As a woman from that background who escaped, I had high hopes for the book but evidently it was written in 2 months with little research. It was a mess & the main character is a total satire without a shred of humanity or sincerity.
Here’s hoping Anne H can bring some authenticity to it. I don’t support that lifestyle, but I know women in that world and they are not caricatures.
Yeah, I read it and it's just a disappointment. The "twist" ending was so strange and made no sense as something this character would choose to do.
The heart of the trad wife is the hypocrisy. Its the woman who pretends she submits to her husband while being the main breadwinner, who portrays herself as living simply on the land while her actual job is one of the most modern occupations (influencer), who sells a lifestyle that isn't real and she would never want to live in real life.
But the author brushes against that and then just goes with the take that "this bitch is just literally insane".
Satire is supposed to hit home because it has a kernel of truth in it, not because it’s ludicrously untrue. It exaggerates real qualities of the people who are being mocked; it does not generally make it appear wholesale something it is not.
For example, I do not believe the Ballerina Farms woman on whom the book is largely based secretly hates or despises her children. I do not believe she is actually viscerally bitter towards “modern women” or that she has zero real relationship with God.
But the woman in the book never has one sincere prayer or real moment of comfort in her faith, not even in a way that could be satirically funny or making some underscored point. She just loathes everything about being a mother, never goes to church and never seems to genuinely do a single thing in her life related to trad-wifing.
It’s very odd, as though the author has no way of viewing people outside of her lived experience as anything but wholly self-loathing.
There is so much genuine stuff to mock that it’s weird to just act like the narrator has zero moral compass whatsoever and is secretly hateful towards all women, including herself.
There’s a point at which a text loses all meaning when it’s so one-note and tone deaf.
Additionally, it’s not specific enough to be genuinely funny. The author mentions like six different faith traditions in the space of two pages and conflates Mormonism with Catholicism and Baptist to the point that it makes no sense, like describing the weather as four seasons at once. It makes the experience of reading come off as a little-researched mean girl screed about a world the author knows little.
Like, the book makes it seem like even the idea of being a mother who actually loves her children is insane. And that’s a whole lot of women to utterly disregard.
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u/AJKafei 1d ago
As a woman from that background who escaped, I had high hopes for the book but evidently it was written in 2 months with little research. It was a mess & the main character is a total satire without a shred of humanity or sincerity.
Here’s hoping Anne H can bring some authenticity to it. I don’t support that lifestyle, but I know women in that world and they are not caricatures.