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Reading Yesteryear: Gender Fantasies & Fascism · Syllabus

• Ashby: Hey, syllabus listener, Ashby here. In this episode, we are diving into Yesteryear, the brand new 2026 novel out by author and podcaster, Carol Claire Burke. Fair warning, we are going to reveal the quote, twist and discuss the ending, but we try to hold off until about minute 57 or so in today's discussion. If you don't wanna be spoiled, pause listening and come back to the second half after you finish the book. And lastly, part of today's conversations Ash Shu: ⁓ Welcome to Syllabus, the podcast hosted by two recovering straight-A millennials, Ashby and Coco, who live to overanalyze the media and culture we encounter while shedding the gold star culture that made us. And occasionally getting lost in a tangent. If you too can't help but think a little too deeply about books, movies, and more you come across, you're in the right place. We are so glad you're here. Let's get into it. Ashby: includes some plot themes of sexual assault. You can skip the majority of those details between minute 57 and one hour 25 minute mark if you like. All right, here's the show. Coco: I know that you ⁓ get, when you get really charged up, you ⁓ it really makes you think. ⁓ Ashby: Mm. That's true because there's no other I just can't get it all out. really verbalizable. ⁓ Coco: a specific cadence to it's like. ⁓ Ashby: That comes from hanging out with my grandparents and then being like, ⁓ tell you what. ⁓ Yes. Okay. Coco: you ⁓ ⁓ Ashby, you and are here today to talk about the new novel by Kara Claire Burke, ⁓ one of our favorite podcasters, host ⁓ of ⁓ Diabolical Lies with Gassen. I hope I'm saying Katie's name Ashby: Nope, Katie Tassin. Coco: I love Diabolical Lies and I knew of Diabolical Lies. I'm sure we've talked about this before from following Money with Katie for years and then being like, ⁓ my God, this like adorable blonde lady is being radicalized against capitalism. And I was like, I am here for it. This is zesty. ⁓ And then ⁓ launched with Carol Claire Burke, this incredible podcast, ⁓ Diabolical Lies. And think something we can definitely talk about today is the parasocial feelings that you have ⁓ of reading Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: a novel written by someone whose voice has been in your earbuds for like, you know, many, many hours breaking down the phenomenon we see around us. So that will be fun. And I think what we do is like, let's not spoil the ending for like the first little part of our discussion and then we'll be like, and now we're gonna do spoilers because ⁓ I imagine this has been one of hottest selling books. I think it's number one ⁓ on the New York Times book list, that is officially called. ⁓ And I'm like seeing all of this content online about, you know. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: big rooms full of women holding yesteryear up. And so I know that there's a lot of people reading it and a lot of people with like a strong appetite to discuss it. Ashby: Mm-hmm. And we do know it's eventually gonna be a movie. So hopefully no one's listening to this and then waiting for the movie to come out because that's gonna be a while. But yeah, I think it really will be interesting when the movie does come out in the next couple of years, what changes if any they make or how closely they follow and how they actually execute some of the stuff in the book. Including like casting all the different ages of the characters. Coco: Yes! Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: I'm going to be really interested in. feel like the casting, talked about this yesterday, is going to make or break how this comes across on the screen. But yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. Okay. And this is the most ⁓ silly part of yesteryear, but the woman in the book is portrayed, our protagonist, as a woman with dark hair and sharp features. And I know she doesn't really have sharp features, but I immediately thought of Daisy Edgar-Jones because she keeps getting cast in all of these book adaptations, very famously, Normal People was kind of how she shot to fame, but then also Where the Crawdads Sing. And then she's also going to be in, ⁓ Ashby: Mm. Coco: She's cast in ⁓ a book adaptation Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, as the Sadie Green. But then while I was thinking about ⁓ yesteryear, it was making me think of all this stuff that I kind of watched and read like a couple of ago, especially when my welcome to... Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: Welcome to Plathville, Faze was really in high gear. And I watched the FX series under the banner of heaven. And I totally forgot that Daisy Edgar Jones is also in that playing like ⁓ a Mormon housewife Yeah. ⁓ Ashby: Mm-hmm. ⁓ wow. Wow. Well, I think she'd be great just because it, okay, there's, there's the sharp features in the dark hair, right? But I kind of think that's less important. But what's critical to me is there's a kind of cold calculating this that this character has. she doesn't seem to be very high on like like an empathy scale, she seems to have a little trouble relating. Like there's kind of a flatness there where things seem very black and white to this character. Not, don't, I mean, it's multiple times brought up by the character's mother. Like it seems like you have a hard time being kind, which I really relate to like a lack of empathy, just not being able to relate to how other people might be feeling. So you really necessarily need a person that can come across Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: in that way that's like kind of a flat affect. And ⁓ I do feel like from normal people, I feel like I can see that from Daisy Edgar Jones, you know. Coco: Mm-hmm. Absolutely, yeah. And then she was also in that movie adaptation of Where the Crowd Eds Sing, which is a book that I absolutely despise and I know people love it, but guys, it's bad. But also kind of like, I think that it would work well for a character that has kind of been, I get why she was cast. Okay, so yesteryear, Ashby, not to put you on the spot, but I'm wondering if you can give us a little overview Ashby: ⁓ Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Coco: spoiler free of the plot of yesteryear. Ashby: ⁓ trials and tribulations of a sheltered conservative Christian woman who gets married very young into a rich political family and decides to create a online persona. in what we would now recognize as like tradwife culture and some of the fallout from what you curate for the audiences not really matching real life. ⁓ And I think critically, is to me really more of like a psychological book. I think there's a lot of people who when I've seen it like reviewed or picked up or talked about, Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: almost like we're dragging tradwives, like we're finally putting them in their place. I don't really get that. get more of a like, this is a look into what having a very sheltered and very prescriptive upbringing in a Christian context, how your brain starts there. And then when you put that online, how very different and disparate those things are. Coco: Hmm Ashby: and how much cognitive dissonance that can create in an individual. Like I just see this as really a, what happens when you take an extremely sheltered brain and you throw it onto the internet? What will happen to that person's consciousness? ⁓ That's really what I think of it as. It's a look inside this person's psychology. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I totally agree. And I think like while I was preparing for today, I was kind of thinking that our main character, Natalie Heller-Mills, feels a little bit like the ⁓ female version of an incel. Like there's something to the way that she's speaking that's like things... She's been promised that a gender prescription will solve... Ashby: Mmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: her life, just kind of solve it. And she's feeling owed certain things and kind of like by enacting, like I'll take a strategic path to get these things. It's kind of cynical and hard as opposed to ⁓ kind of coming from a very sincere emotional place. ⁓ But yeah, I think I'm interested in like thinking about it as like a psychologist. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: psychological experiment or like not experiment but portrait of a person. ⁓ And I want to say that I'm really down to have like an unlikable main character. And I think she's like very intentionally unlikable. It's part of the part of the character is that she's unlikable in social interactions in real life. And so she is very carefully curating what likability could look like online, ⁓ even learning like how to like Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: tilt her head in the right way and how to make her smile seem sincere. And she goes to, at one point, a little influencer online course where people are critiquing her profile and kind of saying that you're not likable. ⁓ But there is something in this portrait that I think could very much be a real person, but there was maybe something that I wanted more in the book. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: ⁓ where I feel like that there's, it's saying something about the ways that women kind of subscribe to ideologies and convince themselves that this ideology is real. And there was, there was almost a lot of cynicism in this. And I wanted, I almost longed for something that was a slightly more like nuanced picture of like this type of person. ⁓ but I'm not sure if that's. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: connecting with you at all. Ashby: ⁓ I think really contained. I think it's really contained to just Natalie's perspective. I think that does you with a feeling of it being quite restrictive because her perspective is so incredibly narrow. She is like a laser focused, opportunist. ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: like self-absorbed opportunist. And it does leave you, like hungering for some more empathy for, honestly, you feel like you wish there was like some kindness, like a hand extended to this person, like a way out. But I think, I sort of feel like that's the point is like how lonely this life is that you construct for yourself. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: is totally, totally random, but ⁓ something I was reading or some internet quote was like, only great love and great suffering really brings people to some type of change in themselves. I think in this context it was talking about, it brings a lot of people to religion. ⁓ And ⁓ I think about that, there are some people in public Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: realm who neither love anything greatly nor have they ever suffered. And what kind of people do you get when they don't love anything more than themselves and they've never actually suffered any consequences? And I really think about that narrow focus with this character too. Coco: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I liked reading some people's reactions to it, and especially people who maybe come from high control religious environments, talking about they like the representation in the book of how Natalie reacts to motherhood, I think that there's a portrait of someone is experiencing postpartum depression in this novel. ⁓ but also a lot of resentment. And I like the commentary online of people saying, if you don't ever think of motherhood as a choice, like if it is just a default expectation of you, then people were saying that they have had their own experiences of like resentment. And only when they felt like, ⁓ I can like leave this environment and I can stop having children after two, then that's like a different perspective. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: And so I think that there's something in this book that's like also very empathetic to this type of woman where she's having a really, she keeps having children, but she also likes the idea of being a mother without the experience of enjoying motherhood for the most part. ⁓ And that that was, that was very interesting. mean, one of the things I really loved about the book was I thought that it connected the Natalie's project, right, of Yesteryear Ranch. And the way that from her perspective, that she has like orchestrated this like trad wife lifestyle with her husband, who she viewed as like kind of a man child, kind of inept, and she Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Coco: sees everything through the lens of she had agency and kind of forced this life for all of them and their family And I think that it connects back to fascism in a way that feels really seamless and very true like so gentle. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: ⁓ and that all of things kind of connect back to ⁓ ⁓ father-in-law's ⁓ political aspirations by building this audience, ⁓ both from tapping messages resonate with the Manosphere, as well thinking about how his daughter-in-law represents this vision of America that's aspirational for so many, even if it is entirely a fantasy. ⁓ Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: And I thought that that was just very great. And I haven't listened to all of the episodes, but I have enjoyed the In Bed With the Right has done a 1933 series. And they always take a very critical look at gender for like each month of 1933 and kind of how gender plays out. And the role that like femininity kind of relates to nationalism just comes up a lot in those conversations. And I think it does a good job kind of. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: tapping into that in this novel. Ashby: Mm-hmm. one the most interesting things about this and like, ⁓ we talked a bit about this in the Lindy episode that people like to contrast like a feminist vision of a sort of life in under capitalism, whatever that like, ⁓ with what they think of as like the sort of trick mirror, reflection of that, there's this feminist utopian version that solves all the problems ⁓ that all aiming toward. That's also a little bit of a myth. And then the polar opposite of that is the tradwife, which is offering a different solution. I think this book does an interesting job of like contrasting her while she's in college with women with a different point of view and kind of showing the double bind that they're both in. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: ⁓ she talks about her roommate and how she imagines her roommate will go on to work for these big consulting companies and not be paid enough and have to try to figure out how to balance childcare responsibilities with the cutthroat culture of the corporate world. ⁓ And that she'll have to delay having children until she has to reach for IVF. And that at that point, her marriage will start to have issues because their responsibilities are increased on this couple under capitalism. And then ⁓ what the trad picture is supposed to present is like this opposite solution to that, which is let's just subtract women from the workforce. Okay. ⁓ and let the women totally focus ⁓ on raising children. ⁓ and the home and that that's the solution, you know? So the main character drops out of Harvard to get married and have kids. And you see that as she has kids, she's like, ⁓ this sucks. It's like actually still crappy. It's like actually still difficult. And they end up having to hire childcare. ⁓ And she really struggles with her quote unquote traditional role as a woman versus her husband's quote unquote traditional role as the like leader of their family, because at one point she actually has like a kind of glass shattering moment where she's like, it suddenly occurs to me, I should have been born the man because I have the agency. I have the vision for this family. I have the strength to do what it takes to lead, but I've been in this female body. That must mean I'm assigned the role of caretaking. So she tries to do things in this way. That's like manipulating behind the scenes. And at the same time, still trying to find a way to make it look like her husband is leading the family, but she's actually orchestrating the whole thing. And a truly hilarious choice that the author has made is that the husband pretty early on makes it really clear that he would just love to be a stay at home dad. And also that he has like a passion for taking care of children. But since that doesn't fit with their traditional values, instead of actually assigning things based on each of their abilities, they Coco: Yeah. Ashby: They're like, no, we're so prescriptive in our gender roles that we're just gonna ignore that completely. And it just goes to show you that like having a rigid ideology in any direction doesn't really help anybody. It's kind of a double bind that everyone's in. Coco: Yeah! Yeah, ⁓ No, 100 % agree. ⁓ we feel our our narrators, kind of we see the world through her We see her disgust at husband for veering from what she views as like traditional masculinity. ⁓ And ⁓ we get kind of... Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: later on in the book, we get like a different character's perspective on her husband, Caleb, who says you're underestimating him or like you're not kind of seeing him as a whole person, that there's like more to this guy than there is. And like that's up for us, the reader, to like determine whether we agree with that or not, whether there's more to him or not. like Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: It's like what he would have been good at is probably being like that stay at home dad or he wants to be like a kindergarten teacher. And she's like, this doesn't fit within my narrative of what a man should be. And that would be a humiliation for me to be with someone who doesn't subscribe to what patriarchy says he should do. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. there's so much in here. ⁓ author does such a great job of making the link between how internet Manosphere content is to the proliferation the tradwife. That the Manosphere idea is this direct, cynical, fascist essentially reaction to feminist advances. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: And then what the Manosphere has to do is create this world where it is and right for men to be in charge of everything. And it's this reactionary conservative project to feminism, right? ⁓ so then it needs to come up with its own template for womanhood that supports this and that naturally creates this outline of the trad wife, like the woman who's super supportive. She's endlessly patient. She's ⁓ full of grace and faith in God and, ⁓ just absolutely nurturing to a fault or whatever. ⁓ And she's very compliant. She doesn't, challenge her husband for authority her whole value is being incredibly yielding to her husband in every way. ⁓ Caro has talked about is like critically, this woman has to consent to her own submission so that you have people like Natalie Heller Mills who have to like go toward it and enact it and embody it. And then anything that happens to them, they have nobody to blame. They can just say, ⁓ well, this ⁓ the order of things. I chose this. This is the life that I wanted. you might see that from the outside, but inside of that, no person can be demeaned and dehumanized without feeling it. She feels tons of resentment and frustration. She finds ways to like fight back against this structure that she says she consents to and to like control it from the inside. it's in and of itself, it's a fantasy. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: in the book itself, the way that her trad wife account blows up is that there's like the equivalent of a Joe Rogan on the internet who says, look at this woman's account. finally, we have a woman that we can all actually, respect. This is what all of you guys should be aiming for is this type of woman. Coco: Yeah. Ashby: I just think it's fascinating that... that even inside of that, she has to actually produce this image for her husband because he puts on a little bit of a show of absorbing the Manosphere content and wanting to walk the walk, but it's not really who he is, but she is behind the scenes being sort of like, ⁓ yes, dear, ⁓ what a man. It's really kind of funny. Coco: And I even, okay, so I even was thinking about, she starts this account ⁓ of this, and she's really like, let's move to this farm in Idaho, I believe, so that because she's like recognizing that her husband will not succeed in like corporate America, like her husband has no, like she's like, he's kind of a man child, his own parents think of him in this really kind of, ⁓ Ashby: Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yes. infantilized kind of way. Coco: yeah, infantilize, of embarrassing, like kind of a failure to launch type of style. ⁓ And so she's kind of like, well, what options exist for me to like have dignity in this like early marriage to this like rich guy that I have chosen? And so she's like, let's move to this ranch. And then she like very much is aware of the fact that he's just like, Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: actually gonna like sit in like a part of the barn with like in front of a computer all day like consuming Manosphere stuff while they hire labor to like take care of the farm. ⁓ And so even like her like consenting to be submissive is in part like she's like also I'm the architect of my own submission. Like there's something very weird going on there. But I viewed as when her moment where her account takes off and goes viral, I really thought of it as like almost like an Alex Jones type of person. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Coco: online, like this real deep like, manosphere guy. Like, even though Joe Rogan definitely gets like, I think we on the left think of him as being on the right, he's like somewhere more in the center and normie than some of these weird manosphere people. ⁓ Yes. Ashby: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But I don't know the names of any of the Manosphere people. So I just sort of know that they exist to the right of Joe Rogan in a way. But I mean, he's definitely not blameless. I still think his profile in general is what the Manosphere type of people are aiming for, is like that level of leadership. ⁓ And he is still very like, he still very much embodies the whole like masculine, masculinity and manhood is essentialist. Coco: you Sure. I certain. He's aspirational just as like the person that he is. Like big dude, like yeah, like I get along with everyone. I'm just asking questions. Yeah. Ashby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's an account of that stature that gives her this boost that she needs. Yeah. Coco: Should we start talking about the twist or And so what we haven't really said yet is that in this book, this is not the twist, but there's a mystery where we have this one timeline where ⁓ Natalie Hiller Mills is of growing this trad wife lifestyle and like she's creating the set ⁓ sort of literally of their home. She's launching this account. She's figuring out how to ⁓ gain followers and like make money of this account. I mean, we see like this portrait of all of the effort that's going in behind the scenes versus like what an audience might consume. And then she's, over time internalizing like this online version of herself ⁓ and of seeing herself always through the audience's eyes ⁓ and that there's, ⁓ she has to ride this line between being like aspirational and kind of hated that she's like, I understand that people have to be like. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: compelled by me, even if they kind of hate me, even if they are these like liberal women that are leering me a little. Yeah, hate watching for sure. Ashby: Like, hate watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coco: ⁓ And then we have this like other timeline where from our perspective as readers, and there's this is the that does, we do get an answer to what's going on, ⁓ she's suddenly in 1855 with her family that feels like her family, but doesn't feel like her family. ⁓ And she's very confused. Ashby: Yeah, like when you're in a dream and you're like, these people are the role of the people that I know in my waking life, but their faces are a little different. It really has that energy. Yeah. Coco: time. Yes, and like, it's my house, but it looks different than what I remember my house looks like. It's my land, but it looks different. And then she's being put through the true labor of a woman in 1855 that we imagine ⁓ would have to do. And so she's kind of, think that when you were mentioning that there's like a version of people reading this to say like, ⁓ it's someone getting what they wished for. And then like, what is like? Ashby: a little different. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: the commentary that what does the novel ultimately have to say about that ⁓ is part of it. And so yeah, there's like a question around the agency that's going on because we also see in the modern timeline, I'll just call it that, that they hire this producer, Shannon, to come live on their farm and help create content in addition to these other nannies that are there to help do the childcare like you mentioned. ⁓ Ashby: Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: And Shannon is the character that introduces this different perspective of Caleb. And Shannon is like you have... Ashby: Yeah. Well, I think actually Shannon introduces a different perspective on the whole thing. Like from the minute it's Shannon is a fascinating like foil to our character, Natalie, because from the minute Shannon arrives on the farm, what you see is Natalie sort of watching to see what Shannon's reaction is to everything. Shannon presents as very ⁓ Brooklyn nose ring, pink hair, kind of like your Coco: Mm-hmm. Yep. Ashby: you know, stereotypical liberal Gen Z kind of person who is the polar opposite of this, you know, traditional trad wife, look at me making bread from scratch kind of image. And you see Natalie immediately cares what Shannon thinks. She doesn't admit that, but like she's seeing how Shannon is walking through the house being kind of like, ⁓ it's a little bit smaller than it looks on your account. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: you know, each little thing Natalie is taking as an insult or where she's like, ⁓ how interesting. I didn't realize you had nannies from the account. And she's like, well, yes. And she's taking that on as an on board as an insult. Then she notices that the farm actually has hired workers. ⁓ The implication being that they are not true employees, but being, you know, maybe unethically paid under the table and their citizenship status not being part of that conversation. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: So Shannon is noticing that and clocking that and Natalie and the fact that they use fertilizer when they have been presenting themselves as all organic. And you just see Natalie registering this and sort of realizing that in order to like take her account to the next level of presenting this image, she's necessarily had to create like a devil's bargain where she's brought in someone to actually witness the entire thing. Coco: and the fertilizer. Ashby: And she's sort of like noticing maybe what she's done. She's brought an outsider in who is ⁓ judging it and at the same time is tasked with presenting it in this other way. So it is really interesting that that's who she chose. Coco: Mm-hmm. This is like my like little hypothesis or like feelings about Natalie as being kind of like a female incel is that like her whole architecture is oriented towards like being appealing to other women or being socially accepted by other women in the same way that men in the manuscript really care about what other men think. And, you we get this, if Natalie, when she goes off to college, Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yes. That's so true. Coco: could have made like one friend, man, her life might've been different. Like, could have really connected with someone, but she feels ostracized and judged from the beginning. And so then she, her whole architecture that she builds up is like this, this reaction to female gaze or like what other women see. And so even before we meet Shannon, there's like moments where she's like out in public, like at Target or whatever, and getting judged by people she's meeting in real life who are fans who then like, Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: pierced through the artifice of her life and see something real and see something a little bit dark that they don't like. ⁓ ⁓ Natalie is like, can't maintain the kind of smile and say all the right things as I can on camera when I can take 80 takes and rerecord and edit it myself ⁓ versus like an in-person reaction. And I what you're saying. Like when Shannon shows up, Shannon, Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: starts off by being like, ⁓ we actually love you because like you represent something to all of us who know that the may this maze of corporate America is ultimately going to be a flop for us that it's like not going to be fulfilling that we understand we're going to have to work insane crazy hours and we want like we there's the overlap between the left and the right on like kind of like local organic produce like a table or whatever. And then very quickly the the veil falls from Shannon's eyes when she sees Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes. Coco: couple of things and she can see in Natalie something darker than what she's been presenting online. Ashby: Definitely. Yeah, so Shannon gives us like a totally new perspective on this thing. She becomes like a really important other voice. And while I wouldn't say that Natalie ever develops any real friendships with anyone, it becomes clear that she does care about what Shannon thinks. And then over time, it becomes clear that she realizes what a vulnerable position that she's in by sort of Coco: Yeah. Ashby: recognizing in herself as Natalie, she actually cannot manage this whole brand company that she's created on her own. So she has had to hire someone. But by doing that, now Shannon has the keys to the kingdom. Shannon knows all her account passwords. Shannon could blow up her account. She could change the edit. But it's so interesting that she realizes that like actually she can't do it all. The whole women can have it all. in order to actually get there on the tradwife end of the spectrum. She's like, I have to bring someone in to take this to the next level so we can sell our aprons that were made in China and the raw milk that we're bringing in from our cows and stuff like that. Like I've got to get a good producer in, but now she has kind of traded a little bit of agency and allowed someone else's viewpoint in. Yeah. Coco: Huh. And she says like for Shannon, she's like, she's like, I wake up every morning thinking I need to fire this woman. Like I need this woman out because this is a risk that I've kind of introduced. But she's like obsessed with Shannon, like she's truly obsessed with Shannon. ⁓ And what the Internet I do appreciate in the commentary and in a past life, Ashby: Yeah. She's obsessed with Shannon, yeah. Coco: I have worked with influencers for brands or it might be. ⁓ Like ⁓ ⁓ an NDA would have I have worked with influencers for brands or it might be. ⁓ Like ⁓ ⁓ an NDA would have solved a lot of problems for dear little Natalie Heller-Mills. solved a lot of problems for dear little Natalie Heller-Mills. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: ⁓ Ashby: Yeah, yeah, Coco: I mean, it wouldn't have solved all the problems because ⁓ invites, creates some really big problems for herself ⁓ when comes to Shannon. Ashby: and yeah. But I think what you get is sort of like, this ⁓ is the almost like absurdist logical conclusion of what happens if you've pointedly decided about yourself that you are not a girl's girl. This is a person who's put all the chips on black and just said, will die not being a girl's girl. And like, what happens is you get what could be a friendship. This could have been that, but instead it has Coco: you Ashby: all the contours of what we know to be like, there are complexities in female friendships. There are feelings of jealousy that arise. There is a sort of weird thing where you see yourself through your female friend's eyes that happens, like a refracting of what your life looks like. There's a natural like comparison there, but over time you learn to navigate that and like ⁓ take that on board and grow from it. But this is what you get when you have to hire people. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: to be in your life. ⁓ The sort of like entourage, not real friends, who's on the payroll are the only people you surround yourself with. And it could have been a friendship except it only has those negative contours of just how does Shannon see me? Is she judging me? Like, could she take advantage of me? That kind of thing. Comparing her own life choices to Shannon's life choices. And... ⁓ you know, being resentful of her, but also feeling superior to her. ⁓ You see that going on, but I think Shannon represented an opportunity to grow, a person that she could have been friends with, but she just went so hard on like, will never try to relate to another person that wasted opportunity. Ultimately that person becomes an enemy. Coco: Yeah. Yep. I mean, I definitely felt like while I was reading this book, I felt like I've watched a lot of Real Housewives. And I know we've been talking about Summer House, but I really feel like there's also a very Housewives component to this where you see a lot of women who have a lot of wealth but are also like isolated. And then the people that they do have as quote unquote friends are their hired help. Sometimes that's like their stylist or like the person that does their makeup or their personal assistant. And then Ashby: Yes. or their personal assistant. ⁓ Coco: ⁓ In the most recent season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, ⁓ Sutton Brown, who's going by Sutton Brown now, ⁓ Sutton Brown had this like ⁓ personal assistant kind of almost like Butler type person that was, they seemed like they were really good friends. And when the season starts, that friendship has ended. And you really understand that you're like, this woman, Ashby: ⁓ sad. Coco: was friends with someone that she also was abusive towards. Like, and you could picture, you could pick up on it and that that person probably had enough and left. And that's really like something that's quite, for a person that is sometimes often unlikable, you also feel really sad for them that they're so alone. Ashby: Mm-hmm. But you get that. You get that this is a... The inherent thing about having a rewarding relationship is that you have to be yourself a little bit vulnerable and you have to let the other person be vulnerable and you have to be a safe place for that. Natalie starts out just being sort of like opposed to vulnerability in every type of way. Coco: Hmm. Yeah. Ashby: all of her relationships must be tightly controlled and she prefers to be alone if she cannot control a relationship. And so she goes to college and she meets her roommates. For a lot of people when they go to college, meeting people from different backgrounds is like critical to their growth. Like they actually intentionally place people of different backgrounds together in dorm rooms so that you will have exposure to different ideas. ⁓ Coco: Yeah. Ashby: and different walks of life. She had an opportunity there to befriend some of the girls at Harvard and her roommate, Rena, who is a fascinating specter that haunts, it just absolutely haunts Natalie's thoughts for forever, which is so interesting. ⁓ Just absolutely fascinating. Yeah. Coco: Yep. Like you're a freshman year roommate, like playing this looming large in your mind. But if you also have so few other women that you have encountered in this way, it makes sense. Ashby: Yes. Yeah, yeah. So she meets her and she's come from this like sheltered, know, Christian, evangelical background and she meets Rena and she comes to think of Rena and some of the other women in that in her classes and who hang out, you know, and party in the dorm as these like polar opposites of her and everything she does, she goes deeper and deeper toward whatever they do. I'm doing the opposite. It's almost like oppositional defiance. And and, she has this to actually reach Coco: Yeah, right. Ashby: out to Rena and create a friendship, but that would require some vulnerability. But instead she remains totally defensive and she requests multiple times to have a room to herself until she finally sort of orchestrates an altercation in which ⁓ she and Rena get into it and it explodes physically. And then ⁓ they do give her a room to herself. But it just goes to show you how uncomfortable she is being challenged. And if she can't control the narrative, if she can't control what other people think of her. ⁓ You get from her thoughts in the book, you get from her perspective, she spins out, she is spinning out. She notices people's eyes change, their expression change, and she starts thinking, no, that was wrong, that was wrong, I said that wrong. You get a person who maybe actually has a diagnosable level of difficulty with... Coco: Yep. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yep. Ashby: processing other people's expressions and emotions, right? So then she gets a room to herself. So that's what she does. She reaches a level of discomfort and challenge and instead of letting, overcoming that and like letting something in her shift, she doubles down and retreats. And so later in her life, you know, the only relationship she has then is with her husband, a person that it does feel like she picked because she felt that he was easy to control. And then beyond that, she hires help like Shannon and her nannies. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: And because of the employment conditions, that feels safer to her. She can control those relationships. And the same with her online... ⁓ yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. She really doesn't even see the nannies as people. Shannon's the first one I think that we clock is like, she's really clocking this as another person who, and there's like in the background, you understand the nannies be talking. Yeah. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yeah, ⁓ yeah, you do get that immediately. And it's so interesting because early in the book, she says, you know, she's she kind of kind of throw us into her a day in her life, right, where she has the producer and she has the nannies. And she she calls them in the book. She's like Nanny Amy, Nanny Louise, Producer Shannon, capital P. Like these are their names, right? Because she is putting first their employment relationship. Coco: Yep. Ashby: In fact, Louie, Nanny Louise, the first one she hires says, you can just call me Louise when she hires her and she thinks for a moment and then insists, I prefer to call you Nanny Louise because you get that she needs a layer between herself and other people. She needs there to be some type of ⁓ distance there that makes it clear that their relationship is employer. If she had to relate to them on a first name basis, that would be challenging. I do think it's interesting that later in the book, Coco: Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: She continues in her own thoughts to refer to Nanny Louise and Nanny Amy this way, but she does at times just refer to Shannon as Shannon. And I think that's really interesting. She starts to kind of ⁓ change her thoughts about her a little bit. Yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ Yep, she kind of can't deny Shannon's like personhood and that's very threatening. Yeah, I think Ashby: Right. Yeah. And I think it's fascinating that these are women for whom motherhood is central. And you see so much of her own struggle with that and the struggles of women around her, like her mother-in-law, who seems fundamentally sort of psychologically broken from her experience being a high profile political wife and then also raising four kids in a different time period. She seems like she's gone off the deep end. ⁓ Coco: Yeah. of it. Ashby: And you see that that's like a challenge for her. And she sort of looks at that as like, that's one path she's assessed as her own mother's sort of motherhood path. And it's like, that's another path. And she's obviously struggled to rate her own mother had raised her and her sister as a single mother. And ⁓ she looks at her sister's life. ⁓ Her sister gets married to her high school sweetheart. The marriage is not working out. The sister is considering leaving the husband and Natalie is just like absolutely unsupportive in that. Coco: It's like very black and white thinking. And I think that's where it like connects back to even like this very fascistic worldview because it's like, no, the only path is to follow the rules. And like, if you don't follow the rules, you have failed. And so she feels very comforted by the rules, even though we're watching her and we're inside her mind, feel that this is so unhappy. Ashby: Yes. Yeah. Yes. Correct. Mm-hmm. But what you get is that she herself has a complex feeling about motherhood where she is not thrilled with the postpartum period and is feeling very overwhelmed and is struggling. And then ⁓ later on in the book, get she has multiple children. She's constantly trying to voice them off. She's trying to get away. She has a moment where she's so happy she hires the nannies that she Coco: ⁓ definite- ⁓ yeah. Ashby: has a little soft prayer to herself in the kitchen where she says, thank God I'll never be alone with my children ever again. Like she knows that motherhood sucks for her. But it's so interesting that she sees what it has done to her mother-in-law, how difficult it was for her mother, the insane stress and pressure that her sister is under. She has no empathy for that whatsoever. And even in her own life, she doesn't like being a mother. That's pretty clear. ⁓ Coco: Yeah, what is she? you No, no, no. Ashby: And like at the same time, she has no empathy for anyone on that front. Coco: No, motherhood is just branding for her. And I have, this is where I'm like, I'm saying that and I have empathy for the character who didn't, cannot see another option. Ashby: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Coco: part of what you learned through this book is that she kind of makes a deal with her father-in-law to have more children because he's kind of funding their lifestyle, at least at the beginning. because he's very wealthy and he has these political aspirations so he sees, my son having this like farm, this like Instagram farm life is going to look good for me. I need you to have a bunch of kids and I kind of need you to keep my, my kind of my fuck up of a son. Yeah, out in out in Idaho and I need to know where he is, you know, keep him there. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Ashby: My fail son. This is his fail son, yeah. Mm-hmm. I need you to keep him occupied and available to me for photo ops. That's literally what he is. He's a prop. Yeah. Coco: But you also see she then turns her own children into props because she thinks about them through, she talks about like online Natalie. Like she literally like will be like, ⁓ there's, I'm this person and there's online Natalie, but like, let me always try to see what online Natalie would do, what this image of myself would do. And so she starts saying like when she has a child, she has to like think of a little catchphrase for them to be like, I'm gonna brand their personality this way with no real... ⁓ Ashby: Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: sense of who those kids are. And part of what I really was so compelling is that you, as her children get older, she can see them seeing her. And that's like so threatening and so scary that her eldest daughters, which we can definitely get into, start to clock kind of your fake and like, are you and who are you and all of this stuff. But, ⁓ go ahead. Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, just think it's so sad and interesting that it really... There is a liberal conception of motherhood that is like motherhood is hard. It's like you try to, you the sort of capital L liberal idea is, you you graduate college, you know, you and your husband will ideally have some type of egalitarian arrangement where you share parenthood responsibilities. But even those women will tell you like how hard it is, how isolating is, how high the expectations are to try to do everything perfectly. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: There just keeps being this idea in our culture that the only solutions are personal solutions, that there can never be any type of collective solution so that all of these women are on the mommy blogs and the liberal conception sort of being like, how do we juggle it all? Like, what are some tips I can do in my own life rather than how can we reach out to each other and build solidarity to solve the isolation of motherhood? shouldn't be this way. And then in the tried wife world, it's like, here's this, you Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: opposite embodiment of motherhood. It's still hard. It's still difficult, but the solutions again become personal. They become like, she blames all of these women for their own predicaments of like, well, if you had just, if you just did this, then it wouldn't have been that way. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ Ashby: ⁓ And I have always thought there's something interesting about the idea of personal responsibility ⁓ and control. ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: I grew up in a really conservative place and the biggest difference that I could see after going to college and coming back is an insistence of people that circumstances do not change your life. I felt when I learned about things like the socioeconomic indicators of where you're born, the sort of luck of your life, and things like demographic patterns, like how much more... certain demographics are likely to encounter police brutality and things like that. I really felt liberated by that. That, ⁓ my God, thank God, everything is not just your personal responsibility. There are structural things in place that dictate what your life looks like. And we need to all come together to try to make the conditions better for everyone. But trying to come back and talk about these things, Coco: Yeah. Ashby: I would have thought they'd find that liberating too. ⁓ was like, don't you think it's like liberating to recognize that you in this rural place don't have access to things that you should have access to. ⁓ And that that is literally ⁓ your health, affecting all these economic opportunities, blah, blah. But what I realized is that I was taking away from them the idea that every decision they make ⁓ what dictates the outcome of life. ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. It takes away a sense of agency and maybe it's emasculating in some way. Ashby: Yeah. And that what was so fascinating was it wasn't just that it's not just the attitude of, you know, we talked about this, like with Nepo babies of like, worked hard for this ergo, this is mine. You know, it wasn't just that it wasn't just that they needed to feel that their life, like their safety, their home or whatever. was like, look, some of this has to do with the fact that we're white. Like we just are luckier in this way. It wasn't just that they wanted to hold on to the things that they felt that they had earned cleanly through meritocracy or by being blessed by God, it was also that they needed to believe that their failures were theirs alone. That there wasn't some outside structure that was keeping them from succeeding, but that if they'd really tried maybe, but you know, the fact that they aren't promoted or the fact that this, you know, they couldn't find a job after this plant closed down or something like that, that that was on them and that, you know, they just learned to live with that. Coco: Yeah. Yeah. Ashby: they don't want to attribute their failures to anything structural. They want it to belong to them as well. And ⁓ I'm just really struck by how much she needs everything to be a like controlled choice with a outcome. You know, she thought motherhood is a thing that you just endure. It's like a thing that you're assigned. Nobody likes it. You're just supposed to say you like it. she's so honest about that in her thoughts, but she constantly presents it and launders it as if that is not the case. ⁓ But that she just cannot like see that there were things there that are structural, that are not fair, that isolating herself on a farm like that is not fair. Being dependent on like, Coco: Mhm. Ashby: your father-in-law's political wins and losses is not fair and that your kids having their own life and consciousness is a good thing. Like you want that, but ⁓ yeah, just her insistence on X thing equals control is just nothing seems to be able to challenge that. Coco: Yeah. And it's so American. Like, I think it's just such a deeply, ideologically American, this like kind of individualist view of things. that even if your life isn't good, you have to believe in like that this is a just world and it's a hard God that rules it. ⁓ that is, to take that away, ⁓ like a house of cards and like the whole ⁓ Ashby: It's just so American. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Coco: architecture of worldview could collapse if take it away. ⁓ And like, because maybe you don't see like that there is like kindness and like love and like community that exists or could be possible. ⁓ That is just too threatening to even contemplate. ⁓ Yeah. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Well, and not wanting that because that depends on someone else. Like not wanting kindness or not wanting any kind of sympathy or help if it isn't something that you control. She doesn't want anything from anyone out of the goodness of their heart. That is extremely threatening to her. And that's why she can't have real relationships. But one of the things I wrote down is Coco: Hmm. Ashby: just her ability to compartmentalize. It really gives you something to think about in your own life. One of the things that strikes me is she recognizes eventually that they can't have crops that will survive without pesticides. So she instructs the workers to use pesticides, but hide it from her husband so that he thinks that he's just such a successful cowboy farmer. Coco: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: and also to hide them so that they're not seen on the cameras when she's filming for her TikTok. she compartmentalizes that so that later someone confronts her with like, these are not organic vegetables that you're selling at the farmer's market. But in her mind, she's like, yes, it is. Cause I've presented it that way. The ⁓ is what's real to her. Or like she doesn't actually know her own children. Coco: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: but because she is as much as possible tries to voice them off on the nannies. like when she's like, no, present as if I care about them and like that they have personalities. ⁓ my God, that part is truly depressing. Coco: as if they're educating them. which you realize is not true. And I think, yeah. Ashby: No, they are not at all. But I think she's okay with that. I think she wants them to be controllable. They're little brand items for her, accessories, yeah. Coco: Some of this, maybe this will talk about it a little bit more, but I recently listened to the audio book of Educated by Tara Westover, which is a memoir. It's incredible. And like, I think it's a really nice compliment to this. I would say that herself a woman who grew up in a cult-like environment with parents that had ⁓ mental health issues. So her father, I think, is bipolar. ⁓ Ashby: ⁓ yeah, I've heard that one brought up in connection with this. Coco: and they are part of LDS, but they're really kind of a really fundamentalist, part of a fundamentalist community. it's, sometimes I think people talk about the memoir educated as if it's like a cult, but it's almost like so specifically her family. I don't even like know how we would say it's a cult, but it's, she is in theory being educated at home. And what you learn is that she's really not receiving any kind of education and her path out of this. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: ⁓ environment is because she's simply just incredibly smart. And she has a couple of people in her life that connect with her, like somewhat like a classmate. Like she just has a couple of people that intervene in tiny ways that sort of, and even like an elder sibling that kind of himself kind of gets out a little bit and, just kind of give her just enough of a launchpad to go to a place like, I think she ultimately does end up at Harvard and Oxford in different ways. But Ashby: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Coco: That memoir does such an incredible job of ⁓ analyzing the psychology because she is a person who is deprogramming over the course of this memoir, like telling her story. And she does such a great job of like addressing when those fears, those harshness, those inability to connect with people like would just kind of come from her psychology, even if she didn't like agree with that anymore. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: and kind of just this process of deprogramming. So highly recommend ⁓ educated, but I would say that Tara characters a little bit more like a Mary or a Clementine, like these daughters that are kind of included that are viewing Natalie ⁓ through their own lens. I think she would be one of them. But yeah, definitely there's a lot in there where it's like the parents mental health part and convincing themselves of certain things plays out. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I like that, ⁓ I just, some of these things just baffling to me because she makes motherhood so central to like her identity. And then I know she has the tough time with postpartum, but then it's like something happens where she just stays on autopilot. Like she's actually unable to connect with people in a real way. And that includes her children. And one of the consequences of that is things like their like lack of education. Coco: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: I'm shocked that she really is so okay with, ⁓ like she's not interested in her children at all. Like she's not, she doesn't take any type of, she's just like, ⁓ sure, that's the curriculum, I don't care. She's not interested in it, she doesn't care what they're learning. She's not like worried about them in any real way, only about their ability to like help her hurt her brand. ⁓ And. Coco: Yeah. Ashby: I just think that's really fascinating that it's like something happens. Yeah. Coco: mean, it's a real view of children as property, which is actually like a huge strain in American society, that like there are people who conceive of children as their property and do not reckon with the fact that those children are going to grow up and look at you and have opinions on what has happened in their lives. And... Ashby: Yeah. Coco: I, it's, children are in America, people who don't have rights. Like, there's really few rights, but I mean, this is where we get to the, there's some elements of that that play out in this novel for sure. Ashby: Mm-hmm. It's true. It's really true. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, maybe we'll switch to that. But like my overall feeling at the so we're going to talk now about the end of the book and the kind of twist at the end. Coco: Yeah. Ashby: So we're toggling back and forth between modern day and the 1850s. Right. And throughout the like 1850s things, if experience, she has sort of these moments of lucidness where she's like, I'm trapped. I've been kidnapped. She thinks she's on a reality show like Truman. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: Truman Show level at certain points. ⁓ There's a part where she finds a piece of plastic ⁓ in the front yard, which she clings to as proof that ⁓ this is in fact not actually the 1850s, that this is some kind of trick that's being played on her. ⁓ And, you know, a couple of the people, you know, I've seen talk about the book were like, I was genuinely surprised by the twist. I actually didn't see that coming. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: I was a little surprised too. Some of the other criticisms I've seen have been like, I think there were kind of lot of plot holes with the twist. ⁓ So I do have some of those like having thought about it. Yeah, a little bit more. Okay. Coco: Yeah. do have a section that we can talk about plots, but let's keep going with what happened. So we're revealing it. So stop listening right now if you don't want to hear all of the things that happen. Ashby: Yeah, Coco: But so producer Shannon, it turns out after going to this like right-wing political rally for author-in-law Doug, Shannon has questions. Shannon is like, whoa, baby, this is some white nationalist craziness. What is going on? She confronts Natalie about it. Natalie is very dismissive of that conversation. ⁓ Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. The father-in-law. Mm-hmm. Coco: And then Shannon kind of like takes the reins and is like, I'm gonna talk to Caleb, the husband, about what's going on. And Caleb, very invested in the manuscript, explains and starts talking. And then from there, we learned that Shannon and Caleb keep having conversations and have a romantic or sexual affair with each other. ⁓ And then I think Caleb comes and confesses to Natalie, if I'm calling correctly. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: And he's like, I'm in love with Shannon. I've never been in love with you. I've never even known what love was. And it's like kind of because it's like the first woman who's like been nice to him. Shannon does not love Kayla back, but Shannon has said to Natalie, you have underestimated this person. This is a whole person right here. ⁓ And Natalie just kind of at first is like tries to act like it doesn't exist and is like, come to work tomorrow. You can have like. Ashby: Mm-hmm. A little bit, yeah. Mm-hmm. Coco: sometime, but she also then in confronting Shannon assaults her and we do not get the details of that assault, but it appears like it could be a. Ashby: There are two different narratives. There's the unreliable narrator in the moment that we get from Natalie, where she's mostly running through... Well, I'll say later, but in the version that we get, seems like Natalie's just having a lot of hateful thoughts toward Shannon, and then at some point she finds herself choking Shannon, and then ⁓ realizes that she's gone too far, comes to in the moment, and then leaves. Coco: You're right. Ashby: And then she reaches out to her father-in-law and they put together a sort of political fixer situation to sweep this under the rug, right? But then later we get Shannon's side of the story, sounds like, yeah, sounds like from Shannon's perspective, it was much more like a sexual assault. ⁓ So I truly had no idea what to think about that at all. Coco: Mm-hmm. from a broadcast. This is a very interesting, so let's come back to that and what we can make of it or how we want to think about it, because I have some thoughts. But I think then what happens is that, just bluntly, we understand Natalie kind of has like a breakdown, and there are moments like this blackout when she assaults Shannon. There's even a couple other moments where... Ashby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Coco: you don't know what is inside Natalie's head versus what she's saying and you think it's inside her head, but then you realize other people might be reacting to this internal model analog. She kind of has like these blackout moments. And I think it's a really good commentary on like this hard worldview that won't allow you to have other like expressions or like other veering from this course. And so like she even can't recognize herself when she veers from what she thinks is okay or prescribed. ⁓ Ashby: Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Coco: And so then she kind of has this breakdown because their life has been revealed to be violent, to be a lie, that animals are dying on the farm, that these children are being abused, that there's like, Shannon tells all basically, taking down this family. And then instead of it being like that Natalie has been flung into the past, what we learn is that she and Caleb decide we're actually going to take this experiment further. We're getting rid of the influencer lifestyle. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Coco: but we're gonna go live like it's in the 1850s. And her eldest daughter Clementine takes all of the children at the beginning, but there was a small baby child or like a two-year-old Mary that's left behind, and then they continue to have more children. They sort of start over family 2.0, but in a make-believe 1855 world. ⁓ Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: Natalie, ⁓ when we're getting this perspective of, I've I've sucked into the past, I found plastic, I don't know where I am, this isn't real, or it is real, or this is a gift from God, this is a challenge from God. Like we say, this is a person who's in psychosis to some extent. ⁓ And, and her, you see like her children and her husband reacting to her and you get the, maybe this happens on the reg. Maybe this happens kind of regularly, that they're kind of used to this woman losing it and trying to run away. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: ⁓ Et cetera. Yeah. Ashby: Yeah, and so. In a way, the twist makes sense. a way, it's like, for a lot of different reasons, ⁓ Clementine has taken the other children. Clementine's like a teenager at this point. She's her oldest daughter. And ⁓ after the whole Shannon thing comes out, Shannon had actually befriended Clementine on the farm and was like, was one of those people, like you were saying in ⁓ Tara's book, that sort of saw that Clementine was actually not happy. Coco: Right. Mm-hmm. Ashby: was sort of conscious and aware that things were not right and was really curious about the outside world. so Shannon becomes like a little bit of that lifeline for her. She gets her a phone and she kind of talks to her and is kind of like, hey, these things are normal and these things are not. And over time, Clementine kind of becomes aware that this is not okay, like for her and her siblings to be ⁓ honestly neglected. I think they really are neglected and also not. getting ⁓ reasonable education. ⁓ So she takes the kids and they go live with her aunt, which is Natalie's sister, and her grandmother. ⁓ We also sort of get an interesting second arc for Natalie's ⁓ mother and sister in the They're kind of these peripheral characters that, again, Natalie sort of casts herself as contrast to. She seems to really revere her mother for ⁓ raising them as a single mom because from Natalie's perspective, ⁓ her father left when they were very young because of an affair. And so her mother remained faithful forever and was just like, he left us to be with another woman. And so I'm still technically married. I'll never marry again ⁓ as sort of like a martyr in a way. And I think a lot of what Natalie does is in reaction to that. She also wants to be eldest daughter. She wants to take care of her mother. She sees herself as more competent and smarter than her mother who never she'll never let anything like this happen to her. So when her husband has an affair, this is a pretty big blow to Natalie's like I can control everything in my life. And when her sister who has married her high school sweetheart and then it turned sour and has all these kids has a sort of Coco: That's right. Yeah. I think we get the portrait that maybe he was always kind of abusive. Mm-hmm. Ashby: ⁓ for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And when she decides to leave him and like start over and she actually has a nice second arc where she starts going to therapy. She marries like a more liberal pastor in town and they sort of live happily ever after. And this infuriates Natalie. She like doesn't believe in divorce. She doesn't think. I think she really thinks that women should be punished if ⁓ if they're not able to like suffer nicely. Coco: Yeah. Ashby: And then her mom also starts going to therapy and starts to have her own realizations and they start to kind of grow as people away from this evangelical, like more conservative mindset that they grew up with. And this change in them for the better, Natalie finds incredibly threatening and very frustrating. And at a certain point, her mother reveals to her, actually, the reason that your father left is that I had an affair and your father wanted to work it out, but ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: I couldn't like bear the shame and so we separated and I just figured I would raise you guys. I would raise you guys myself and they had this sort of family lie which was our father's no longer with us that they told people and it was almost like to the point that they believed it themselves where when her mother finally comes out to her as saying actually this was the true origin story I've been going to therapy and it's important I share this with you. She says like Coco: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: you know how your father is not really dead. It's like, they're like sort of speaking what they all know, but they've spoke about it in this way for so long that they kind of believe it. I think this is a kind of origin story for where Natalie learns to compartmentalize, like what's real, but we don't speak about. If we position it in just a way that it's not necessarily a lie, that's kind of the start of her ability to position the truth in this malleable way. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: And yeah, she really takes this shit hard. But I just think that's interesting that they have this growth thing and then that's who her children go to live with until ⁓ Clementine becomes an adult and ⁓ things change a little bit. Yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, so my friend, the Queen of Spades has asked, like, do we see, I think it's a really good question. Like, do we see Natalie's mother as kind of having betrayed her? Like, what? And I think, I think it's, that's too, maybe too simple to ask, but like, like, I do think that there is something there where ⁓ her mother then confronts Natalie and is like, you should be kind. Like, why don't you have any kindness? And Ashby: Mm-mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Coco: It is true that her mother has a role to play in like the way that Natalie turned out. Yeah. Ashby: Yeah, but I think Natalie's mother... the sense that I get from her is that ⁓ she's tried for a while to sort of abide by the black and white, like this is right, this is wrong thing, but because she herself has like made a mistake, she's always had a little more grace for making mistakes. But it's the fact that she never owned up to them that maybe gave Natalie the wrong impression of that. Coco: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: so that she thought that everyone's job in life was to just live it totally blameless as a martyr. But ⁓ I never saw any of her mother's actions as particularly like reinforcing. ⁓ Her mother immediately takes in her daughter while she's going through this divorce, even though there's like five rambunctious kids in her household, she rolls with it. She grows from going to the more liberal church. She wants to change things. And there are certain points along Natalie's path where Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Ashby: her mother has kind of offered her an off ramp. Like there's a part early on where they're about to get married and her mother kind of looks at her and is like, are you sure you want to do this? ⁓ But because Natalie thinks of herself as like more responsible than her mother or sort of responsible for her mother, or she's not going to repeat the things of her mother or something like that, ⁓ she doesn't take it. know, she doesn't even the... Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: even the sort of empathy that her mother extends to her, she doesn't take, She's like, no, I make my own decisions. I'm gonna marry this person. And her mother ⁓ constantly is reinforcing to her over the course of book, try to be kind. I think she knows that her daughter has a little bit of like, ⁓ a lack of empathy, you know? I don't wanna Natalie, but I do think she has something diagnosable. Like she has... Coco: Mm-hmm. ⁓ The internet's with you. Ashby: I'm just like this woman is a psychopath. think I actually think this is a person with psychopathy. But I I think her mother she's a person who's not blameless, but I don't think she's ever intentionally I think she's always open to things being different, especially if the choices between uh sort of like cold Coco: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Ashby: hard following the rules being kind. I think her mom chooses kindness most times. ⁓ Coco: I think you're right, yeah. Maybe this is a, don't know if this is the right time to introduce this, but I think that what felt very believable to me about the twist, right? The twist is like, we're committing, we're doubling down on yesteryear, right? Is that even the memoir, Educated, these two parents, see, this one is more of a domineering father and a Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: and a mother that goes along with it ⁓ in educated, but you see them double down. Even when they get outside intervention that's like, this actually is like really dangerous. People are getting hurt. People are, you know, physically, ⁓ there's a very abusive kind of son involved. Like there's lots of opportunities or reasons for them to exit. And there are other like grandparent type figures that are kind of like, what are you doing? And they keep going deeper and deeper into this hole of like, religious fanaticism and really specifically being like and we're prepping for the end times like and a sense of control ⁓ Despite any like outside like logic there and so that felt I was like well that people do behave that way and then separately even in welcome to Plathville what you learn is that this they're kind of more framed in like a dugger like kind of ⁓ like a ⁓ quiver full ⁓ Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: type of ⁓ mentality. But what you learn is the backstory of the two parents, the heads of this family, don't really come from environments like that. Like maybe they're kind of more conservative or maybe they're kind of religious, but they enter this because their lives fell ⁓ out of control and they do it as a sense of control. And so I also am like, it's not weird to me that Natalie doesn't explicitly come from this environment. Maybe she comes from a conservative Christian environment. We don't even know specifically what like version of Christianity she's really a part of, and Caleb as well, but we're just like, these people go deeper into this lifestyle as a sense of, as a reaction to the somewhat, the very genuine failures of modern society. Ashby: Yeah, well, what I got the sense was that Caleb was a person that had never really learned to think for himself. And ⁓ the only thing he ever wanted was to sort of be validated as a man in his father's eyes. And so when this whole scandal with Shannon broke and two things happened, one, Natalie makes it clear that how much of their life she has been orchestrating to him and that kind of Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: destabilizes his own sense of reality because for so long she was sort of letting him play cowboy. ⁓ And she had actually come up with this entire lifestyle for them, but build it as if it was his idea. And that he found very destabilizing. The other thing is that he has this sort of passionate, intimate friendship with Shannon because Shannon takes it upon herself as like, she realizes Natalie's too far gone, but Shannon is like, maybe I can reach. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: Caleb because she sees that Caleb is a sort of sweet person who cares about animals and cares about his kids, but that he's been led astray to try to embody this conservative masculinity and believes all this messed up stuff from the internet, right? So she takes it upon herself to sort of debunk all that for him. And they have these long conversations where she is like pushing back and challenging him. And over time, she kind of like helps him like deprogram a little bit. And that Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: over the course of that though and then they have a like a sexual relationship. He takes that to mean that they're in love which is kind of really sad. It just goes to show you how kind of like unstable his own sense of self is. It comes from everyone around him and he is floored to find he thinks that him and he really thinks him and Shannon are gonna run away together to Brooklyn, New York where he's never been and like live happily ever after because that's all he can see. Coco: I know it is. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: And then he is absolutely devastated to learn that Shannon does not feel that way, that sleeping with someone and having a friendship does not mean you're gonna move in with them. And like, I think that that combination of events, plus he's now publicly embarrassed his father and their family, it's sort of like he has nowhere to go from there, you know? And so he retreats a little bit further into it, realizing that kind of, for better or worse, he's like a little bit stuck with Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: with Natalie, ⁓ she's pregnant at the time and that this all goes down. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: so, yeah, he kind of... ⁓ Well, we have to, but I guess we ⁓ Yeah. Coco: We gotta talk about his dick. We gotta, we gotta. So she keeps getting pregnant, but what we learn is that it's because he's like jacking off into a bowl and she's inseminating herself because their sex life is so bad that he's never really kind of fully erect when they're trying to have sex. ⁓ of them enter this relationship as virgins. They try to have sex on their wedding night and it's very like disappointing. I think we as the reader are reading this book and kind of thinking like this is Caleb like this is who Caleb is ⁓ and one of the most devastating like ⁓ amazing but also devastating is when Natalie's like I can't believe you had sex with like Caleb and his like soft dick and Shannon's like ⁓ honey is he like not erect when he's having sex with you ⁓ that's housewives levels ⁓ Ashby: Mm-hmm. absolutely devastating. Mm. And that breaks Natalie's brain. That is what triggers Natalie to go berserk and attack and attack Shannon. Yeah, it's wild. But another thing that's interesting is that in the 1800s timeline, Caleb has gone much more in the direction of like super stern. and I mean, they're much older in this timeline, like they're in their forties and, he's. Yeah, like they're. Coco: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. I think she says she's 50. Mm-hmm. Ashby: in this direction, in the 1800s timeline, he's much more stern and gruff. He's actually quite a bit more physical with her. He slaps her a couple of times. And he's like really gone all in on this 1800s papa lifestyle situation. I was mostly reminded of the dad in The Witch, the pastor dad. Coco: Mm-hmm. I kind of don't remember, I mean I remember liking it, I don't remember a lot, yeah. Ashby: He has the like, he has like the voice and he's like very like, this family will serve God, like that kind of thing. He's very like putting that on. But anyway, in this world, he's a lot more assertive and aggressive and quite honestly, he's a lot less emotional. He's much more withdrawn in the 1800s world. ⁓ No vulnerability showing whatsoever. And in this world, their sex life is much better. ⁓ That they act... Coco: Mm-hmm, yeah, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But it's also portrayed as like you're reading it and it reads like marital rape when you're reading the scene. And then she like has an orgasm. Like, because you don't know, because you don't know that they have consented to this lifestyle and that this is like the game plan. Like, because you think this woman has maybe time traveled back and this is like an alternate reality where he's like, a woman like will be in my, I will be in the bed. That's how it's supposed to be. But yeah. Ashby: Mm-mm. Mm. Mm-hmm. It's an interesting choice by the author because ⁓ I know that part of what she's trying to explore is the idea of you shouldn't really fantasize about a time when you had less rights. Being a trad wife is a little bit ⁓ like, ⁓ okay, you want to go back to a time of coverture where you're not a legal entity except that your husband provides everything for you. He's your full lifeline to the rest of the world. If he cheats on you, Coco: It's very provocative. Mmm. Mmm. Ashby: deal with it unless you want to blow up your life and if he and that marital rape is not a thing because you're not a real person. Like so I kind of get that but I think I think there's something like psychological being said here about the fact that she can actually have very enjoyable sex with him once he's ironed out everything about himself that was at all vulnerable. Coco: And that she found repulsive, honestly. Yes, uh-huh. Ashby: Yes, yeah. And that at the same time, when she can be... I don't know. There is a sort of interplay of like control and desire in sex. And so I think something about her not having to, I guess, perform control or perform consent or perform being into it, maybe actually frees her in a way. And so, yes, she doesn't like enthusiastically consent, but I... Coco: be in control. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: kind of get the sense that enthusiastic consent is kind of a boner killer for her. I get the idea that like having to act like she's into this is the part that she didn't like because she wasn't like she wasn't into him. So it's fascinating that in this timeline where they're much more regressed, she has a much more fulfilling sex life. But, you know, I also know that a lot of people say that you don't enter your sexual prime until you're in your 40s. So that might be part of it, too, you know. Coco: Yeah. I think also, like going back to the Shannon assault then now, like I think some people are reading it as really surprising and that they like are viewing it through a lens of queerness. I mean, there's, I don't know. I view it, I definitely view it as a sexual assault. Like we don't know enough, but like I really from the, you, so it's up to the readers ⁓ how you interpret what you hear. ⁓ But I take it as a sexual assault, but I actually think like, Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I wrote that down too. Mm-hmm. Coco: It makes perfect sense. Like, I don't even know if it has to do with desire at all ⁓ to dominate Shannon, is that she views, this is the way that she views the world. And so to dominate another person is also going to come through in this way of like a sexual assault. It feels like it's about power and domination to me way more than anything having to do with like sexual orientation. Ashby: Absolutely not. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I wrote down too. It's like the sexual assault's confusing. In her mind, she only strangled her, but maybe she didn't. sounds like in Shannon's retelling of events, we don't get the full story, but we just get that there was a part where Shannon's clothes were off and that she was being pinned down. it's like, what would be the motive there? I hope that the author isn't trying to say that all these women are actually repressed and queer. Coco: Yeah. Ashby: There's probably some people that want to read it that way, that going further into a sort of traditional feminine role is a way to reject your own like ⁓ queerness or curiosity. But I just wrote like it seems to have a lot more to do with power and hatred for female bodies, because that's what all sexual assault is. Sexual assault is not about desire at all. It's fully about power and control and fear. So it seems to me more of a just a kind of Coco: Mm-hmm. That's... Yeah. Ashby: explosion of frustration and a belief that ⁓ that's what women's bodies are for. I wanting to sort of like visit some humiliation on this woman, I think. ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's kind of how you do wonder like, what was, ⁓ what was your motivation here? Like, yeah. Ashby: And well, and yeah, and the fact that even she, the narrator doesn't go into any details, she seems to block it from her own mind. It's sort of like, what do we do? Like if she's able to compartmentalize this stuff so much, you know, like what, what goes on there? ⁓ it's interesting that she sort of blacks out, like doesn't have, she has to sort of filter this stuff in order to take any of it in. But I, I, I really contrast like Shannon with like, Coco: Yep. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's a very blackout. ⁓ Ashby: The difference between how she approached her roommate, Rena, and Shannon is like, Rena was her first opportunity to grow. She went against it and created a physical confrontation there that she sort of blacked out and doesn't give us the details for. It's like she won't report it to her own mind. You know, she's doing PR for herself. Yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so Rena represents kind of like a peer, like who is the alternate lifestyle, you know, and that's very threatening. And then Shannon is someone who's supposed to be subservient as an employee, who then rises through this, you know, relationship with Caleb to being a peer. And that's like must be shut off. That must be destroyed. Yeah. Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And as a person that she already sort of thought of as like sexually wanton from the start, know, ⁓ already positioned. Yeah, it's very much. Yeah, basically. Yeah. So I think that's fascinating. And this is one of the things that I think will be interesting about how they decide to show this in the movie. Coco: Yeah, it's like stereotypes too about like young women who with pink hair or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Ashby: because it's critical to the book, so you can't omit it. But it will be interesting what version of events comes through because I really don't know how to reckon with that. What does that say about her level of psychosis at all? I truly have no idea what to think about that. But you get the sense that she has just a lot of repressed frustration and anger toward women that she sees as not acting right. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: Like she just has so much of it. I don't know what to make of that at all. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: couple questions that I had about this like reveal is I think it's a little interesting that they decided to just disappear and kind of live this almost Amish lifestyle without some type of community or church. It sounds like Coco: This is my big question too. Yes. Ashby: I mean, it seems like the way that it started is this was so explosive, like their lives are ruined, right? And their kids are taken away and ⁓ they've messed up their father-in-law. So their father-in-law starts to distance themselves. And then she basically unremodels their house. She has them take away all the modern things and make it even bizarre and to make it even more Coco: Mm-hmm. Including the toilet. Oof! Ashby: I'm not sure what that's about, but they have no community. And so it sort of seems like the way they end up like this is because the scandal was so great that everyone wants to distance themselves from them and was just sort of like, they gonna do what they gonna do, you know, whatever. Coco: Well, and this is where I think that question of like, Natalie views herself as having agency kind of at every point. But I don't know how much agency she always has, or if she's like a survivor who's like finds pathways, because there's a threat in her life. Her father-in-law wants to have her killed because... Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ yeah. Coco: because she is the one, it's not that Shannon is coming forward in the news and saying, let me tell you all about like the behind the scenes of this like fucked up influencer family. She's also saying this woman assaulted me. And they're like, if a man assaults a woman, actually, in America, can like, we can just move on from that. Like look at who our president is. But like, if a woman assaults another woman, that's too damning, that's too, even if we're not reading it as like a queer interaction from like that lens, like the. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: Culture would read it that way. And so like, that's too threatening. And so, know, Caleb is like, my dad wants to have you killed. And so I did see like, well, what were her options? She's even like thinking through, she's like, I can't even like move to New Zealand because people know me everywhere. I have like 10 million followers. I'm gonna be recognized anywhere I go, which I'm not, I think she could have like still disappeared, like moved to a different place and disappeared. But yeah, I wondered if it was like, this was the path that her brain found to survive. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I truly, I don't know. think the quagmire of what was the deal with the assault is interesting because it seems like then nobody knows how to treat her. It is a place that where I think everyone in the public doesn't know what to do with. The strangest thing is that if it had been an assault from Caleb on Shannon, everyone would have just discredited Shannon and found a way to move on as this home wrecker. Coco: to do this. ⁓ Mm-hmm. Exactly. Ashby: But because Shannon was specifically saying, no, Caleb is actually a good person. you know, it's his wife is like in way too deep and she has a lot of rage and anger. think she's really misguided. Then now there's this other thing that emerges, which is like, in a way, the family breathes a sigh of relief, like, ⁓ thank God it's not Caleb. Like, but now the problem is with his wife. It's different when a man cheats on a woman in these communities. It's like she's supposed to stand by her man. But if a woman does something out of line, like that poisons the whole family dynamic and we need to get rid of her because now he has a license to like, ⁓ essentially there are a lot of different ways this could have gone. Yes, he could have killed her, but I kind of think about what we've learned about the Kennedy family. She could have been lobotomized. She could have been institutionalized. Like those things are not off the table. Anytime a woman steps out of line like that, ⁓ there are lot of, yeah. Coco: Gotta shout out the Diabolical Lies episode on the Kennedys. That blew my mind. Incredible. I then tried to talk to my mom about it and I was like, it's okay, different generations have different narratives about the Kennedys that probably aren't going to be evolving. Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. But yeah, like, lot of, there were true real threats to her, but I think it's fascinating that, ⁓ Caleb has essentially multiple pathways to come out unscathed if he had been the one to assault Shannon. But because it was Natalie, it sort of like created this situation for everyone that nobody knows how to deal with. And so what ends up happening is everyone just distances themselves from Coco: Mm-hmm. And they told. Yep. But I did think I going back to that like extended community, it's like when I have engaged in like learning about see, and I guess I'm I'm always I'm coming at it from maybe less of a angle of tradwives that like I've read tradwife discourse, but I haven't myself been like so pulled in to like learning that much about tradwives. But so I guess, you know, it makes sense. She kind of artificially creates this as like, you know, Ashby: Yeah. Coco: as an influencer, like kind of as like, I'm gonna present this to the world. But I think what we even know about someone like Hannah Neilman and like ⁓ a lot of these people in even like the Plattville people, ⁓ the Duggars back in the day, know, ⁓ I love the documentary, Shiny Happy People, which is kind of talking about these fundamentalists communities is that there's an extended community that is part of the high control of it all. ⁓ And that is partially also what makes it so hard to escape is that it's not just your family. It's like all the people around you. And I was kind of wondering about like that isolation that we see in this novel. And you know, this is a novel that is quite long. It's a good page turner. But like, it's hard for me to criticize, hey, you didn't include something. It's like, there was a lot in here already. But I did wonder about that like extended community ⁓ part of it. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because I don't really see how it doesn't feel like a person could sustain it themselves, you know? like, it seems hard to imagine that just this small family could sustain that for themselves, unless it really was the case that every time they went anywhere, they got so much, you know, public hate and pushback that they just retreated back to their. their house. I don't know. it would have made sense to me if they had been like, we ⁓ started, trading vegetables with so-and-so at this ⁓ other fundamentalist farm It would make sense if they were kind of part of a church or ⁓ a movement or something, So I don't know. I thought that that was interesting. Maybe it started from a place of retreating from the public eye and then it just got crazier and crazier. that seemed a little bit of a stretch to me. Coco: Like it would be like this. So this is let's do like alternate, alternate. And again, not really trying to like harshly criticize the book by any means, but just kind of like other thoughts that I had, like an interesting path could be like, ⁓ we're going to go deeper into this, but then you get subsumed by like a religious cult and then you aren't in control because you're part of a cult. Like that's what I think happens to people. And then my second like thought there was I think I maybe if we had Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-mm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Coco: these two timelines where we have kind of more influencer Natalie and then we have like 1855 Natalie, maybe as opposed to the like psychosis part where we think there's like a jump cut to this like past, like maybe just putting these two lives next to each other and us wondering what happened with, and then we reveal that she knew she entered this. Like I think that there's something, I don't know that I, it would have maybe felt more believable to me because people do do that. They go deeper into the rabbit hole. Ashby: Mm-mm. Yeah, think the kind of like turn toward medication as like a way to make all of this make sense for her is two things. It's like showing a kind of loop where ⁓ has a choice basically to like grow beyond this except that she's done some things wrong, which is like her mother's path. ⁓ she can just insist Coco: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: to just not feel those things. And that's her mother-in-law's path. And then that's how she gets into this path of being kind of drugged is what they make it seem like. But I also think she shows so many signs of like psychopathy and psychosis earlier on in the book that it actually doesn't seem that weird to me. It seems like this was a person that was very high functioning or at least she was functioning in a way that everyone was okay with. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ashby: The things about her, ⁓ was not running afoul of any behaviors that were expected of her early on, but we know from being inside of her head that she struggles to emote and to relate to people. ⁓ But she was always so useful to everyone and so laser focused on presenting success that I think people just decided they didn't care about that. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: You know, there is a part where she's really struggling after the birth of her first child. Even her mother, who's like, I've said, I think is like little bit more sympathetic, but when it comes to motherhood, ⁓ everyone is sort of like, you need to snap the fuck out of it. She has like, I think a moment there where people could have intervened with her. ⁓ She's truly like vulnerable, but everyone sort of is just like, you look like shit, essentially. You're not presenting well. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: I think she was kind of enabled in a way to like go down this path of the only thing that matters is how you present yourself. And what we see over time is splitting. That's the thing where what happens in your brain was like over time you start to have like a true split in your thinking. And black and white thinking is one big part of that. If it's not in the black and white, then it gets kind of cut off from you. So I actually think the turn toward pills is probably. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: realistic in a way that this is a person who's probably constantly ⁓ flipping, toggling back and forth between those two extremes. that turning to pills was just another way that the people around her could control her. And also probably she describes it when the family in the 1800s is able to get access to the pills, she has a sort of more, she sort of drifts through her life. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yep. Ashby: rather, and she feels more peaceful about it. But it's when she's lucid that she has these impulses toward control and frustration and back and forth and all that. And running. that's what we've said is that she says she feels like she is a person with agency who should have been born a man. The only way in the way her mental illness has progressed for her to play along with strong daddy, papa figure, and I'm just the passive wife that goes along with it is to medicate this woman. Coco: and running. Mm-hmm. Ashby: because yeah, yeah. Coco: Yeah. Well, and that's so, this is where it's like, we know Caro a little too much, like not, not or not, or we don't know too, but it works well for me. But like, it's like, we know that even on Diabolical Lies, they would talk about like how like, yeah, women in the past were overly medicated to keep them happy in their, in their boring housewife lives, like stuck in their homes without access to. Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Docile. Okay. Coco: their own bank accounts and stuff. yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: Well, but also no access to their own mind. That is critical. Like no access to their own resistance. So yeah, I think she made choices in this direction, but I also think you're right. She didn't have big picture agency like she thought she did. ultimately to kind of escape from the public scrutiny, they start to retreat more and more from public life. And then I think now we're in this sensitive place of Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: What do we do with people like that that are adults? And that is a real question where you do have some family members or people that you know who kind of go off the deep end a little bit. They don't leave their houses very much and they do start to go down a path of like ⁓ anti-vax is a big thing that they bring up in this book. ⁓ And they increasingly don't want to rely on the outside world. And when those are adults, it's like nobody really knows what to do with that. We don't have institutionalization anymore in the same way. ⁓ So families without resources are kind of, you know, what do they do? ⁓ So I forget what they eventually do to explain like how they continue to live there because they made it sound like at some point the money dries up from Caleb's family. Coco: Yeah, so it turns out that her elder sons are like living and kind of helping, which also a little bit ineducated. Like that kind of happened. Like it's interesting, like these things where you have seen and read. Sometimes you read something and you're like, this feels impossible. And then you're like, but people are like this. Yeah, so I don't know that they ever really fully explain like who's how they're funding it, but also doesn't seem like they require much. Ashby: sons on an adjacent property. Yeah, yeah. That does make sense, yeah. But it is, it isn't though. Coco: to keep living either. They don't have electricity or running water. Ashby: there? Okay, I look, I get that. Okay, I get that. At the same time, even like, you know, the Pennsylvania Dutch, like Amish people that live this kind of lifestyle. ⁓ There's still there are still things that are going to ⁓ puncture the veil. This is the thing. Coco: Mm-hmm. They exist with commerce and stuff, yes. Well, they're not trying to pretend the outside world doesn't exist. They're saying we are choosing to not live within the outside world. So they do a lot of like woodworking and quilts and like other types of tasks, yes. ⁓ Ashby: are choosing, that's right. Yeah, but I mean, there's things like there have to be property taxes paid on this farm. There have to be birth certificates for these children. Coco: Yeah, well, and some of that is ineducated. She does not have a birth certificate. yeah. Ashby: Okay, but well, I know, like, so that's the thing is like, I would think there would be like logistical things about this that if you don't have a large community that hides that from you. Coco: Yeah, that's right. They exist in a community that understands them. Yeah. And someone previously really famous, like you're pulling this off, but people know where you live. Yeah. Ashby: then I'm kind of like how or again ⁓ well, that's the other thing is that there is a limited amount of time before somebody decides they want to do a 10 part podcast, true crime on you and rolls up in your driveway. ⁓ There's even just like surveyors for the land that might pull up. Like there are things I don't know. I don't think they live so far from the world that. Coco: Maybe Doug is like to some degree just like keeping the lid on it. Like, and they actually address that a little tiny bit in the book. Ashby: Yeah, so so there were just ⁓ okay. Cause I only remember them kind of being like basically the money, the money dries up from Doug's family. Like they had other financial issues or something like that. I don't know. ⁓ that's the only part that I remember. And eventually, yeah. Coco: Yeah. So Clementine shows up and takes the kids again, part two, you know, after she herself as a teenager takes her siblings and then she comes back for the rest of the children and takes them. And then we get a sense that Natalie and Caleb like decide to leave. And then what we learn is that Natalie is in prison for child abuse charges. I don't know that we'd learn if Caleb is in prison or not. Ashby: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. that's the thing is as the book goes on, Natalie's narrate as an unreliable narrator, it starts to deteriorate pretty gradually. It starts to become clear that she has these like breakthrough moments where she kind of sees what's going on, but not really. ⁓ So there's a lot of kind of gaps there toward the end. Another thing that I think will be interesting for the movie to cover, which I have to say, I don't think feels inauthentic to the character. I actually get the sense that this character is slipping in and out of lucidity and doesn't actually know what the features are of her life. She kind of doesn't know how things run. Sometimes she's ⁓ kind of with us and then sometimes she's kind of floating through a world of Bible verses. So that kind of actually does track for me. But yeah, what we kind of later learn is ⁓ there's a moment where one of the Coco: ⁓ no, no, it works. It really works. Mm-hmm. Ashby: children in family 2.0 where they've retreated from society and people have decided to leave them alone. Which the only thing I want to say about this is that it seems like they got more and more extreme in their views in terms of like anti-vax and 5G. Do you know what I mean? Like that kind of thing. It seems like as that happened, their family started to distance themselves from them as like finding them more and more frustrating to deal with. There's a moment where Natalie reveals that they decide to ⁓ Coco: Yes. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Ashby: remodel the house to get rid of all modern elements, okay? And that they sort of started as a game ⁓ for their youngest daughter where they're like, we're just gonna play pretend like we're in the revolutionary war times. But over this period of time, like to stay out of the public eye and also whatever, they are just, their families have distanced themselves from them. So over time, they have more kids on this farm and like you get the sense there's like kind of no one to advocate for them at all anymore. And just, Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: further and further. So by the time we catch up with her, she has like a 12 year old daughter, some like seven to eight year old, two seven to eight year old sons, and then ⁓ like a seven year old daughter, I think, or something like that, Maeve, who we later learn is her last child, who is actually not a toddler. As the book is explaining it to this timeline to us, we get the sense Maeve is a toddler, but then we later realize Maeve is not a toddler. she is developmentally disabled because ⁓ they had her much later in life with no prenatal care and she had a really traumatic birth. Yeah. Yeah. A really traumatic home birth. And wow. Wow. What a crazy like revelation. But that's kind of like Coco: She didn't breathe, she didn't have oxygen to her brain for a while. And you kind of feel that Maeve is the only child she loves. Ashby: Yeah, because Maeve is like, because Maeve is not easy to control, but it's never going to challenge her in any way. She's just pure, pure love. anyway, her daughter in this world is like incredibly competent, like a mini version of herself or her older daughter that she remembers from the other timeline, Clementine. And there's a part where Maeve gets really sick. And so now they need to find medical care. ⁓ Coco: So sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Ashby: Mary, her oldest daughter in the 1800s timeline, is really extremely worried about Maeve and they finally have an agreement where she's like, we need a doctor. So ⁓ Mary sends Natalie off to get a doctor with instructions. And while roaming through the woods to get to the doctor for Maeve's fever, she comes across a modern farm adjacent to theirs. And it really kind of blows her mind and like breaks her kind of psychosis for a second. And what she stumbles across is the neighbors who she had seen in an earlier, who had actually visited the farm earlier, like these two didn't speak to her at all. These two older guys that lived on the adjacent farm that she had seen earlier that she'd felt like she recognized but didn't quite recognize. And then she realizes they're her older sons from her earlier life. Coco: Yeah. but like didn't speak to her, yeah. Ashby: So her older sons had decided to live on the adjacent property and essentially help them continue this fantasy. And what he was doing was taking grocery store stickers off of produce so that they could then bury it in their garden and let them continue to pretend that in fact they are farming when they're basically subsisting on sort of charity, which is so sad. like, is... Coco: Mm-hmm. So fucked up. I know. Ashby: Such a great encapsulation of the idea of performance, like even when they're not performing for an audience, they need to perform for themselves. And that requires other people to support that. You actually cannot live on your own. This like sovereign citizen thing is bullshit. You can't do it. You need other people. ⁓ Anyway, and that breaks, kind of breaks her brain, right? And there's also another scene that we get where the oldest daughter, Mary, ⁓ Coco: for an audience, yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: goes off into the woods and then comes back visibly shaken. And we later learned she encounters her older sister, Clementine, in the woods, who basically says, like, come with me if you want to live and and like says to her like, hey, you guys aren't being treated well. ⁓ The older brothers on the adjacent farm had reported that Natalie had come running through the woods and was like hysterical or whatever. And also that Maeve had had that fever, which was very concerning. It's basically a welfare check. Right. So Clementine ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Ashby: comes back and confronts everyone in a modern vehicle and lays it all out there where she's like, hey, this is what happened. She kind of catches Natalie up on what's happened since then. She's an adult now. And she says, she reminds her what the preceding events were. And then she says, I'm sorry that you didn't want to be part of the outside world because there's actually wonderful things in it. Then she hands them a warrant and takes all their remaining children with her. ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. Yep. Ashby: And now that is another logistical question I have. I don't actually think that's how that works, but okay. I'll suspend my disbelief for a little bit. ⁓ Coco: think the children get into the car. you know, yeah. Ashby: I know, but I don't think they send family members out with a quote warrant to take all the children. I don't think that's how that works. No, it's CPS comes out, does the welfare check and like a family member is who they deliver them to. But I don't actually think that she can show up with a warrant for your children. That doesn't sound right. Coco: ⁓ my gosh, so true. They would be, CPS would be there. Yes. ⁓ huh. Yeah. So I wanna say like the internet or like people reading this have talked about like some plot holes and stuff in the book. And I think that's like one of them that you're pointing to. And then there's some others that are like pretty minor. But what I was thinking about was this book, the plot holes didn't like take, like it didn't bother me. Yeah. Ashby: Yeah, same. Yeah, I agree. They were minor, but they were things that after it's just it more has to do with like the. It's. I think it has to do with the pace, like by the end of the book, the pace speeds up significantly. So like once we get here and they're revealing sort of how things have unfolded since the Shannon debacle that is sort of like ground zero place that broke Natalie's brain, ⁓ you're getting lots of different pieces, so you're not getting the full story because Coco: There's twists and stuff, you, people are going to think about the plot. Yeah. Yes, it does. ⁓ Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: her brain is messed up and she's not able to give you the full story. And then the parts that you're getting from Clementine, from Mary or whatever, it's obviously not the full picture. So there's that. And then there's just a ton of information. Like we're just getting hit with stuff. So there are a few things that by the time you're at the end of the book, this last quarter has been so fast paced that you kind of have to go back in your mind and be like, wait, what? Yeah, that's all. Coco: Yeah. Yeah, well, I guess this is my hypothesis. I don't know enough about the publishing industry, but people have talked about reading this and feeling like, ⁓ like another editing pass would have like strengthened it. And I kind of agree with that. And even though I know no one cares, but like my gripe against where the crowd at saying is like, there's so many things in that book that do not make sense. And like, you're like, why didn't an editor fix this? And I think that there is something people were saying though, like, Ashby: Mm-mm. Mmm. Coco: the publishing industry is also an industry that has like low margins and roles have been cut. And they're like, there's maybe something about this book that has been rushed to print because it's a trendy topic that's like you want to capitalize on the moment. And it's like, and you have the very interesting figure of Caro who we know as the host of Diabolical Lies, but kind of rose to getting into like this podcasting. from being like an influencer online commenting on culture and kind of has had her own experiences of like being on camera and like thinking about an audience. But I just, I want to like, I don't think that the holes don't bother me really in reading it, but like there are moments where you're like, man, like there's a twin sharper that I think it could have ended up if there was like more time. Like, you know, similar to Taylor Swift's latest album. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, ⁓ my gosh, there's so much there to talk about. okay, a couple of the things that kind of, it's like, it would have made more sense to me if they'd been embedded in some type of community. It's a little harder to envision that this would be allowed for this long. Also, there's a part where they say that she sort of becomes lucid and realizes that compared to Clementine, Mary's growth is stunted and that she is malnourished. It does seem to me like with such a high profile on them and then her Coco: think so too, yeah. Yeah. Ashby: previous children being taken away, there would have been welfare checks on them since then. Like you don't disappear from the public eye like that way. So for 12 years is the thing. Like I think someone would have intervened sooner. So that part is a little bit questionable to me. That's like a logistic. There's a part where she is first kind of coming to in the 1800s timeline and Coco: Mm-hmm. Especially as a famous person already. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: she sees they've been tracking the children's growth on the wall and they've marked it as 1850. And that is a little, I know they said they started things off with ⁓ their youngest daughter as a game of pretend. And she even says that what she decided to do was buy revolutionary war clothes online and cut the tags out and that that's the clothing that they wear to make it all more believable. Look, it doesn't strain credulity to me that a person who's unwell does things like this, like further and further trying to get away from the public eye ⁓ and trying to be more and more authentic in this black and white version that you have in your mind of we're not going to rely on the outside world for anything. Like this feels very in line with the like tinfoil hat, no 5G. That has a lot more in common with that side of things than what I think of as a very curated world of ⁓ the tradwife influencer. Coco: Sure. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ashby: So I see an intersection there, but not so much, not so much like I don't see Norah Smith doing that shit. I don't see that at all. But a mentally unwell person who's become incredibly mistrustful, sure, does something like that in a fugue state. Absolutely. But yeah. Coco: Well, and there's maybe like a teeny bit more, I think some people are also saying like a teeny bit more research would have just stripped. Like, and this is just because, this is why I'm criticizing the book publishing industry too. Like that's where I'm thinking about this, but it's like, there are so many community, there are so many stores of people who sell clothing now that exist in like a right-wing community space. So you don't need to buy revolutionary work clothes to like pull off this thing. You could be. Ashby: Yeah, me too. Me too. Mm-hmm. Coco: pulling in some of those threads of culture that do exist, kind of from this like other very traditional, even like Mormon kind of community types of areas. Yeah. ⁓ Ashby: Yeah, that's the thing is that, yeah, is that it's sold as a, they retreated from society and built their own sort of Disneyland world where this is true. But I think it's much more believable that they connect with people who are like this and want to form a like broader political kind of version of this that's supported. I don't believe that a set of individuals can create this for themselves as much. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Ashby: But I absolutely believe that, you know, in the Manosphere world, Caleb connects with some people who were like, absolutely, the devils of the modern world. ⁓ You know, my wife, Han, makes these clothes and we'll send them to you. Yes. Coco: Like, yeah, Caleb is embedded in these communities already, he is very much part of the book. And like something that's really important is like this quiver full like approach to like having a lot of children is directly related to. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: demographics like in white supremacy and trying to have as many white children and even to form an army, to have enough people to form an army for a civil war. Now they do mention civil war type stuff in the book. ⁓ In Civil War, great movie with Jesse Plemons. just wanna recommend Jesse Plemons roles in all the different ways that they show up. Another Jesse Plemons role would be The Power of the Dog. Another... ⁓ Ashby: Yeah, it is. Yes. Yes. I do. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: movie that's focusing on rural lifestyles and patriarchy and the oppressive nature of such. Ashby: And it just seems, I don't know, maybe these kinds of, I don't know, maybe these kinds of isolated families really exist, but like. It just doesn't seem maintainable to me to never meet anyone else. Like they make it seem like when the brothers from the adjacent farm come to visit that are adults now, they make it seem like this is the only person that Mary has ever seen in her life and she's 12. Coco: And they're kind of icked out that like maybe she's flirting with them a little bit. Cause they're her brothers. Ashby: because she's never met another person. And what she is so shook up by when she meets Clementine in the woods is that Clementine is totally modern looking and ⁓ has like basically told her like the way you're living is not right. She's like destabilized her whole foundations and everything. I don't know. So it's like, yeah, think a little people have said that the end of the book, like you said, feels rushed and feels like ⁓ could have used another editing pass. I feel like the end of the book was really fast paced. Coco: Mm-hmm. Ashby: and you're not meant to get the whole story because it's like from her piecemeal point of view. But I do think that like when you actually later as you reflect on it, you start to think for 12 years is a little bit hard to believe that they've had no other contact with anyone else that would kind of destabilize this. Like that's a little bit hard to believe. ⁓ yeah. Coco: Interesting. Uh-huh. I quite liked the end of the book and thought the fast-paced nature of it was great. think I would say maybe like trimming a lot some of the other parts down would maybe make it like sharper. I don't know. Yeah. Ashby: Mm-mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just there's this pretty stark contrast. Pre-Shannon debacle, things are kind of a slow weaving together of how she got into this trad wife life and the life she's living. And then after Shannon debacle, it's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: But yeah, that part kind of stood out. then, I don't know, going so far as to write 1850 on the walls, that seems a little, that feels a little out there to me. But that's something she encounters early on. ⁓ And let's see, what else did I write? One thing that I think is so interesting is that ⁓ earlier in the book, she has social media, but she doesn't seem to use it to explore anything. She doesn't use it as a portal to the world. Coco: Yeah. Ashby: She is a deeply incurious and unconscious person. I would think that one of the things she's critical of is that her nannies are always on their phones and that she keeps her children away from all screens, right? Like they don't, it doesn't seem like they even maybe even really have TV. Although later in the book, they all sit around to watch Shannon's like 60 minutes interview. So I was thinking to myself, okay, well, do they not have TV on the farm? Do their kids not know what TV is? Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. like Doug and Amelia's house. thought perhaps I but I don't remember where the setting is. Yeah. Ashby: I know, I know. And I know that they say they had taken the children to Doug and Amelia's house at a certain point. I don't know. I'm not sure how disconnected her modern world children are from all of this stuff. But she basically makes the point that she thinks it's better for her children to be props in her social media than to be online exploring social media and letting the ills of social media affect their brain. Coco: Mm-hmm ⁓ Yeah. Hmm. Ashby: One of the earliest conflicts in the book is that her oldest daughter asks her what a trad wife is, which she finally pieces together is because she must have gotten access to a phone to ask about that. ⁓ But I am interested. I think it's interesting that ⁓ Natalie is the only person in the world for whom they have social media and the only thing they're interested in is posting content, not consuming content. She never talks about Coco: Yeah. Ashby: consuming other people. She never talks about seeing what else is out there. They talk a lot about Caleb getting radicalized, ⁓ going down this rabbit hole of stuff, but she never uses social media to explore. She only ever catalogs in her mind the comments on her own videos, and that becomes part of her ongoing weaponization against what she calls the angry women. But you would think that that would lead her on a little bit of a breadcrumb trail to be like, you Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: What else is out there? She'd get served stuff, but she is so laser focused on just making content that she never gets exposed to any other kind of view, even to get further into her own worldview. Like I could actually see ⁓ an arc there of like seeing more like Plathville content and stuff like that, making her more dedicated to getting rid of the trappings of modern. Yes. Yeah. Coco: the ideology part of it, because I think we see it as, again, it's very cynical, like the way that the character is approaching things. She does have this concept of God, but it doesn't seem like it exists within like a very organized religion. It's just, it's more that God is your biggest audience, the one that is always overseeing you and observing you. And so you have to, and her mom kind of gives her this idea that like just perform for God, like perform for, you know. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-mm. Mm-hmm. Coco: that's higher power ⁓ and goes down this kind of like splitting pathway ultimately. But yeah, it's interesting because maybe that's coming back to what I was saying at the very beginning where I think it is a very interesting psychological exploration in this novel. And I like what you've said about like maybe like psychopathy and there's something there that's... Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: specific to Natalie, right? But I do think that what we see in these women is the blending of things, a much more grayer space that you latch onto an ideology that ultimately is about your own oppression, but you do it because it makes sense within the context that you live in as a survival pathway and a way to feel that you have dignity, even if that comes at like... Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Coco: your own expense. There's just like a level, a layer of like nuance that I kind of, even if it wasn't extended to Natalie because of Natalie's own like view of things, I sometimes wished it was be a little bit more spaced out for some of these other characters. Like I think that Amelia, her mother-in-law, really does feel like kind of flat to me. Like she is a caricature of this like politician's wife who's kind of wine soaked, rich and... ⁓ Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Coco: you know, using substances to get through daily life. Sure, that people do that, but there's not, there could be more a mixture of genuine love or something undercurrent that's being squashed down. Just something a little bit more from some of these side characters. Ashby: get that. But I what I really get is that even even if that's there, Natalie can't see it. She can't see it. So I do think something like a movie is going to be able to shed more light on that because it's basically from a slightly different perspective. But from inside Natalie's head, everything is so black and white and ⁓ has to be part of control. Everything is about how you appear to the world. I mean, it's giving it's giving like manifesto, you know, giving. Coco: I know, yeah, it's through her eyes. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the only person that like we get this glimpse of is for Shannon and it's like in that moment when at the beginning of the novel before you know about what has really happened with Shannon you see that Natalie observes Shannon as kind of and I might be getting this wrong but like kind of like spacing out and you get that Shannon knows something and something has happened where she she's clocking this is so dark what's going on here on this farm. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's what I mean is like, Natalie is seems biologically incapable of letting other people's humanity into her brain. And so we'll never get those the color of those pictures there. What I do think is fascinating is, I mean, OK, ultimately, by the end of the book, the main thing I was left with was just it is so horrendously sad for the children like Coco: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: The heaviest, that's the heaviest thing about it. And that's why we were talking to our friends about it. was like, I myself am not a parent, but I don't know if reading this as a parent, it might be very heavy at the end to think about all these children really being neglected. And I don't know if that might be too heavy for some folks. I'm not sure. Cause I really was left with a sense of heaviness and sadness for the kids, especially, you know, especially the ones that grew up in the 1800s timeline who are. Coco: Yeah. Ash Shu: ⁓ Coco: Mmm. Yeah. Ashby: malnourished and neglected and who so much development happens in the brain and like it's going to be really kind of scary and challenging for them. Like they talk about it later entering the world of modern things and who knows what things they'll be able to overcome and not overcome like in terms of like speech delays and stuff. I just don't know. It's sad. Coco: I know. So Jessica, this is like ending this and going and reading Educated. It could be like the book of Mary. So it ends with one of her children, this eldest daughter part two has written a memoir about her life. You could also, I like the glass castle that kind of also addresses some of this type of experience. But ⁓ yeah, definitely. And I think Educated just does an incredible job of like taking you on that journey of like what it has done to you. What is the trauma of that? ⁓ Ash Shu: ⁓ ⁓ Ashby: I know. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Mm-hmm. Coco: And I don't want to give it too much away about that, but she does kind of confront her parents. And it's very fascinating to see where they choose, when they choose to empathize and when they choose to shut her out because they can't shake their own way that they view the world. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Yeah. so one of the fun, one of the like most, interesting thing that wraps everything up toward the end is yes, we get this last excerpt, this last vignette, which is we understand that Natalie is in shackles. So we get the impression she's ⁓ imprisoned for child abuse. She's on a set, which looks very much like her home ⁓ or something like that. And that she is Coco: Mm-hmm. I think it is her home. Ashby: I couldn't tell. I was like a little unclear. She... Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Coco: They're trying to get her to, they're trying to say, do you remember when we drove up the road? Do you remember when you came in? And, but she's had too many versions of her own home in her brain. I don't think she can register. I'm interpreting it this way, but yeah. Ashby: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. The depersonalization, the derealization that happens is very stark by the end where she's, everything is kind of seen through this lens of like, it's a little bit real, but not real to her. ⁓ And so she has agreed to do an interview, but only if it is done by her college roommate, who has become a news anchor in the last several years and Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hehehehehe Ashby: ⁓ So Rena's gonna do this 60 minutes interview with her about like her life and everything. And I'm just like fascinated like this woman, she has really carried this college roommate around in her brain for so long. Coco: And even at the very end, she's like, she's certainly not like a household name. And then she's like a news anchor in like Chicago. You're like, bro, that's a major market. Ashby: Yeah, yeah. She's doing fine. ⁓ I think that's so interesting. And Rena seems to have a lot more empathy for her. She's sort of like, I'm okay. Like I do have a family. probably isn't, she doesn't reveal too much or whatever, but ⁓ she's really trying to be gentle, like walking her through this interview. And then she hands her the book that her daughter's written. That's the sort of impetus for the interview is that Mary has released a book and ⁓ Mary has this forward to her mother in it about like, you know, what Coco: Yeah. Ashby: life has been like since then and I was just weeping like the intro the thing from Mary was just so beautiful. I just thought it was like such a great like encapsulation of the complexity of like mother daughter relationships where you feel for them, but you also know what they're responsible for, but you also want to like move forward in your own life and like have some grace for that and not hold on to anger and everything and just the way that it hits Natalie. just that's like a very emotional part of the book. It really ends on that note, I thought. thought it was really lovely. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think... What you're saying about the children part is like, think that that, reading the last little section of this book made me like the book a lot more. Like not that I didn't like it, but it really boosted my feelings about the book because I think it ends on something that feels like the stakes are there for all of us, like as people in a society. And like what I was saying, like children don't really have rights. like, it's, if this book is upsetting, like, Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: this is partially what happens to real children, like in America. We in America love to like point to other countries and be like, you're oppressing these people, you're oppressing these, look at, think of this. And it's like, this happens in our backyard. And the Shiny Happy People documentary really gets into, it's mostly the people who are in that documentary are children who have survived living in these environments, who are speaking now as like young adults. And they get into like, Ashby: Yeah. No. Coco: This is how high control religious environments tell parents how to treat their children to create these very submissive children. And it's just like very fucked up and very upsetting and like your children are not your property, your pets are not even your property. That's my philosophy. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Well, I think what's so beautiful about this end part of the book is that it's like you said, the rest of the book, we don't get a ton of things that aren't filtered through Natalie. But in this place, we actually have this sort of refreshing oasis moment of hearing from a person who does have access to the full range of human emotion. And it's this first person letter to her from her daughter, Mary. And it Coco: Yeah, mm-hmm, we do. Mm-hmm. Ashby: And it's like, ⁓ this is nice to hear from another person's point of view and who all the things that she feels about it, but also that she sort of like understands her mother, forgives her in a way. ⁓ Anyway, it's just really lovely. ⁓ And then I did actually listen to, you should listen to if you haven't the Carol Clare Burke episode of, yeah, of Diabolical Lies. And then there's another episode too, where they talk about this, but ⁓ Coco: Mm-hmm. I did. Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: So Kara has gone through a lot of ups and downs in the publishing industry. I know she's had a book or two before this that she's worked on for like a decade or like five years that she couldn't get picked up by a publisher and launched the way she wanted to. But then she said, this book sort of just came to her and she wrote it really quickly and it wasn't like a five to 10 year thing. And then it was just going back and doing like revisions. And then it very quickly got picked up by Anne Hathaway's Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: company to make a movie out of. she mentions Anne Hathaway ⁓ at the end of the book in her epilogue and ⁓ everything that she thinks. So I don't know how much involved she was in ⁓ any the process, but ⁓ I think it's so fascinating that. ⁓ Coco: that might be like partially what I'm saying. The speed to market is all yeah. And girl, I would cash those checks too. Nope. Ashby: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It clearly got like a lot of buzz and... ⁓ totally. Not mad about that at all. But I understand that an author like Carol is willing to work on something for five to 10 years and that this book came to her, but it also sort of like she quickly wrote it and it quickly hit the market at the same time. And so it might not be like representative of all of the types of things that she'd like to write. Coco: Uh-huh. Ashby: under ideal circumstances necessarily, but it really sort of perfectly lines up with a kind of modern moment of what people are interested in. And ⁓ I think it's interesting. I heard her at one of these saying that she a little bit pictures Natalie's voice like ⁓ the cool girl speech from Gone Girl. ⁓ Coco: Gone girl. Yeah, I get it. She is kind of like that character Ashby: Yeah, and I really think that the, ⁓ this like part in yesteryear, it's on page 91 and through 93, where she has this kind of like mental fantasy about Rena's life compared to her life ⁓ that is so crystallizing of that tone. I was like, this is the cool girl speech of our time. This is the one that people will be doing as monologues for stuff. So that's the one that I'm the most excited about ⁓ for them to figure out how they adapt it into the movie because it's just, when I was reading this, when I was reading this, was literally snapping. I was like, this is phenomenal. She has captured the rage to Coco: Mm-hmm. She kind of... She's also kind of like our... Now I'm forgetting her name. I can't believe it. But from Butter, our serial killer, our quote unquote serial killer. Like where you're like, there's some things that you are accurately pinpointing about women and then other things. And then you take a weird turn. Ashby: Fantasy rage perfectly, yeah. Mm-hmm. ⁓ gosh, that's so true. I didn't think about that, but she does have a lot in common with her. The kind of like trying to find a way to, ⁓ Coco: And that book is told from a different point of view, not from inside the one that's a psychopath of some degree. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ that's so interesting. True. So I love that speech. think it's like a true stroke of genius. The other thing Caro has said about this is that she credits ⁓ Taylor Swift in a lot of ways. That she wanted to be a writer, but that she felt like ⁓ she had run into all these other issues and that... Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Ashby: At some point, I think in the pandemic, she said she was listening to Taylor Swift's My Tears Ricochet and ⁓ that inspired her to really commit toward writing and that she feels like ⁓ some of her success is kind of owed to that. That she gave herself, I forgot what she said, some task of like write a few hours every day or something like that. ⁓ Coco: I think she published like a short story a week or something. She gets into it in the caro episode. And you know what it made me think of? It made me think of Brennan Lee Mulligan in his commentary on being like a dungeon master on dropout and like kind of people being like, you're a genius. And he's like, the thing is, though, I did this for like decades for no money before like this. And he's like, I just love it when creative people do what they love over and over again. And then they get rewarded for it. And I was like, I really was thinking caro. Ashby: Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Coco: that she's put in all that time and really kind of honed her voice and craft. you know, when you're when you're going into reading someone's book that is a person that you really admire on a podcast or wherever, like there's a little bit of like, you're bracing yourself like, how am going to feel about you after I read this? And it's like, I was just so grateful reading it was like she, I really felt like her intelligence is like powering novel. And Ashby: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Coco: I think that's what I love about her on Diabolical Lies. Ashby: I think what you said captures it, which is there is a type of thing that happens in your mind where you view yourself ⁓ as ⁓ acting ⁓ a depersonalized space. so ⁓ this character has this of practice of acting for God and then she kind of ⁓ finds it pretty easy to then act for the audience of subscribers. ⁓ And I think that's a really fascinating commentary in and of itself, we famously live in a pretty secular society, but where ⁓ you can still run the same traps, you know, where you start thinking of yourself, not as a real person who's embodied, but as how you present. either to the judge in the sky or to the thousands of voices on the internet. And just the danger that that can lead to. Like we should not only think of ourselves as how we present to other people, we should not always be trying to control the outcome or what people think of us ⁓ because it can lead this way where that becomes what you're mostly invested in. So I think it's a little bit of a nice commentary for folks who think they're maybe above the whole like, Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ashby: you know, trad wife or super fundamentalist discourse or whatever, because we're all we can all be victims of trying being more invested in our presentation than what life is really like. Yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. Yeah, agreed. I mean, I definitely also thought of like Britney Spears, like while I'm reading, getting towards the end and being like what we've also learned from You're Wrong About, where like fame is abuse and this woman maybe had more, definitely had more agency than I would say someone like Britney Spears has had based on what we know about Britney Spears' life. But like, you're like, oh, you can see how it does, can break your brain. And yeah. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can see that. Yeah, ⁓ and I wish I had included this, but my letterbox review would be, ⁓ over-functioning dystopia horror story. Coco: For your own journey to not over function. Ashby: Yes, it's like this is where it gets to when you start really trying to be like, let me just orchestrate every little thing behind the scenes and make everyone think it's their idea. This is where it goes. This is where it can go. If you're not careful, you have to let people experience discomfort and failure. It's not our jobs to sweep everything under the rug. ⁓ But so yeah, if you wanted a real dystopia horror story, this is it. So yeah. Coco: Yes. Ashby: I enjoyed the book. It's a real page turner. It's again, my famous, gives you something to think about. There's a lot to think about in here. Like the intersection of social media, like how modern our lives are, motherhood. It is something to think about. It really leaves you thinking afterward of some Coco: Yes! Just, I'm just saying, something to think about. Ashby: And, but anyway, all of that is to say I do, I do, I did enjoy yesteryear. I do recommend it. I especially really liked the author. and, ⁓ I think if this is like, if this is evidence of like what many years of hard work on a book that she ultimately didn't get published, but then, like you said, honed her skills and was able to put this out in something that really captures something current about the, about the moment. Coco: ⁓ Me too. Mm-hmm. Ashby: then I really can't wait to see what else she comes out with. Coco: too. And I think this is also sometimes what I would think about. Sorry to bring up Mark Maron again. I'm really sorry. Again, I don't I do not stand by all of Mark Maron. But I think sometimes what I would think is that the comedy special was like the thing he cared about. And to me, the podcast was what was so meaningful. And I this book is great. And like, I definitely think people should read it. It's really fun to read something that's so Ashby: Hmm. Coco: politically relevant, culturally relevant, and such a page turner at the same time. Like that's fantastic. ⁓ And at the same time, I'm like, I fucking love diabolical lies. I'm like, ladies, keep cooking. You guys are incredible. Like we need you. You're doing something really essential. Spending time with you is so fun and you're so smart. And I'm just so grateful. So I'm just like, the book is great. Subscribe, pay for the podcast. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ⁓ yes, definitely. what they do, I hit this one I said, what they do is like, they beat me to it. Like that was like, that is the ideal podcast like setup that I wanted. And as soon as I found out how they like donate so much of their subscriptions to socialist causes, I was just like, that's perfection. That's what I'm looking for is like ethical ways to still scratch like intellectual grad school itch at the same time. And they're, yeah. Coco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And they go so hard. And I honestly love Carow out there on this huge media tour. Just being like, like definitely like, yeah. And like my cohost really wants to fuck Hassan Piker. It's so good. Ashby: Yes. Fuck ice. Like, yeah, I love that. Mm-hmm. She's so fun. She's so great. Yeah, really recommend. But this is exactly what I mean, is like, that is the opposite of grifting, is when you build something that you care about and you like bring a lot of like, you you bring both your values, but also like respected research and hard work into it. And then you don't use it as a way to just Coco: No. ⁓ my God, yeah. Ashby: be super extreme and then take advantage of your followers. They use it as a way to actually build community across people and push on a movement. So that's what I really admire is that they're not the grifters of the left. It's that, yeah. Coco: No, and we even talked about like in our Women's History Month episode, we're talking about kind of this concept of like being radical politically. ⁓ And like I think Caro is someone who has said, I really admire Sally Rooney because Sally Rooney Just like ⁓ really not. Ashby: Mm-hmm. Coco: compromising on the politics and I think that the Cairo is not a person who's going to do that. Like that's just, you know, she has all of this like opportunity right in front of her. And I'm just like, ⁓ hats off, salute, I fricking love you, bitch. ⁓ Ashby: No, totally. I totally agree. So on that note, I cannot wait for the movie to come out and ⁓ everyone should buy yesteryear. I bought it for us on pre-order from Bookshop, not from Amazon. So, woo woo, woo. Walk in the walk. Coco: Mm-hmm. Woo woo! All right, come, we made some references, we've got some recommendations. Go to syllabuspod.substack.com. Ashby: Okay, see you next time.