Latest / Rachel Oates / The Dark Side of TradWife Influencers | Yesteryear Review

Transcript

The Dark Side of TradWife Influencers | Yesteryear Review · Rachel Oates

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Hey everyone, and welcome back to my channel.
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So a topic that I've covered quite a lot over the years is
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that of trad wives, you know, women who want to be perfect
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little stay at home housewives focusing on cooking, cleaning
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and raising the children. They want to be in the kitchen,
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barefoot and pregnant while their husband provides for
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everything financially. He's the hunter gatherer and.
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Leather Dare. They say that that is a woman's
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place, her only place, and she should be submitting to her
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husband and his every whim. These are the women who think
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feminism has ruined everything and made life harder for
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everyone, especially women. They completely ignore the fact
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that they wouldn't even be able to choose to have that lifestyle
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today if not for feminism. OK so I'm here to make a
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clarification video because of the big controversy going around
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about the term trad wife and the intent behind the term as well
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as the intent behind my channel and what I post.
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If you are not familiar with the term tradwife, it is a woman who
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chooses to live a more traditional life with ultra
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traditional gender roles. So the man goes outside the
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house, works, provides for the family, the woman stays home and
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she's the homemaker. She takes care of the home and
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the children, if there are any. I want a man who leads.
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I want a man who's a provider and will protect me.
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I'm not going to listen to him. Do you see how crazy you sound
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right now? If you want that, you better be
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willing to and listen that you cannot do this for every man,
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but once you find the right one, you'll be able to trust and
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follow him blindly him lead. And yes, I realise you can lead
1:32
yourself, but when you find a man that you're willing to let
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lead you. Number one rule as a tried wife,
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this is your duty as a wife. A man's home is his castle, so
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he should be treated as a king. He's working a stressful job,
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maybe working long hours just so he can provide for you and the
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family, so he rightfully deserves peace.
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That being said, it's every wife's duty to appreciate Herman
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and all his hard work. Show him how much you truly
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appreciate him. OK?
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He is your king and you are his queen.
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That is your beauty. We're tried wives.
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We believe in gender roles in our marriage.
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We're tried wives. We believe a clean home is a
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happy home. We're tried wives Always obey
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our husbands. We're tried wives We choose to
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stay home and support our husbands.
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Proud wives, We always have dinner ready when our husbands
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get off work. Tried wives, we always satisfy
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our husband's needs. Crowd wives, we want to be
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caught dead in a bar or club without our husbands.
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Crowd Wives, we always respect and appreciate our husbands for
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their hard work. So what would happen to a modern
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day TikTok posting right wing grifting #trad wife if she was
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really transported back to a time when women had no rights,
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no freedom, and no choice? That and so much more is
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explored in Carol Claire Burke's new novel, Yesteryear, which
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looks at a #trad wife influencer and what the effect is on her
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spouse and her children and what the lifestyle is really like
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behind the camera. I have been so excited to read
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this book since I first heard about it, and it did not
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disappoint. I gave it a proper five stars
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and today we're going to be doing a deep dive into it like I
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do with a lot of my book reviews.
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We're going to be going, you know, step by step, line by
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line. But there's also so much in this
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book that I didn't even have time to talk about in this
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video. So it's one that I really
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recommend you go out and read for yourself.
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That said, what we are going to be talking about, there are a
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lot of spoilers ahead, so please be warned.
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Our book opens with Part 1, The Past.
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Our main character, Natalie Helen Mills, wakes up in her
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cosy farmhouse in Idaho just before 6:00 AM.
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Her radiator is pumping out heat, making her toasty and
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warm. She's gloating about her perfect
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life, how she's never struggled with anything because she's
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disciplined and sober. She tells us about her husband.
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My husband was not disciplined before he met me.
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He was the youngest of five boys, the run of the litter in
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an American dynasty. His father was the latest
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senator in a long line of US senators currently barreling
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through a presidential bid. Third times the charm.
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His mother was a homemaker who'd spent most of her life drowning
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in Chardonnay. Together, through a near fatal
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combination of parental neglect and maternal sympathy, they had
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raised Caleb to be so soft and spoiled and sweet.
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But the only thing more valuable than a person with God-given
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traits is a person who's willing to learn.
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And my husband, that man, had been willing to learn.
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Meanwhile, she describes herself as a flawless Christian woman,
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the manic Pixie American Dream girl of this nation's deepest,
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darkest fantasies, the mother every woman wanted to be, and
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the wife every man wanted to come home to like a nun in a
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porno. It didn't make sense, but also
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by God, it worked. They live on a farm with the
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dairy cow, chickens almost ready to be slaughtered, her husband,
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five children, and a 6th on the way.
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Natalie makes her own bone broth from scratch and lives a perfect
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little triad wife life that she posts about regularly online.
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However, what her audience don't see is all the help she gets
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behind the scenes. Nanny Louise, a godsend for our
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family, was at the stove making pancakes.
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Producer Shannon, my right arm, was by the kitchen sink getting
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the video equipment prepared for a long day of work.
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Stetson and Samuel, my darling young men, were sitting at the
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table shoving and pulling one another in equally groggy
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measure. Clementine, my eldest, the girl
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who made me a mother, was at the head of the table, ignoring her
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brothers and reading a book. Nanny Amy, our second in
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command, was moving through the far corners of the house, waking
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up the littles, kissing sleepy eyelids, tugging MY2 toddlers
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gently forward into the day. She would bring one to the
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table, hand her over to Nanny Louise and go back to get the
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other. I closed my eyes and whispered
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my daily thanks to the Lord for everything He provided me.
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My hand moved instinctively to my stomach, resting at the
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height of the curve. I was 32 years old, six months
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pregnant with our sixth child. It had been the easiest
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pregnancy to date, though all my pregnancies, relatively
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speaking, have been smooth. I was born to be a mother.
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I never felt more connected with him than when I was tasked with
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carrying one of his creations. So this immediately was giving
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me Carissa Collins vibes, although Carissa didn't have
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easy pregnancies at all. But this idea of, you know,
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being made to be a mother, having so many babies,
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constantly popping them out one after the other, very Carissa
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Collins, Natalie internal narration.
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Praise to God. Thank you for watching over the
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farm animals, Lord. And thank you for helping us
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pass 5 million on Instagram this week.
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We're only a few souls away from 1,000,000 on YouTube.
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Lord, it's through your will and your will alone that I've
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reached so many hearts and minds.
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It's in your name that I work to spread your truth.
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This is such an accurate portrayal of Christian
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influences, isn't it? They're they're so happy to sit
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there and say that you know when people are murdered, it's all
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part of God's plan lingo. You go to plan.
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We were. And it's also somehow his plan
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for you to get to X million followers on social media.
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Like like, if a God really did exist, do you really think he'd
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be letting kids starve on the streets and like letting people
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be murdered, letting genocides happen, letting people's basic
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human rights be taken away? But also sitting there going
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like, Oh well, you know what? I'll help you get to this many
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followers on Instagram like crazy.
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It's just weird priorities, isn't it?
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I also love this part here because it's so damn accurate.
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What we had now in terms of help was more than enough for the
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time being. It allowed me to be present with
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both my children and my followers in all the ways I
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wanted to be at all the different points throughout the
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day. That's the thing about being a
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mother and a wife and an influencer all at the same time.
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It's basically like breastfeeding 3 babies
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simultaneously. Like seducing 3 lovers at once.
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And this really reminded me of when Candice Owens was going on
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and on about how being a mother is the most important thing a
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woman can do. I think it was on a debate on
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Jubilee. And she was like, yeah, you
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know, being a mother's best thing you can do, it's the only
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thing women should do, blah, blah, blah.
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And then the person she was debating was like, wait, but
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like, aren't you a mother? So why are you here?
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Why aren't you with your kids now?
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And she was like, yeah, well, influences like this, like the
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Candice Owens in the world and like Natalie in this book, they
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make money off telling women that the only thing they can and
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should be doing is being a mother and a wife.
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And if you choose anything else over that path, you are wrong
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and you're sinning and you'll be miserable.
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And yet they regularly choose their job and their career and
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influencing and going to these debates or making content
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online, they regularly choose that over their family or at the
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same time as their family. And it's just incredibly
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hypocritical. It's like when we see Natalie
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say that being a mother, wife and influencer, it's like having
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three babies or three lovers. She's clearly putting all three
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things on the same level of importance.
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You know, she considers her career as important as being a
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mother or, as we'll find out later, more important, you know,
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as important as being a wife or more important than being a
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wife. She'll never admit to this
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online because she's only making money by saying that she's a
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wife and mother first, and she only gets influenced by telling
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other women that that's what they should be doing.
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But what she tells of us to do and what she does herself is not
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the same thing. There's a lot of hypocrisy
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there. We do see all the time there
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with so many of these women online.
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Just Pearly Things does it constantly.
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And Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, classically Abby, you know, they
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all, they all do the same thing. Natalie goes on to say I rarely
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paid attention to the differences in the children.
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Both the girls and the boys spoke similarly, laughed
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similarly. Their clothing was a rainbow of
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neutrals, the same pile of olive and tan and Oka have been
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tumbling down our growing family tree for over a decade.
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Again, sorry to keep your own comparisons to real life, but
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this is something I found myself doing throughout the whole book.
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And so you'll you'll keep seeing it.
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But again, this reminded me a hell of a lot of Carissa
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Collins. It's like when Carissa posts
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like a birthday post for one of her kids and she tries to list
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out the things you know, she loves about that kid.
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Like Angel's so great because this and this is so great
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because this. I think they all have a names.
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I can't actually remember them, but I think they're things like
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that. And she's like, you know, this
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boy likes basketball like his dad.
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This girl wants to be a mummy when she grows up.
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This child is really funny. And they're all all really
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generic things. You can tell she doesn't quite
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know the distinct personalities of her kids, but she's still
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trying to make it appear like she does, you know?
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Natalie goes on to describe how the facade she posts online
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isn't all that real, but she claims she's only doing it for
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her children's own good. She says people refuse to
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believe my babies were as amenable as they appeared
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online. There's no way this is their
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actual life. The angry woman, the angry women
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would write. That's what Caleb and I called
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them, the angry women. To which I would reply
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absolutely nothing. Of course.
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A mother's main task is to protect her children from the
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world. There was no need for some
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hateful witch in Manhattan to see how physical Samuel got with
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his brother and even his sisters sometimes.
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No need from the witness Stetson's daily tantrum over
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arithmetic. I love that boy, but he had not
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been gifted with a standard helping of brains.
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If the angry women found out about any of my children's
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failings, they'd go crazy with blood first.
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They'd also be devastated. This is super interesting
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because labelling people online who question or criticise them
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as the angry women again feels very akin to Carissa Collins and
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also Morgan of Paul and Morgan. You can tell that this author,
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like seriously seriously, did her research.
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And it's interesting because I've been on like a real writing
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kick this week. So apologies for my appearance.
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I know I'm very scruffy right now.
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My hair needs dying. I'm in a bit of a state, but I,
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I've been writing and writing this week, in the last four
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days, I've written 5 video scripts, something like 130
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pages of script have been written.
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So I'm, I'm a little exhausted and I've literally just finished
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a script before this one. And it was about Morgan and her
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friend Carl, their third episode of their podcast.
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And so I've written a script about that.
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And the entire first half of the podcast is them complaining
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about people hating Paul and Morgan online and how awful the
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comments are. And there's a lot of and being
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like, well, I just don't care. I don't listen to them anymore.
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Meanwhile, like she's actively in the comments section arguing
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with people and like making video responses to these people.
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It's a lot. Anyway, my point is you can tell
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that Cara, the author, like she really did her research on this
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community. There's clearly a lot of
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influence taken from fundy influencers.
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And you know, you can point out this and be like, Oh my God,
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this is entirely Ruby Frankie. This is definitely Christa
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Collins. This is Morgan saying this is
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and you, she knows how these real women act in the real
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world, and she's brought all of these real people together to
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influence this fictional character.
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And yeah, it's just, it's very well researched, very well done,
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and I really enjoyed it. Some people are like, oh, you
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know, this is just anti right wing propaganda.
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That's a that's a review that I saw.
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Other people are like, oh, you know, this is too far for satire
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because people would never do this or this.
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I'm like, but they do. They really do do this.
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This really is what these people are like.
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And when you spend enough time watching these communities and
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listening to them, you see these things.
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And the fact that she's done that and captured it so well in
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this book is really, really commendable, you know?
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Anyway, sorry, little tangent there off script.
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So as the family go back their breakfast routine and that is
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the nannies look after the kids, the producer gets ready for the
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day of work and Natalie just watches over everyone.
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We find out that producer Shannon has been having
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nightmares for quite a while. And Natalie says there a message
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from God because, well, Shannon had misbehaved.
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We actually found out later what these nightmares are from and Oh
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my God, is it bad. Like blaming this on God and
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Shannon misbehaving is just major victim blaming here.
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It you know, it's interesting once I'd like read through the
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book and like going back over again.
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You see so many different little things in there.
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It's umm, it's definitely a book that's worth a second read.
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It's great. Other than this, there is a lot
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of trad wife talk and fundy talk and like the commodification of
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children and lots of talk of training the kids, which
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reminded me a lot of Michael and Debbie Pearl and their horrific
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book to train up a child, which I've covered quite a lot on this
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channel. I covered it years back, like
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when I first started my channel. It was my first video to get
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like 1,000,000 views and it's it's a really horrific book.
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And then a few years back I kind of did a well wear of the pills
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now and didn't update on a few bits of their content, including
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that book and some other books they put out and what they were
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doing today. So if you're interested, I'll
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leave them linked down in the video description as like, you
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know, further watching. But yeah, this talk of training
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children, definitely a pearls thing, Natalie says.
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It was a particularly special gift from our creator that we've
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been blessed with three girls in a row.
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All children were gifts from God, of course, but groups of
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girls, little jewellery sets of two and three, that was
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something else altogether. A girl was lovely, a boy was
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nice. But girls, plural, were rainbows
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and fluff personified radiant balls of delight.
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Such community oriented creatures.
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With the addition of each new little lady to their little lady
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tribe, they all seem to grow a little taller, glow a little
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brighter. They carried each other like
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dolls. They braided each other's hair.
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They picked and preened and poked at one another with
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motherly obsession. So you've also got the
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parentification of children there, you know, thinking
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they're all mothering each other.
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The boys would keep us fed when we were old and feeble.
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Like, you know what? Again, coming back to it and
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knowing what we know at the end. That is a very good bit of
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foreshadowing, I'll say. The boys would keep us fed when
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we were old and feeble, I like to say.
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But the girls, they would dance around our wheelchairs, toss
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rose petals over our graves. Plus, I'll admit it, they were
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easier to train. The boys occasionally resisted
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or got frustrated or bored, but not the girls.
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They could perform on film for hours without complaint, just
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like their Mama. Yeah.
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OK, editingly jumping in. I'm hoping there's not too much
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background noise in the minute, but one of the things I found
15:37
really interesting here is while watching this back in editing.
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I just want to add in, I've mentioned how like when all the
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kids have the Old Street personalities and we don't
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really see any character development for any of them
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except a little bit of Clementine, the eldest, and in a
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later part of the book another eldest child called Mary and a
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youngest one called Maeve. Other than that, none of the
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four boys we've seen this book have any distinct personality.
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The 2 little girls here don't have any distinct personality.
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And then any other book I would probably be critiquing this to
16:06
be like poor writing because why include these characters that
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you're not going to develop? But in this I really have to
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praise it because that is the point in this book.
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This mother has so many kids, it's almost like she doesn't
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know what to do with them. She's collecting them and they
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come putting them on a shelf. It's kind of like over
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consumption but with kids. Of course, she doesn't really
16:20
know their distinct personalities and who they are
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as individuals because she doesn't care.
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She just thinks she needs more kids for her Instagram post,
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small kids to show people that that's the godly thing to do.
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It's like these people who sit down on camera opening 203040
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boxes of blue Boo boos or whatever the cool thing is these
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days and those dumpling things, I don't know.
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And whatever. It's like the people who just
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keep opening them and opening them and opening them because
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they want more and more and more.
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And they don't really necessarily go back and play
16:46
with these individual things or care about each one as an
16:49
individual. They care about the total amount
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they have and how it looks. So in this case, since we don't
16:55
have any character development for them, I think that is in
16:57
itself character development for Natalie.
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And I just think it's really well done when.
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Natalie's eldest daughter, Clementine, who's 12, asks her
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mom what a trad wife is. She replies I opted for casual
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ambivalence. The worst thing you can ever do
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is let a child know that you care.
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I know that trad is short for traditional.
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Some people call women like me a traditional wife, for obvious
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reasons. By some people, I meant the
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angry women. The angry women were the ones
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who called me a trad wife, who said trad like it was short for
17:24
something evil. Like traditional wasn't a fine
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word in any same person's universe.
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But these women were not saying, nor were they happy, nor were
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they big believers in personal accountability.
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Instead of asking themselves why they spent so much of their
17:36
precious time on earth scrolling through other people's lives
17:39
when they could be making their own home cooked meals or even
17:41
offering eye contact to their own children.
17:44
Instead of asking themselves why they spent so much time bathing
17:47
in their own rancid jealousy when they could be building
17:49
their own lives into something they were proud of, they were
17:52
apparently far more interested in drinking a bottle of wine
17:54
each night and typing their little hearts out in online chat
17:57
rooms about me. I suppose I'm assuming these
17:59
women winos, but judging by the number of typos riddled
18:02
throughout each of their messages, I'd call it an
18:04
evidence based assumption. It's a lot.
18:07
There again feels very Morgan and we see her hypocrisy as well
18:13
because, and there's like a lot of projection from Natalie
18:15
throughout this book where she projects her own insecurities
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onto these other women. She goes on to talk about how
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she has 6 anonymous burner accounts to comment back to
18:23
these people, ignoring the irony that that makes her just as bad
18:27
as them in a lot of ways. She's also wasting her time
18:30
reading about the stuff online and commenting and arguing with
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them again, very much like Morgan.
18:35
It's weird. I, I remember like a few years
18:37
back, I got like a message from someone being like, oh, I think
18:40
I found like your Reddit account, but it's like really
18:43
obvious it's you. So I don't know why you're
18:45
hiding it. And I was like, I'm not hiding
18:47
my Reddit account. It's my name.
18:48
It's Rachel Oates. And they were like, no, no, no,
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this one, I'm like, that's not me.
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And I don't know what the username was now, but I was just
18:53
like, that's, that's not me. And so I think it's weird that,
18:58
like, a lot of people think that having like, these private
19:00
burner accounts, it's like normal.
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But at the same time, I'm like, I can barely keep track of
19:05
posting. Like my actual content, Like,
19:08
that takes a lot of energy. I don't have the energy to sit
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there and, like, anonymously pretend to be someone else.
19:13
But anyway, Cairo, the author, has definitely captured the
19:16
fundy hypocrisy perfectly. Natalie goes on to narrate,
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Before these women called me a trad wife, they'd called me a
19:22
religious zealot or zealot and a cult leader, a breeder.
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Compared to those names, tradwife seemed mild.
19:29
I don't personally think celebrating tradition is bad.
19:31
I said do you? The two little shook their
19:33
heads. No Mamma, We love you Mamma.
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But Clementine just stared at me.
19:38
So you're saying you are one? I felt suddenly like I was being
19:41
deposed for a lawsuit. Clementine, why don't you just
19:44
tell me who told you I was a trad wife?
19:46
No one, Clementine said in a flash.
19:48
She was bored. I was just asking a question,
19:51
jeez. So Natalie thinks that she must
19:53
have seen something on one of the nanny's phones, and she
19:56
tells us that as coming times get older, she's almost a woman
19:59
now and so cannot be trusted. So the day goes by with filming
20:03
content including multiple takes of natural moments, and there's
20:08
a revelation that her husband Caleb's life online is just as
20:12
fake as hers. So sure, they have a farm, but
20:15
he only does the easy jobs that he enjoys.
20:17
Everything difficult is taken care of by hired farmhands.
20:21
We find out later that a lot of these farm hands are Mexican
20:23
immigrants and there's quite a bit of racism towards them.
20:26
So just to warn you that we'll be coming up later, the whole
20:30
first part of this book is also interspersed with Natalie sort
20:34
of giving an interview or answering questions.
20:36
At the time, I didn't know if these were like maybe for a
20:38
magazine interview or on video interview or something like
20:41
that. But they definitely like QA,
20:42
like there's a question and an answer and that sort of thing.
20:45
We do find out later what these are, so I'm not going to spoil
20:47
it because it's not until the end of the book, but just know
20:50
that they're here. And at one point, Nathalie says
20:53
that the nanny she employs are like family.
20:56
And the anonymous interviewer pulls her up on this and says,
20:59
did you just say your nannies are like family?
21:01
Silence. I'm sure you understand that
21:03
there's a long and controversial history of white women calling
21:06
people who worked for them family.
21:08
Longer pause. Soft, knowing smile.
21:11
No, that's not right. Soft, unknowing smile.
21:15
Better next question, please. So maybe it's sorry I'm playing
21:19
with lip gloss while I'm doing this.
21:21
But yeah, maybe it's my Englishness or my working class
21:24
background showing here, but I wasn't actually aware of this
21:26
being any kind of issue when I first read the book.
21:28
And but it turns out, yeah, it is heavily tied to racism and
21:31
class divides and power imbalances.
21:34
So I did some research on this and it's kind of a horrifying
21:37
history behind it, but it goes all the way back to slavery and
21:39
it's usually about the people in control trying to blur
21:42
boundaries and get extra unpaid labour, especially emotional
21:46
labour out of either employees these days, but originally
21:49
slaves. So yeah, saying the people who
21:51
work for you alike family has like this horrible racist
21:54
classes background and it's pretty disgusting.
21:57
So that was another thing that I really liked about this book
21:59
because even though this world of fundies is something that I'm
22:01
very familiar with and have obviously made a lot of content
22:04
on in the last few years, I still felt like it was opening
22:07
my eyes to certain aspects that I wasn't like I didn't know
22:10
about, I wasn't yet educated on. And so it's really helped me
22:12
understand these other things. And I I really like that.
22:15
I always love learning something when I read a book, you know,
22:18
and The thing is there are absolutely ties between the
22:20
tribe wife lifestyle and white supremacy.
22:22
So I think it's really good of Caro, the author to show this in
22:27
so many subtle ways in the book and also in so many not so
22:30
subtle ways. She just lays it right out.
22:32
And like I say, I enjoy that I learnt something here.
22:34
So brilliant. And I really, I really do have a
22:37
lot of praise for this book. I think it's great.
22:39
There are a couple of little criticisms I have about it here
22:41
and there. I'll talk about those at the
22:42
end. Just things I kind of wish she'd
22:44
done a bit more of and stuff like that.
22:46
But we'll, we'll get there. Don't worry.
22:47
On the whole, really love this book.
22:49
So this is followed by Natalie taking her girls with her on one
22:53
of her monthly visits to Target, where she bumps into an old
22:56
school friend who she clearly hates.
22:58
I paused, looked around, pretended to be confused, when
23:01
really I was thinking oh Jesus Christ, not you Vanessa.
23:05
The friend apparently grew up in a bit of a fundy family herself,
23:07
and she had a lot of trauma from that, but she managed to get out
23:10
of it. Natalie judges her for this.
23:12
Vanessa had grown up in a strict, devout family.
23:14
Much stricter, more devout than my own.
23:16
But she'd since emancipated herself from her parents and now
23:19
like to write long winded diatribes about her terrible
23:21
upbringing via Facebook statuses that garnered on average, three
23:25
to five likes a pop. Vanessa wanted the world to know
23:27
she was modern. Now she changed.
23:30
The irony of Natalie doing the exact same thing but on the
23:33
other side is not lost on me. You know, just because she's got
23:36
a bigger following now, that's not how she started out.
23:39
She's did still start out with like, you know, not many people
23:42
following it. She's doing the same thing, you
23:44
know, two sides of the same coin.
23:46
That's what I'm trying to say. self-proclaimed progressive
23:48
women like Vanessa were chemically addicted to hating
23:51
women like me. I knew that I knew this woman.
23:54
I knew this woman got embarrassingly drunk at family
23:56
parties and pulled up my Instagram page showing anyone
23:58
stupid enough to walk past that. She knew this woman personally.
24:01
She knew her in high school before launching into some
24:04
recycled slur of a speech about how all traditional people are
24:07
idiots, all religious people are idiots, all people who choose a
24:10
different lifestyle to hers are idiots, idiots, idiots.
24:13
When what she really wanted to say was I'm so nauseatingly
24:15
jealous of this woman I used to know that I think it might
24:17
actually kill me. Again.
24:20
The irony, the projection, it Oh, it's perfect.
24:23
Women like Vanessa with their expensive latex foreheads and
24:26
their I'm with her bumper stickers.
24:28
They didn't know what they wanted.
24:30
They couldn't possess a truly principled stance even if
24:33
someone injected it straight into their faces.
24:35
Lord knows they couldn't take responsibility for their own
24:37
lives. So they blame their unhappiness
24:39
on me, the dumb, ignorant, backward thinking trap wife.
24:42
Never mind the fact that I graduated in the top three of my
24:44
high school. Never mind I got straight A's at
24:47
Harvard studying global Religious history while while
24:50
Vanessa ping ponged her way through the rooms of the club
24:52
rugby house at Michigan. Yes, I'll admit I checked in on
24:55
her Instagram from time to time too.
24:57
See what I mean? The hypocrisy here is so damn
25:00
accurate. I was only 6% of the way into
25:03
the book here and I already knew I loved it.
25:05
Natalie then rants and rants before calling Vanessa the C
25:08
word in her head and saying F her and then apologising to God.
25:13
Not to Vanessa, who she silently offended, but to God.
25:16
Because apparently it's worse to like, swear in front of God than
25:20
to insult someone who. Used to be a.
25:22
Friend really shows what Natalie's priorities are,
25:25
doesn't it? And she cares about appearing to
25:27
be a good person, not actually wanting to be a good person and
25:31
be good to others. Natalie stresses that Vanessa is
25:34
going to out her online as having been in Target, so she
25:38
decides to post an online video about it first, asking the kids
25:41
what they got on their very special trip to Target.
25:44
This again feels very Ruby Frankie getting the kids to
25:46
perform on camera, like, you know, just at will and Ruby
25:51
Frank kind of Ruby Frankie before she joined Connections
25:54
though. And all the child abuse came out
25:56
when she was still just like a family vlogging channel.
25:59
That's what this bit reminds me of.
26:01
However, when she points the camera at her eldest daughter,
26:03
Clementine, Clementine tells her to stop filming me.
26:07
I froze. My face flooded with heat.
26:09
She'd never done that before, not once.
26:12
And this absolutely throws her. She doesn't know what to do.
26:14
She's never had a kid talk back to her like this before.
26:17
Later in the interview segments, Natalie refuses to answer a
26:19
question about children's ability to consent being posted
26:22
online. And then we get a time jump to
26:25
later that night, Natalie gets an e-mail from the producer,
26:28
Shannon, saying that she's quitting her job.
26:30
And Natalie, I'm writing to let you know that I won't be working
26:32
for you any longer. Between what happened over the
26:34
summer and all the nightmares, it's clear that this job isn't
26:37
good for my mental health any longer.
26:39
I've got a bus ticket for later tonight.
26:40
I don't need a ride. Nanny Amy is going to drive me
26:43
to the station. For what it's worth, I don't
26:45
think you're a bad person. I just think you're confused.
26:48
Please tell the kids I love them, Shannon.
26:50
PS I'm sorry for screwing up your content calendar.
26:53
So I was like, Oh my God, a mystery.
26:54
What happened in the summer? Why is she acting so weird?
26:56
Mystery. Intrigue.
26:58
I'm here for it. Turns out what happened.
27:00
Pretty horrific. And the fact she stuck it out
27:02
this long. Credit to her Natalie's
27:06
response. How dare she.
27:08
I suppose it was the tone of the e-mail that got under my skin.
27:10
More than the e-mail, More than the e-mail itself.
27:13
Such faux maturity, dripping with unearned consention.
27:16
Exactly the type of letter you would expect from a 21 year old.
27:19
Exactly the kind of letter I would have expected from Shannon
27:22
in particular. That lost little lamb, that
27:24
stupid little bitch. Sorry Lord, sorry sorry sorry.
27:28
Natalie is so damn awful, but she is spot on as a trad wife,
27:32
which is why I'm a little bit obsessed with this book.
27:34
It's funny that a lot of people seem to think I'll automatically
27:37
hate a book if it has an unlikable main character or
27:40
narrator, but for me it's only if like the author's intention
27:44
comes into play. Like if the author's trying to
27:46
tell me that this awful person is a good person or that like
27:49
they're the romantic sexy lead when they're like a rapist or
27:52
something, I'm like, no, no, I can't get into that.
27:54
I can't get behind that. That's ridiculous.
27:56
Stop trying to convince me that this terrible person is
27:58
something I should root for. But if the author goes into it
28:02
writing a bad person and we know they're a bad person, we know
28:05
the author thinks they're a bad person, but they just want to
28:08
write this complex character with like some good points and a
28:10
lot of bad points, whatever, and show that nuance.
28:13
I'm here for it. You know, John Falls as the
28:15
collector does it really well. This book does it really well.
28:18
I'm all for that. Like it's very clear that Carol
28:20
here is critiquing tribe wives and online influencers and
28:23
family vloggers. She's not trying to portray them
28:26
as like the best thing ever and make them super sympathetic
28:28
while they're doing horrible stuff.
28:30
So for that reason, I enjoy this book and I I like having this
28:33
complex start, but not protagonist, but main character.
28:37
You know, as Natalie is processing the information about
28:41
Shannon quitting, her husband, Caleb tells her that his dad, so
28:44
her father-in-law thinks it's about time that he run for
28:47
office. And we get a little bit of
28:48
background on Natalie's father-in-law too.
28:51
His name is Doug and he plays a big role in this book.
28:55
I would say he's kind of like a Donald Trump type figure in this
28:59
world. Caleb's father wasn't just a
29:01
senator. He was a bona fide political
29:02
icon. He'd been in office for four
29:04
decades, running uncontested every six years.
29:07
OK. That's not the bit.
29:08
That's like Donald Trump. Like you'll you'll see it.
29:10
Like what I mean by Donald Trump is like the money and the
29:13
political views anyway. And he was a war.
29:16
Yeah. A war veteran.
29:17
That's not Donald Trump. And he was a war veteran, a
29:20
family values traditionalist, the kind of guy most people
29:22
described was an abject sincerity as a real life John
29:25
Wayne. They went wrong.
29:27
Doug Mills was broad shouldered and confident, the ultimate
29:30
patriarch. Yeah.
29:32
See, now, I mean, this is not Donald Trump.
29:34
He's, he's very like typical Republican politician in these
29:39
parts. But there's other parts where he
29:41
just tries to like, buy everyone off with money.
29:43
That's what I mean by the Donald Trump type stuff anyway.
29:47
And nearly every comment he made to another man was accompanied
29:49
by a hearty clap on the shoulder.
29:51
He was, if polling was even remotely accurate, about to
29:54
become the next president of the United States.
29:56
He was also my closest ally, what my father-in-law and I both
29:59
knew there was no otherwise. There was only this plan, a very
30:03
delicate one, in which two variables, my producer, my
30:06
husband, were taken care of in one fell swoop.
30:10
And then, Oh my God, we get this revelation.
30:12
I would just like to pause here and say another woman would have
30:15
cracked years ago. I don't think you're a bad
30:17
person. A bold thing to say to the wife
30:20
of the man you've been effing. That was the word I was looking
30:23
for. Bold.
30:24
The whole e-mail was so hair raisingly bold that it might
30:27
have caused another lesser woman to have a complete nervous
30:30
breakdown to throw her phone across the room to hiss at her.
30:33
Stupid, useless, can't keep his penis in his pants.
30:36
Husband, look what you've done, not me.
30:40
As I stared at my philander moron of her husband, I gave
30:43
myself a mental pattern back. For all the work I've done over
30:45
the years to harden myself against the world, we were
30:48
facing down the barrel of our first PR disaster.
30:51
I could already see the headlines, allegations, royal
30:53
instafamous family jumping in because apparently I
30:55
mispronounced this entire line because I was trying to tell it
30:57
without my glasses on. Even worse, it's Natalie Heller
31:00
Mills, a cult leader, former producer, speaks out.
31:03
So now I was getting like salmon near vibes from this more Ruby
31:06
Frankie vibes. Yeah, absolutely wild.
31:09
I was so keen to see where this goes.
31:10
Part 1 ends with Natalie wishing to herself that her husband
31:13
wasn't so spineless and complaining to herself that he's
31:16
not naturally masculine enough for her.
31:19
Part 2 is titled the Present and in this we get 60 odd chapters.
31:23
I think it is. So this is the main chunk of the
31:25
book and some people said they found the timeline of this book
31:28
confusing. But really it's alternating
31:32
between a kind of present day or like a present day in Natalie's
31:37
life where she wakes up in this 1800s esque farmhouse and then
31:41
flashbacks to her life from like being a kid, living with her
31:45
parents and her younger sister to go to college, to her life
31:49
and becoming an influencer. So there's like the 1800s life
31:53
and the flashbacks to kind of present day ish, if that makes
31:57
sense. It will make sense as we go
31:59
through it. So in the 1st chapter, Natalie
32:01
wakes up to a freezing cold house, colder than she's ever
32:05
been in her life. Her bedding isn't her own.
32:07
Oh, she doesn't think so. Her alarm hasn't gone off and
32:10
she's panicking and confused. Her phone isn't there and her
32:13
first thought is that she's been abducted, but then she hears
32:17
children laughing. Her children.
32:19
She finds herself in a house which isn't her house.
32:22
It looks almost the same but with nothing modern.
32:25
She walks into a kitchen and she finds children, but not her
32:28
children. Four of them, 2 girls, 2 boys,
32:31
all wearing raggedy looking clothes that remind me of a
32:33
pioneer reenactment. The oldest, a dark eyed girl who
32:37
looks to be a teenager, her hair pinned and plaited.
32:40
She's like Clementine, but not Clementine.
32:43
She's also the only one who isn't looking directly at me.
32:46
She's braiding the little girl's head with perfect, unyielding
32:48
focus. All these children look like
32:50
they could be my children. None of them are my actual
32:53
children. But the kids are calling her
32:55
Mama and yet she's like, I've never seen them before, who the
32:57
hell are they? And like, this is proper horror
33:00
film stuff and I love it. So just as a reminder, so back
33:03
in like the real world, like the kind of present day ish when
33:07
she's like an influencer and she's dealing all those stuff,
33:09
she has five kids. She has Clementine, the oldest.
33:12
Then she's got Samuel and Stetson, two boys, and then
33:15
she's got Jessa and Juneburg. And then she's pregnant with
33:18
another baby in this like 1800s world.
33:20
So I'm going to be calling it. She's got, well we'll be
33:23
introducing, but she's got 4 kids.
33:25
The oldest is Mary. And then there's two boys called
33:28
Noah, and I think it's Abel. And then the youngest is Maeve.
33:33
So she finds markings on the kitchen door of, like, her
33:35
children's heights. And there's like little, what
33:38
seems like dates next to them. So it's like Maeve 1852 to 1854,
33:43
Noah 1853, Abel 1854, Mama 1855. No Mary on there.
33:49
Interestingly, though. So she heads outside and she
33:51
sees that where once there was her modern fancy barn and a
33:54
modern fancy chicken coop, they've been exchanged for old,
33:58
simple versions, which are a bit worse for wear.
34:00
You know, they're definitely falling apart.
34:02
This is the same landscape she's used to seeing, same mountings
34:05
in the distance, same everything, but everything looks
34:07
older and more worn, and it's also a lot simpler.
34:10
And then she sees her husband, and she says, this man's eyes
34:14
are not my husband's eyes. This man's eyes are black and
34:17
cold and dead. The more I look at him, the more
34:20
unfamiliar he becomes. He's Caleb, and then he's a
34:23
distant relative of Caleb's, and then he's a stranger, an older
34:26
man staring at me in the dead of night.
34:29
Distantly, I register how cold I am.
34:31
I look down at myself, taking the strange nightgown.
34:33
I'm wearing a floral cotton thing I've never seen before in
34:36
my life. He still calls himself Caleb,
34:38
but she thinks that he can't be him.
34:41
So she gets scared and she just runs.
34:43
She's like, I'm running off this farm, I'm going, I'm gone.
34:45
She runs and runs and runs as far as she can, as fast as she
34:48
can, because she does think at this point she has been
34:50
kidnapped. Even though things look the
34:52
same. She's like, I must have been
34:53
kidnapped. When Caleb catches up to her,
34:55
she spits and she swears at him and then the man wipes his face
34:59
with the back of his sleeve. Then he says a Good Wife doesn't
35:02
speak to her husband that way. He rears back and slaps me so
35:06
hard the whole world turns black.
35:09
So he's like a proper typical patriarch.
35:13
And in the kind of world we had before feminism where it was
35:16
okay for a man to hit a woman, where you know what the husband
35:20
said when wives couldn't speak back, you know, the next chapter
35:23
we had a little bit of not at least back story.
35:26
So this is what I mean about the timeline shifting back and
35:28
forth. So this is kind of like you get
35:30
these flashbacks when she was 10.
35:32
It turns out her father left her mother to be with another woman,
35:35
so her mother and the kids all moved away and pretended he was
35:38
dead. I'd be lying if I said I missed
35:39
him, but I did what my mother said because this was the world
35:42
I was born into, A world where good Christian women moonlighted
35:45
as crisis managers for their good Christian men.
35:48
The rules were laid out at church service and Sunday school
35:51
and over the dinner table each night.
35:52
The job of a woman was threefold.
35:54
Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean.
35:58
Oh, and don't forget to smile. When she got a scholarship to
36:02
study at university, her mother worried because in her opinion,
36:04
the world was a mess like the outside world, the real world.
36:09
Who would want to venture outward into the world when the
36:11
world so clearly had lost its way out?
36:14
In the coastal cities, nuclear families were an endangered
36:17
species. Children ran barefoot in the
36:19
streets while their fathers philandered in 3rd floor walk
36:22
ups and their mother smoked crack on the on the Stoops.
36:25
Some women didn't know they were women anymore.
36:27
Some men didn't know they were men.
36:29
The birth rate was plummeting. Humanity was self immolating.
36:33
The white race was going extinct.
36:35
So a lot of right wing talking points there.
36:38
A lot of white supremacy talk. I say right wing or white wing
36:41
there because I meant right wing but with a lot of white
36:44
supremacy undertones. That's what I'm trying to say.
36:46
Words. Words is hard.
36:49
And then with a reminder to be nice to everyone, Natalie leaves
36:53
her mother and her younger sister and gets on a plane to go
36:55
to university. This is interesting because
36:58
throughout the book Natalie is constantly being told by people
37:00
to be nice and she just never is.
37:02
She's not a nice person and that is really to her detriment.
37:06
Chapter 3 in this section talks about how Natalie and Caleb were
37:08
living in the 21st century and how Natalie wanted that 1800s
37:12
aesthetic but with all the modern day functionality.
37:15
So it was very much a facade, this travel life, lifestyle, you
37:20
know, she wanted to look like she was doing anything
37:21
traditionally, but really she had all the modern conveniences.
37:25
I wanted the dishwasher and the microwave and all the modern
37:27
kitchen appliances to be hidden from view.
37:29
I wanted a claw foot bathtub absolutely dripping in natural
37:32
light. I wanted wide plank floors that
37:34
felt like they've been ripped straight out of the Mayflower
37:36
herself. I wanted all the aesthetics of
37:39
the olden times and all the amenities of modernity.
37:42
And I wanted the seemingly irreconcilable set of desires to
37:45
be somehow reconciled via a series of impeccable design
37:50
decisions. It's quite hard to say back in
37:52
the past, which is such that the present, but, you know, the
37:54
1800s world. She wakes again in her odd bed
37:59
and her odd quilt and her eye socket is pulsing where Caleb or
38:02
Caleb hit her. Her whole body is sore and as
38:06
she begins to piece together where she is and learn about
38:09
these new children around her, she also realises, Oh my God,
38:12
I'm no longer pregnant. She was six months pregnant, the
38:15
last thing she remembered, and now suddenly, no baby, that's
38:18
gone again. This is the stuff of horror
38:20
stories. The only thing I think more
38:22
scary than going from being six months pregnant to not pregnant
38:26
overnight is to do it the other way round, you know?
38:30
She returns again to the kitchen, where the eldest child
38:33
in this world, Mary, a girl, is making soap.
38:36
And Natalie thinks back to how in her regular life, she'd often
38:39
do this for video tutorials, you know, to make money and just for
38:43
fun. Whereas in contrast, here, this
38:45
young girl is making it because she has to, because they need
38:47
soap, because there's no other way to get it, no other place to
38:50
get it. There's no other option.
38:52
There's a flashback chapter to her first start in college and
38:55
being peer pressured into trying alcohol for the first time,
38:58
hating the whole thing, really feeling out of place.
39:01
And there's also something else that happens around this time
39:03
that I'm not going to touch on now because I'm going to mention
39:05
it later when it's more relevant, but we'll come back to
39:08
it, don't worry. Chapter 5 is back to the 1800s
39:11
as I'm calling this period. And Natalie notices the
39:14
similarities between this kitchen and a one at home.
39:17
So same big sink, similar items in the cupboards like flower,
39:20
seeds, syrups. But there's big differences too.
39:23
In this kitchen, there's no hidden pantry containing a
39:25
massive refrigerator, 2 dishwashers, and a microwave.
39:28
There's no laundry room with a shelf of chemical free, scent
39:31
free, dye free detergents. No bathroom either.
39:34
Through the kitchen window I can see a small shed by the chicken
39:36
coop, undoubtedly an outhouse I am actively at this moment
39:40
ignoring the nerve cells screaming upwards at my brain
39:43
about how badly I'd like to use it.
39:45
The bedrooms are in the same locations, but instead of bunk
39:48
beds and Pottery Barn bureaus, the children's rooms have straw
39:51
mattresses and exposed wooden shelves, each of which holds a
39:55
few piles of ratty looking clothes.
39:57
So clearly the realities of this life, which she's been idolising
40:00
for so long, are starting to hit her.
40:02
She's like, oh, maybe this isn't as nice as I thought it was.
40:05
Chapter 6 is another college flashback, this time with a
40:08
little bit of racism sprinkled in from her mother.
40:10
Every Monday evening, my mother called the dormitory phone line
40:13
at 7 on the dot to ask me how the week had been, how my social
40:16
life was going. Had I met any French girls?
40:18
What about Irish ones? Were there any deep breath here?
40:22
Jewish or Muslim girls in the building, Did they pray in front
40:25
of me? Did they smell like me?
40:26
Obviously over different. So I see where Natalie is not so
40:30
subtle undertones of white supremacy and racism come from.
40:33
It's clearly been handed down from both her mother and also
40:36
her father-in-law, as we'll see later.
40:39
Natalie also goes on about being shocked by her fellow college
40:43
students and their silly little liberal ideologies.
40:46
The boys complained about power hegemonies and oversea military
40:49
interventions, waving their uncallous palms, even their
40:52
fingernails unnervingly clean. As for the girls, they
40:54
proclaimed their horror at the wage gap between the sexes.
40:57
No one was grateful. To be here.
40:59
As far as I could see, no one was grateful for anything at
41:02
all. They all planned to be wives and
41:04
mothers, yet they absolutely hated men and kids.
41:06
They talked about nuclear families the same way they
41:08
talked about nuclear bombs. It was a destructive, sexist,
41:12
militaristic, heteronormative force designed to ruin the
41:14
world. Literally.
41:16
They would add for emphasis at the end of every statement that
41:19
may they made. That could not possibly work in
41:22
any literal sense. Literally.
41:25
When they talked about stay at home mothers, specifically their
41:28
stay at home mothers, their eyes didn't go misty with gratitude.
41:31
Instead, they argued bravely that old school femininity was a
41:34
scourge. Any woman who chose to stay at
41:36
home instead of working in the world was complicit.
41:39
Any woman who identified as a homemaker was both a victim and
41:43
a perpetrator. Each night after two or three
41:45
hours of this kind of group discussion, the girls would say
41:47
goodnight and I would slowly put my nightgown on, feeling light
41:50
headed and a little bit sick. I felt like I was being
41:53
waterboarded to death by modernity.
41:55
And apparently, even when taking a gender studies class, Natalie
41:58
was getting into arguments with the lecturer, bringing up right
42:01
wing talking points. Well, yeah, but Natalie got into
42:04
this intense debate with the professor the other day about
42:06
biological differences. She had all these studies lined
42:09
up in her arsenal too. Like Bam women.
42:11
Women are physically weaker. Bam men aren't good at domestic
42:14
chores because their eyesight is designed for predatorial,
42:17
predatorial work. Sorry Bam, the female body is
42:20
designed to nurture. And what do you think of that?
42:23
The professor was so peed off. The girl said and laughed it.
42:28
It was honestly hilarious. I kind of love this portrayal
42:31
because I think this is how a lot of right wingers do see
42:33
colleges, not just in America, but all around the world.
42:36
They assume that they're all just like breeding grounds for
42:38
crazy left wing ideas to spread. And everyone who thinks those
42:41
things is just dumb and brainwashed by like liberal
42:44
propaganda rather than like, OK, well, these are educated people
42:48
who are forming their own views and these are conclusions they
42:50
come to. Maybe there's something in that.
42:51
You know, I did enjoy when her roommate Reena called her out,
42:55
though. And Reena is a recurring
42:56
character throughout this book. Not necessarily on the page, but
42:59
she's constantly referred back to and spoken about South.
43:01
Natalie got really judgy one night.
43:03
And in response, Reena said, you're mean, Natalie.
43:06
She was slurring a little bit, her tongue anaesthetized from
43:08
vodka. This conversation would have
43:10
never happened if she wasn't drunk.
43:11
You roll your eyes when we talk. You make little comments under
43:14
your breath. You think we don't notice, but
43:15
we do. And you're extra mean to me.
43:18
You ignore half the things I say to you, and I think it's because
43:21
you're jealous of me because I have friends and a boyfriend.
43:24
And I said at this point in my original script, like, I don't
43:26
think Natalie was jealous of them.
43:28
I think she was just judgy and narrow minded.
43:30
But I do think she was mean. And I can see why that was
43:33
called out. But honestly, as the book goes
43:35
on, I think Rena was right. I think Natalie was very, very
43:38
jealous of them. And she continued to be jealous
43:40
of them and she keeps being jealous of them right to the
43:42
end. Like really, really.
43:44
So I do think this is spot on. And in response, Natalie just
43:48
keeps thinking to herself about how sorry she feels for this.
43:50
These people, because they're obvious, because they obviously
43:54
don't believe in God like she does.
43:55
And so she's like, oh, I pity them, blah, blah, blah, she
43:58
says. My mother always encouraged me
44:00
to be a shining light for others, but I was certain that
44:02
no level of illumination would save these women from the horror
44:05
of themselves. If anything, they seemed to
44:07
revel in the pitch black aimlessness of their lives.
44:10
They were proud of it, happy to wander blindly forth into a
44:13
lifetime of selfishness. It was deeply disturbing.
44:16
Most disturbing of all was the fact that these lost, hateful
44:19
girls thought someone like me should inherently be jealous of
44:21
someone like them. No effing way.
44:24
Sorry, Lord. I'm not jealous of you, Rena, I
44:26
said. I closed my book on my finger to
44:29
keep the page. Then I looked at her.
44:31
If anything, I feel sorry for you because you're unintelligent
44:34
and you lack creativity. But most of all, I feel sorry
44:36
for you because a person like you will never know true wonder.
44:39
Not once in your life. Her mouth fell open.
44:42
You are such a bitch. Well.
44:44
I tapped my finger lightly on the golden embroidered cross on
44:46
the book cover. I don't concern myself with the
44:49
opinions of whores, you see what I mean?
44:52
It's just mean as hell. Absolutely horrible.
44:54
Like, I don't condone her roommate calling her a bitch
44:57
either. I should add that in.
44:59
But yeah, this is a lot of stuff I've seen from like, right wing
45:03
women in particular those who think that anyone living
45:05
differently to them must be unhappy and aimless and stupid
45:08
and a whore. Like, it is spot on.
45:10
It really is. And so again, I applaud this
45:13
book for being quite realistic. To be honest.
45:16
It's like pretty spot on. The scene ends with Rena the
45:19
roommate, punching Natalie, and Natalie uses that as an excuse
45:22
to get her own room on campus. After a few months, another
45:26
student from a Christian group reaches out to Natalie to try
45:28
and help her because she thinks that Natalie looks unwell.
45:31
She's been isolating herself a lot, but in response, Natalie
45:34
initially turns her down. Because it's just not really my
45:38
thing. I said.
45:39
This was, I thought, a much nicer thing to say than the
45:41
truth. The girls in your group are dumb
45:43
as rocks, and the idea of sharing spiritual communion with
45:45
them would probably feel like getting intellectually stoned to
45:47
death. See what I mean?
45:49
It's just mean, so mean. But when the girl tells her
45:53
that, you know, like she's quite honest, she's like, you do look
45:55
rough. I do think you need some help.
45:57
I'm concerned about you. Natalie ends up crying and she
46:00
ends up going to the church group anyway.
46:02
And she says, I sat with the dumb girls.
46:05
I suffered their little sniffling moans and sighs of
46:08
glory to God. And it was fine.
46:10
She's just awful. She's so awful.
46:13
And then she meets Caleb at one of these events and the chapter
46:15
ends back to the 1800s and she learns that the elder story was
46:20
called Mary, like I already told you.
46:21
But this is where she learns it. And she's shocked because Mary
46:24
is the name she was going to give to the child that she was
46:26
pregnant with before this whole time travel incident or whatever
46:30
it is. And once again, Natalie decides
46:33
to try and run away. Only this time she gets caught
46:35
by like an animal trap. I thought it was like a bear
46:37
trap, but it turns out it's a lot smaller.
46:39
It's like a like a ferret trap or a small mink trap.
46:43
You like like a little mini animal trap.
46:45
Traps her leg anyway, pretty damn bad.
46:47
Not enough to like break the bone, but it definitely slices
46:50
through the skin and it's pretty awful.
46:53
This ear is Caleb, who, like I say, is considerably older than
46:56
her Caleb. He gets called old Caleb.
46:58
That's how we differentiate. We have Caleb and old Caleb.
47:00
And then even though she's screaming for stitches and an
47:03
ambulance, she has to deal with, you know, 1800s medicine,
47:07
basically dodgy ointment from a jar and her daughter stitching
47:11
her up with what looks to be twine.
47:13
Pretty damn painful. I guess natural remedies aren't
47:16
always the best, are they? Chapter 8 cuts back to Natalie,
47:20
me and Caleb at college at the church group and we made eye
47:23
contact. Then I sat down and we didn't
47:26
look at each other again. The next meeting he asked for my
47:28
name. The meeting after that he asked
47:30
where I was from. The 4th meeting.
47:32
Did I want to get coffee sometime?
47:34
That's how slowly our relationship moved.
47:36
The beginning. Dating in my religion works that
47:38
way. It feels like you're rolling
47:39
very slowly down a long runway then, right?
47:42
So you think you're going to die for lack of momentum.
47:44
You find yourself lifting up, up, up, spinning wildly towards
47:47
the sun in a sudden aerial ascent.
47:50
Why does this feel like Bethany Beals right in this about
47:52
meeting Dave, you know? And he asks her what she wants
47:56
to do with her life. And she answers like she doesn't
47:58
know. So she just picks something else
48:00
in air. And she says, I paused.
48:03
Why did I want to go? I want a farm with chickens.
48:06
I'm going to live near my mother.
48:08
I want a view of the mountains from my bedroom window.
48:11
And I'd like to study theology. Part time, of course, and only
48:14
after the children were grown. That was pretty much exactly
48:16
what every good Christian girl back home claimed to want,
48:19
except for the theology bit. I added that part for myself.
48:22
Caleb says he wants that life too, but he doesn't know how to
48:24
get it. And then when he's like, maybe
48:26
you can teach me, she says teach.
48:28
So what did Caleb mean by teach? I never said I knew how to farm.
48:31
Yet here we were talking about living in the middle of nowhere,
48:34
teaching each other how to what? Rake dirt milk A cow?
48:37
Cut a chicken's head off the way?
48:39
Caleb was staring at me with that intense pained look on his
48:41
face. He clearly needed an answer.
48:43
But an answer to what? Relax, I told myself, This is
48:47
just a moment. It doesn't really matter.
48:49
Here is what did matter. He was young and handsome and
48:52
wealthy. Most important of all, he liked
48:55
me. He really liked me.
48:57
He said I was fascinating and funny and beautiful.
49:00
No one had ever thought I was any of those things.
49:02
On the third date, we discussed marriage.
49:06
So yeah, a lot there. And it's interesting because
49:09
like, she does clearly like him a bit and she is clearly
49:11
attracted to him to some level. And but also, yeah, the money is
49:16
pretty important to her too. That's like a pretty, pretty
49:19
high up there on the list again, Isn't it funny how she's happy
49:23
to like talk and complain about all the other girls at college
49:25
who, you know, calling them a shallow and not having any like
49:28
real values when she's here talking like this, just like
49:31
deciding she wants a man because he's rich.
49:34
While the hypocrisy, you know, when talking about her
49:37
engagement ring and showing it to her mother, Natalie, my
49:40
mother breathed. It's huge.
49:42
I know, I said, matching her tone.
49:44
I told Caleb it was way too big. She gave me a look for approval.
49:48
That was the way women operated in my community.
49:50
If you wanted to be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain
49:52
good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries
49:55
in order to maintain possession of them.
49:57
It's a strange tug and pull I'd bom witness to my entire life.
50:01
The only surprise was that it was finally happening to me.
50:04
I was becoming the kind of woman other women were jealous of.
50:07
Each time I looked at the ring, I felt an intoxicating
50:09
combination of embarrassment and Glee.
50:11
It was a rich, decadent piece of jewellery.
50:13
If I looked at it for too long, I start to feel sick.
50:16
It was too much. It was a shameful display of
50:18
wealth. I should give it back and demand
50:20
we find something smaller. And also, I'd launch a holy war
50:23
before I parted with it. As for Caleb, he insisted it was
50:26
a perfect diamond for a woman like me.
50:29
I was a flawless woman, he said. A timeless piece of decoration.
50:32
And so there we get that not only is naturally quite shallow,
50:36
but so is Caleb too. He's objectifying and
50:38
commodifying her as a woman. She's a timeless piece of
50:41
decoration. A lot of objectification there.
50:44
At this point, Natalie decides that she has seen the world now.
50:47
And I want no part in it. She says she doesn't want a job
50:49
or a career. She just wants to be married to
50:52
Caleb and have his babies. That is her only goal in life
50:55
back in the 1800s timeline. And Natalie, with her injured
50:58
leg now, is in so much pain. She just sits there uselessly as
51:02
the two girl kids do all the work and make dinner And she
51:05
thinks cruelly to herself. Perfect little homemakers.
51:09
Big fat bitches. Like, that's a horrible way to
51:12
think about children. Like, let's just not talk about
51:15
kids that way. Yeah.
51:16
What Christian kindness is on display here?
51:20
So Mary, the eldest daughter, gets strict with her and tells
51:23
her to sort herself out and that she's a grown woman and she
51:25
needs to start acting like it, Which is pretty fair, you know?
51:28
And Mary and the other kids take care of everything.
51:30
And Natalie has the nerve to complain to herself, once again
51:34
highlighting the differences between reality and the little
51:37
fictional aesthetic trad life she was pretending to live
51:39
before. And then we're seated at the
51:41
table, me closest to the firelight and old Caleb at the
51:43
far end, barely visible in the darkness.
51:46
Mary is walking around, ladling soup into our balls.
51:49
The spread for dinner looks nothing like the meals I've made
51:51
for our Natural Dinner series. In the videos, I showcased
51:54
homemade cornbread, baked carrots, thin strips of pork
51:57
with homemade cherry marmalade spooned over the plate in mouth
52:00
watering swirls. On the table before me is a
52:03
single steaming croc of watery looking soup with some
52:06
vegetables and chunks of white flaky fish popping along the
52:09
surface and a small plate of biscuits.
52:11
The meal looks, frankly, like poop.
52:14
As she's falling asleep that night, Maeve, the littlest girl,
52:18
tells her that this place is home.
52:20
But they sometimes call it yesteryear, hence the name of
52:23
the book. Curious.
52:25
The next chapter is another flashback, this time to Natalie
52:27
and Caleb's wedding and wedding night, which goes about as well
52:31
as you can expect for two inexperienced virgins.
52:34
I'm not going to details here, you can read about it for
52:36
yourself if you want, but I will say it's reminiscent of what
52:39
we've heard from Girl Defined, from Paul and Morgan, and from
52:42
plenty of other fundies for being awkward and surprising.
52:46
Thankfully it wasn't as abusive as Michael and Debbie Pearl's
52:49
wedding night, but yeah, here we are.
52:53
The rest of the chapter, then, is just about Natalie judging
52:55
her old roommate Rena and making comparisons between them of oh,
52:59
I'm so great because I'm married to this rich guy and six months
53:01
pregnant. Whereas she's just had an age
53:03
scare and she got called a fat, ugly whore and now she's doing
53:07
an internship, which means she's going to end up overworked and
53:10
snorting a bunch of cocaine constantly.
53:12
She just makes all these assumptions.
53:14
It's bizarre. She even goes as far as to
53:16
suggest that in time, during this time period of professional
53:20
growth, Reena would also do her best to fall in love and get
53:23
married. And if she managed that, then
53:25
years later when she finally got around to having kids, she would
53:27
act utterly shocked when her doctor informed her she was a
53:30
geriatric candidate and it would be an uphill battle to get
53:33
pregnant. If she was lucky.
53:34
And from what I'd seen, Reena had never been all that lucky.
53:37
She'd only have to do one or two rounds of IVF, and there would
53:40
only be a small handful of months where she found herself
53:42
joking loudly about lighting money on fire while her husband
53:45
jabbed at her fat bum with a needle.
53:47
His mind started to wander passed his miserable, ageing
53:50
wife to the fun young assistant in his office, the one who was
53:53
easy and light and funny, the one who had started to look
53:56
subconsciously to him like the appropriate age for a woman to
53:58
become pregnant. And when the time came when Rena
54:01
finally gave birth, when she finally looked around and
54:03
realised she'd made it, she was at the top of the mountain.
54:05
She had it all. The landscape would look like
54:07
this. Her husband no longer wanted to
54:09
touch her, her boss no longer wanted to promote her, her
54:12
childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her,
54:14
and her friends with children no longer had time to see her.
54:17
And Reena, sweet, precious Reena, would complain about none
54:20
of it. Not the disappearing husband or
54:22
the flailing career or the crushing loneliness.
54:24
Not a word of it to anyone. Because she would technically be
54:27
one of the lucky ones of slush retirement account and Foreman's
54:30
maternity leave. In Jesus name, Amen.
54:32
And in the world that Rena would soon inhabit, you don't get to
54:35
complain about those kinds of problems.
54:37
You don't get to complain about that privilege.
54:39
You don't get to complain about privilege.
54:41
It was clear Rena was dreading it.
54:43
Not just the internship, but the rest of her own life, as if
54:46
she'd been shot through by some fairy tale curse.
54:49
A lot of assumptions there, a lot of judgement.
54:54
None of that even happened to Rena.
54:56
Yeah, yeah. Clearly there's a lot of
55:01
projection there of Natalie trying to feel better about her
55:05
own life choices and her own decisions by judging someone
55:07
else for things that she assumes she's going to do and want, and
55:10
things that are going to happen to her that don't even end up
55:12
happening. You know, it's not even based on
55:13
reality. People like this really do live
55:16
in their own little fantasy worlds, don't they?
55:19
They dream up these horrific scenarios that they assume other
55:21
people must be living in, and then they pity them for it.
55:24
Like they pity them for a life that they've imagined rather
55:26
than the life they're actually living.
55:27
And it's just, it's a lot. It's a lot.
55:29
If only she had the brains or the courage to consider any
55:31
other path forward beyond the one that feminism, that nasty
55:34
witch had offered her. Silly, stupid Rena had bitten
55:37
the poison apple straight down the core.
55:39
Standing there that day, she looked so miserable at the
55:41
prospect of her own empowered future that I nearly laughed out
55:44
loud. See what I mean?
55:46
Like she's one, she's making all this up, and two, she's just
55:48
mean as hell. Absolutely mean.
55:51
The euphoria of my victory was making my vision blur.
55:53
I've won, I won, I won, you stupid effing bitch.
55:56
Sorry Lord, I won. Natalie is such a well written,
56:00
hateable narrator. Like seriously.
56:03
Chapter 12 tells us the first experience of Natalie giving
56:06
birth. How she'd wanted her home birth
56:08
but ended up in hospital. It didn't help that I'd never
56:11
really thought about giving birth in any practical sense in
56:14
the same way I'd never thought hard about the parts of my life
56:16
I was predestined for. Motherhood, marriage, the
56:19
afterlife. Why worry over inevitability?
56:22
All my life I'd understood and accepted that I was brought into
56:24
this world for the explicit purpose of eventually bringing
56:27
other lives into this world, like a never ending baton pass,
56:30
an infinite relay of God's glory.
56:32
I'd assumed I would step into the role naturally, since the
56:35
role itself was natural, was nature.
56:38
But nothing felt natural about this.
56:40
Again, this feels so much like Morgan's story of her first
56:43
birth and how like, they didn't plan any specifics and it all
56:46
went wrong and she nearly died. And yeah, it's sad.
56:51
I think this part of the book in particular does a really good
56:52
job of showing how important a comprehensive education around
56:56
things like pregnancy and childbirth are, because when you
56:59
don't have them, you end up with experiences like this.
57:02
Certainly no one had mentioned how ugly childbirth could be,
57:04
how gruesome and messy. I'd known, in some rough,
57:07
practical sense, that my body would have to be split open for
57:10
a child to leave it, but I hadn't remotely prepared for the
57:13
bold terror of it. Hadn't known that my softest and
57:15
most private patch of skin would RIP a full inch, Hadn't known
57:19
the delivery room would smell like iron from all the blood
57:21
loss, not to mention literal human excrement.
57:25
It's at this point as well that Natalie talks about the advice
57:28
that her mother had actually given her.
57:31
The only warning my mother had given me for this period of my
57:33
life had been that Caleb might not find me attractive after the
57:36
baby was born. It's only natural.
57:38
Shattered. It'll pass.
57:40
This was the latest iteration of a piece of advice she'd given my
57:43
sister and me for years. Men are like babies.
57:46
Their needs are not negotiable. And this is so gross.
57:50
Again, this reminds me of. I've written 2 scripts today in
57:55
response to Morgan and Cole's podcast, and one of them is
57:58
about like the horrific expectations for women after
58:02
they've given birth and how they need to get their body back and
58:05
like all this horrible stuff and a lot of body shaming in there.
58:07
It's really horrible. And then the second one is it
58:11
has sections about how like you owe your husband sex and how you
58:14
shouldn't be saying no, Tim because that's evil and blah
58:16
blah blah. And just, yeah, I hear a lot of
58:18
that in this book. And then we get a scene that I
58:21
swear I could have read on Carissa Collins's blog, and it
58:23
absolutely breaks my heart. So if you haven't seen it, a few
58:26
years back, I made a video called The Saga of Carissa
58:28
Collins, where I went through like a lot of her old blogs and
58:31
a lot of her content and looked at like, how she's changed over
58:34
the years and how she hasn't and some pretty horrific stories.
58:37
And sadly, Carissa wrote a hell of a lot about her issues with
58:40
body image and how that manifested into fasting even
58:43
while she was pregnant and her obsessing over her weight during
58:47
pregnancy. And again, very similar to the
58:50
second Morgan podcast episode as well.
58:54
And it's horrifying and heartbreaking to read.
58:56
And this scene in the book felt very reminiscent of those real
58:59
life moments for Carissa and Morgan.
59:01
So again, it feels like Carol, the author, has taken a lot of
59:05
inspiration from real life women here to create this fictional
59:08
Natalie. My mother was staring at me.
59:11
Now stop looking at me like that.
59:13
I snapped. I'm perfectly aware of how
59:15
disgusting I am. I gained 26 lbs throughout my
59:18
pregnancy. 10 of them are now outside of me.
59:20
Those 16 lingering pounds felt like a second suit of skin itchy
59:24
and I'll fitting. And it's interesting because one
59:27
of the things that Carl says on that podcast with Morgan is it's
59:32
really good to weigh yourself straight after you've given
59:33
birth because like that's the quickest you'll ever lose 10 lbs
59:36
in your life. And it's like, like, you know
59:38
how how awful that is, how dangerous that is to tell people
59:43
when you give birth, that shouldn't be what you're
59:45
thinking about. You shouldn't be counting the
59:47
pounds. Like you shouldn't be thinking
59:49
about your body that quickly. Like you've just put your body
59:51
through so much trauma and stress.
59:53
Give it time to heal before you start like counting things.
59:56
But I anyway, sorry I'm rambling now.
1:00:00
You're going to be back to feeling like yourself in no
1:00:02
time. My mother said.
1:00:03
She sat down in the hospital bed and patted my blanketed legs.
1:00:07
You know what might make you feel better?
1:00:08
What if you went on a little jog around the hospital?
1:00:10
Get your endorphins up. You never were one to enjoy
1:00:13
lying around. The nurse was looking at my
1:00:15
mother now. She absolutely cannot go on a
1:00:17
jog right now. It took 10 minutes to wait for
1:00:20
the next nursing shift to change, to take advantage of the
1:00:22
commotion, and to sneak down the hallway wearing nothing but a
1:00:25
hospital gown and my mother's sneakers.
1:00:27
It took another 15 minutes to jog, slash, walk around the
1:00:29
perimeter of the emergency room parking lot.
1:00:32
By the time I closed the loop at the hospital entrance, it felt
1:00:34
like I was expecting the early stage.
1:00:36
It felt like I was experiencing the early stages of organ
1:00:39
failure. My heart was thwopping wildly in
1:00:41
my chest, my appendix screaming. It stretched to rupture, and
1:00:44
with each step forward, I could feel, literally feel the
1:00:47
precious stretch of skin down there as it ripped open again,
1:00:51
the doctor's stitches no match for my mother's voice in my
1:00:54
head. That a girl, Natalie, get those
1:00:56
endorphins up, up, up. Blood ran in slick roofers down
1:00:59
my thighs. I collapsed into a nurse while I
1:01:01
was walking back through the hospital entrance.
1:01:04
And after all that, her mother just tells her she has to deal
1:01:06
with it. Oh, the baby's crying now.
1:01:08
So come on, get on up. Look after your kid.
1:01:11
It's barbaric, absolutely barbaric.
1:01:14
But this is so much of the pressure and stress that so many
1:01:16
of these fondue women and just women in general and people
1:01:19
who've given birth, what they have to deal with because of all
1:01:21
these pressures on people to like, get your body back looking
1:01:24
this way and do this and be active.
1:01:25
And it's like, no, you've just been through a massive trauma.
1:01:28
Give your body time to rest and recover and heal itself.
1:01:33
I wild. The lack of care is horrifying,
1:01:38
but again, it's a realistic portrayal.
1:01:40
Chapter 13 is back to the 1800s, when Natalie is once again
1:01:43
getting no care or compassion. She also spends a good amount of
1:01:47
time complaining about not having enough clothes, not
1:01:49
having enough nice clothes, and they're too drab and depressing.
1:01:53
Like, yeah, you think. The thing is though, when she
1:01:56
goes outside, she finds something crazy, a little piece
1:01:58
of plastic as though from a lapel mic that's like buried in
1:02:01
the dirt. And she's thinking maybe this
1:02:04
isn't actually the 1800s, Maybe this is a film set, maybe this
1:02:07
is reality TV, and she starts having all these ideas.
1:02:10
So at this point I was like, what are we thinking is
1:02:12
happening here? Because I have my little
1:02:14
thriller head on. I'm like, oh, what is this?
1:02:16
Crazy social experiment, prank show, crazy revenge plot, actual
1:02:20
time travel. Maybe this is like sending the
1:02:22
future and it's like not the past.
1:02:25
I had all these thoughts and I said I would be OK with any of
1:02:29
these outcomes, although if it's something like a social
1:02:32
experiment or a prank show, it'd be crazy to allow it to get so
1:02:35
badly injured during it. And what about the ethics of
1:02:38
using kids in this way? So I didn't think it was them.
1:02:41
I also said as long as it doesn't turn out to be it's all
1:02:44
a dream, I'll be happy with whatever.
1:02:47
And I will tell you now it is not all a dream.
1:02:48
So we're good back in the flashbacks, and Natalie is
1:02:52
clearly having some sort of issues with postpartum
1:02:54
depression, but no one takes them seriously.
1:02:57
It felt like I was dead, waiting for the Lord to pull the spirit
1:03:00
from my heart and body. My mother must have sensed the
1:03:02
general direction of my hopelessness, because she kept
1:03:04
saying an old Sunday school line to me every time she came
1:03:06
upstairs to change a diaper or bring me a meal or help me with
1:03:10
a feeding. Doubt your doubts before you
1:03:12
doubt your faith, sweetheart. I didn't reply.
1:03:15
Sleep, breastfeed, breastfeed, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep,
1:03:18
breastfeed, cry, breastfeed, sleep.
1:03:20
Kill yourself. No, sorry, sleep.
1:03:23
On a less serious note though, Natalie's sister at this point
1:03:27
who was younger than her, she's also had two babies with a guy
1:03:29
called Bryce. She now had a one month old in
1:03:32
addition to her 14 month old two boys, Brandon and Brady.
1:03:35
She thought the matching B names were cute.
1:03:37
Privately, my mother had concerns about this strategy.
1:03:40
If God willing, Abigail had a family of five or six or seven,
1:03:43
would she really have all the names start with B?
1:03:45
Wouldn't we all grow tired of the sound?
1:03:47
So I was like shout out to the Duggars and the Collins right?
1:03:49
And this is what this is what Abigail does for her next few
1:03:52
kids. They all have B names.
1:03:53
It's yeah, it's very, very Duggars, very Chrissa Collins.
1:03:57
And. But in all seriousness, though,
1:03:59
her poor sister is going through it, She says.
1:04:02
It's awful, isn't it? I said nothing, didn't even let
1:04:04
myself exhale for how surely a yes would slip out of my breath.
1:04:08
Not the babies. The babies are perfect.
1:04:11
She let out a quick, ragged gasp.
1:04:13
I'm just so tired. And Bryce under the pause, He
1:04:16
always wants to have sex and I'm just.
1:04:19
And the boys are, so I think I might be pregnant again.
1:04:23
Can you imagine three babies in three years?
1:04:26
I can't believe it. I never thought it would happen
1:04:30
this fast. And this makes me so happy that
1:04:33
I never will and likely never can have children because that
1:04:36
really does sound horrific. You know, the next part is
1:04:39
really heartbreaking, though. I've been thinking about it, you
1:04:41
know? She whispered, Getting birth
1:04:43
control. Bryce doesn't believe in it but
1:04:46
I heard. You can go to the doctor's and
1:04:47
get it. Without them knowing.
1:04:49
I mean this was my breaking point.
1:04:51
I sat up startling her and hissed birth control.
1:04:54
Why ain't your husband? These are sins, Abigail.
1:04:58
And yes, I'm going to keep drawing these comparisons to
1:05:00
real people, but this sounds so much to me like Paul and Morgan.
1:05:04
Because Morgan used to take birth control until Paul
1:05:07
convinced that it was a sin and she stopped and then she nearly
1:05:11
died giving birth and then he still wouldn't let her use birth
1:05:14
control. And then they had another
1:05:15
unexpected pregnancy which terrified her and she was all
1:05:17
like crying and whatever because she thought she was going to die
1:05:19
from it. And I believe after that,
1:05:22
especially with her current health problems that she still
1:05:25
hasn't really got tested for and they were actually thinking
1:05:28
about letting her go back on birth control for a while.
1:05:31
But as of 1 of Morgan's latest Instagram posts, it turns out
1:05:36
their only form of birth control at the minute is the pull out
1:05:38
method, which we all know is not effective and not a real form of
1:05:42
birth control. It's not effective in preventing
1:05:45
pregnancy at all. So she's very likely going to
1:05:47
get pregnant from that. Like absolutely.
1:05:50
So all I have to say at this point is can we please stop
1:05:53
telling people that birth control is a sin when their
1:05:56
lives and their mental and physical health are at risk?
1:06:00
It's just, it's wrong. Let people use it if they want
1:06:03
to. At this point in the story,
1:06:05
Natalie has been out of hospital with her baby for 10 days and
1:06:08
she's been staying at her mum's house and Caleb comes to visit
1:06:11
them for the first time. And I was like what the hell?
1:06:14
So he's not been parenting for the 1st 10 days of his kids
1:06:17
life. It's horrific but also again,
1:06:19
accurate as hell right? He rings her presence like a
1:06:23
phone so she can call him when he's away, suggesting he's going
1:06:26
to be absent a lot. He brings her a pair of new
1:06:28
running shoes to double down as insecurity she has about her
1:06:31
body and her need to lose weight apparently, and a baby carrier
1:06:34
so she can take the baby running with her because she's not
1:06:37
allowed any relief or time off to herself.
1:06:39
Because babies is a woman's job, remember?
1:06:43
But at this point Natalie realised Caleb is like, stupid
1:06:45
stupid. And she says the full truth was
1:06:48
that he wasn't anything smart. He was a nice dumb rich kid.
1:06:51
And what did that make me? A fool.
1:06:53
An embarrassment of a woman at the most important moment in my
1:06:57
life, I'd made a critical error of judgement.
1:06:59
I'd mistaken a man's wealth for his intellect.
1:07:04
Harsh, but true. My husband was an idiot.
1:07:07
Worse, there was absolutely nothing to be done about it.
1:07:10
In the world that I came from, divorce was a German word that
1:07:13
translated loosely to a lifetime of destitution and misery
1:07:16
followed by an eternity in hell. You didn't leave your husband if
1:07:19
he slapped you in the face, or had an affair, or set you up on
1:07:22
a weekly allowance so sparse that you snapped your at your
1:07:25
children when they spilled a glass of milk.
1:07:27
And you certainly didn't leave your husband if he was just some
1:07:30
dumb rich guy. There it was.
1:07:32
I couldn't avoid it now, the dawning prickly sensation that I
1:07:36
knew my husband as well as I knew the elderly cashier who
1:07:39
bagged groceries in my hometown. And this is what happens when
1:07:42
you rush into marriage and don't let and don't allow people a way
1:07:45
out of it. It ends in misery.
1:07:47
This is not healthy that anyone involved back in the 1800s.
1:07:52
And Natalie starts to think she must be part of a reality show.
1:07:55
But just like we questioned, she asks, what kind of reality show
1:07:59
would allow a man to slap a woman?
1:08:01
What kind of people stand idly by while she stepped into a
1:08:04
steel trap and nearly chopped off her own foot?
1:08:06
But then she starts to think, no, maybe, maybe this really
1:08:09
could be a reality TV show. But if it is that, then her
1:08:12
suddenly not being pregnant doesn't make sense.
1:08:14
So at this point, I'm thinking definitely time travel or maybe
1:08:17
like memory issues and she's just forgotten a big chunk of
1:08:19
her life, something like that. Back in the flashback in like
1:08:22
our time, though. And Natalie is trying more with
1:08:24
parenting. And she also tries to convince
1:08:27
Caleb to finally get a job, but he just doesn't want to.
1:08:30
He's like, no, I'm living off daddy's money.
1:08:32
This is fine. And she's like, no, you need a
1:08:33
purpose. You need a job, you need to
1:08:35
provide for your family. When she can't get through to
1:08:37
him, she ends up complaining to her mum, who tells her to
1:08:40
complain to his mum and then his mum gets on to him.
1:08:42
So it's all very pathetic. And basically they end up moving
1:08:46
back to California to go and live with his parents for a
1:08:48
while. And Natalie feels a little
1:08:50
regretful that she dropped out of college and never finished
1:08:53
her degree. But then she's like, no, no,
1:08:55
this is what I'm meant to do, be a wife and mother.
1:08:57
I don't actually need a degree. Chapter 18 is just as sad as the
1:09:01
rest of the book. There comes a point in every
1:09:03
marriage when a woman realises that the man she married is a
1:09:05
freak. This is inevitable.
1:09:07
It cannot be avoided. The only real question in the
1:09:10
matter is what type of freak your husband will be.
1:09:13
Meaning, if you're lucky, you will find out your husband is
1:09:16
preternaturally into vintage children's train sets, and you
1:09:19
will not find out your husband pays high school cheerleaders
1:09:21
for sex. That is the best we homemakers
1:09:23
can hope for in this life. A man whose freakishness is not
1:09:26
unspeakably violent or technically illegal and
1:09:29
therefore something we are able to beat.
1:09:32
This is sad. This is so damn sad.
1:09:34
If that's the best you can hope for it just.
1:09:36
Oh, it's heartbreaking, isn't it?
1:09:38
This is the part in the book, though, when Natalie realises
1:09:40
that her husband has committed the worst fundy sin of all.
1:09:44
No, not abusing children. That's forgivable, of course.
1:09:46
Just look at the Duggars. No, he's done the unthinkable
1:09:49
and he's watched pornography. Shocking, I know.
1:09:55
Terrible. Disgusting.
1:09:56
How could he? Yes.
1:09:59
Porn. This.
1:10:00
I hadn't told my mother. One afternoon I walked into our
1:10:03
bedroom to find Caleb's laptop laptop open at his desk.
1:10:07
I glanced over to our bathroom door and saw it firmly shut
1:10:09
tight, a band of yellow light by the floor.
1:10:12
I walked over to his desk, hoping to find the browser open
1:10:14
to a job listing. Instead, I found a grotesque
1:10:17
still of a couple, naked and frozen.
1:10:20
Mid thrust. Before my brain short circuited,
1:10:22
I noted the long line of tabs open at the top of the browser.
1:10:25
Husband and wife real couple F passionately for one whole hour.
1:10:30
Intense kissing leads to squirting orgasm.
1:10:33
Amateur couple have hot intimate F session.
1:10:35
Lots of P word licking. Then I stepped forward and
1:10:40
slammed a laptop screenshot. My waggon was hitched to a sex
1:10:43
pervert. It's actually quite wholesome as
1:10:45
things go, isn't it? Anyway, Natalie and Caleb's
1:10:49
parents conspire to try and get him to try and get him a job,
1:10:53
but it's tough because, as Natalie says, I wish that was a
1:10:56
job for playing with babies. Caleb whispered.
1:10:58
I'd be great at that. I didn't say anything.
1:11:00
The panic I felt earlier in the kitchen was now gone, replaced
1:11:03
by a dull, sweet throbbing in my chest.
1:11:05
He was good at playing with babies.
1:11:07
He never grew bored or irritated with Clementine.
1:11:10
He found her endlessly entertaining, in fact.
1:11:12
That was the problem, wasn't it? He had no desire to do anything
1:11:15
else. My husband wanted too little
1:11:17
from his life, and me. I wanted too much.
1:11:19
Suddenly it was so obvious. Caleb should have been born a
1:11:22
woman and I should have been born a man.
1:11:24
A sad sickness turned my stomach.
1:11:26
We were equally broken in that way and oh so sad, isn't it?
1:11:30
Like, you're not broken. It doesn't mean you should have
1:11:33
been born a different sex or gender.
1:11:35
Like it just means you have different strengths and that's
1:11:37
OK. This is proof of why gender
1:11:40
roles are so outdated and unnecessary, isn't it?
1:11:43
It doesn't mean you're broken or wrong.
1:11:44
It just means you fit a different role and these, like,
1:11:47
traditional gender roles don't work for you.
1:11:50
I feel like this dynamic is something we see in a lot of
1:11:52
fundy couples too. And it's something they don't
1:11:54
want to admit to. Like, look at Bethany and her
1:11:56
husband Dave, that who spring to mind immediately.
1:11:59
Like they keep going on about how, like, you know, the woman
1:12:02
needs to submit to the man and man needs to be the big strong
1:12:04
provider and be prepared. But Bethany's the one with, like
1:12:07
the mind of an entrepreneur who's like really interested in
1:12:09
business and working and that sort of thing.
1:12:11
Whereas Dave seems much more like kind of creative and laid
1:12:14
back and happy, just sort of like be home with the kids and
1:12:17
do his own little projects and stuff.
1:12:18
Like, they don't fit into traditional gender roles, and
1:12:21
there's nothing wrong with that, but they keep trying to force
1:12:23
themselves into it because that's what they've grown up
1:12:25
with. And that's.
1:12:27
Yeah, that's what we see here with Natalie and Caleb.
1:12:29
And it's just, it's sad. But then Natalie has this
1:12:33
revelation or delusion, however you want to frame it.
1:12:36
Again, it's something we've seen plenty of times before from
1:12:39
other fundies, and it's really well represented here.
1:12:42
Mary and Caleb had not been a mistake or an act of ignorance.
1:12:45
No, quite the contrary. It'd been the beginning of a
1:12:48
divine mission. We were put on this earth to
1:12:50
teach each other how to be, to give each other purpose.
1:12:53
I would help Caleb become a better man, and he would help me
1:12:56
become a better woman. Through my example, Caleb would
1:12:59
grow stronger, more ambitious, and through his example, I'd
1:13:02
grow softer, more loving with our children.
1:13:05
Like a balancing of liquids, he would take and I would give
1:13:08
until we met each other in the middle.
1:13:10
It would be the job of a lifetime for both of us.
1:13:12
We were a match made in hell. I mean heaven.
1:13:15
I could see it now and we all know of course this doesn't
1:13:18
happen. This is not how things work.
1:13:21
It's not going to end well, is it?
1:13:23
No, back in the 1800s and Natalie has tried to escape
1:13:27
again and she has now been tied by her ankles with fabric ropes
1:13:30
to keep her in the kitchen. This is the first bit to me that
1:13:33
felt a little bit unrealistic and sensational, but I was like,
1:13:36
OK, this is fine, let's carry on.
1:13:39
Caleb had warned her. At this point.
1:13:41
If you cause another problem, if you try and leave this ranch or
1:13:44
even worse, try and take a child with you, I'll tie you up by the
1:13:47
horse and see how you do overnight, you exhausting Wretch
1:13:51
of a woman. And at this point I was like,
1:13:53
you know what? Actually, this doesn't seem that
1:13:55
far fetched for like, if this is the 1800s.
1:13:57
Because back then, you know, there is a history of in the UK
1:14:00
men being known to sell their wives when they got sick of them
1:14:03
or they would pay people to have their wives like dunked in the
1:14:06
local river if they embarrassed them or flirted with another man
1:14:10
or did something wrong. So like, yeah, this doesn't seem
1:14:13
that far fetched. I guess.
1:14:14
In reality, this is followed by a scene of Natalie being shocked
1:14:18
that her daughter has to churn butter completely by hand
1:14:21
instead of using an electric mixer.
1:14:23
Like, you get the point. At this point, there's lots of
1:14:26
comparisons between Natalie's old life and this life.
1:14:29
And it's a little, I don't say repetitive, but there's a lot of
1:14:33
examples. It's nice to see such attention
1:14:35
to detail back in the present day flashbacks.
1:14:38
Caleb has decided he wants to be a nursery teacher, and Natalie
1:14:41
doesn't like this and she panics.
1:14:43
A pit formed in my stomach. He would be good at it.
1:14:46
He'd be incredible. He'd probably love spending all
1:14:48
day with children, teaching them all the benign bits of
1:14:51
information about the world that any idiot adult could master.
1:14:53
Blue is a primary colour. Fish have gills.
1:14:56
If he started this job, he would want to do it for the rest of
1:14:58
his life, and the dream of a respectable life would be over.
1:15:01
We would be consigned to life as a kindergarten family.
1:15:05
Dimly, I registered there was some poetic justice to the
1:15:07
phrase. We were a couple with a
1:15:09
diagnosis so serious it bordered on medical failure to launch.
1:15:14
She's so shallow. But this is how I imagine women
1:15:17
like Erica Kirk are. Yeah.
1:15:18
And Candace Owens, Abby Shapiro, I feel like they are like this
1:15:22
with their husbands behind the scenes.
1:15:24
Just a just a vibe I get, you know?
1:15:26
So Natalie starts to try and put him off by spouting right wing
1:15:29
conspiracies. And this sends him down a rabbit
1:15:32
hole where he becomes, like a proper conspiracy theorist.
1:15:35
And he's a part of the whole manosphere online.
1:15:38
And it just gets more and more extreme as the book goes on.
1:15:41
She says. Do you even know what they teach
1:15:42
children in school, Caleb? They teach them that being
1:15:46
Christian is a terrible thing, that gender is a construct, and
1:15:48
that marriage is some destructive force.
1:15:51
Do you want that for our kids? Of course not, Caleb said.
1:15:54
He frowned. Do they really teach that these
1:15:57
days? I nodded sobly.
1:15:59
They teach little white children to feel guilty about the fact
1:16:02
that our country used to have slaves.
1:16:04
My public school hadn't taught this, but I'd heard from other
1:16:06
schools that had. Or rather, my mother had heard
1:16:08
about it from another woman at a church bake sale who had heard
1:16:11
about it from her sister's best friend, who was a principal at
1:16:14
an afflicted middle school in California or Maryland or
1:16:17
Canada. My mother or the woman or her
1:16:20
sister could never quite remember where, but that ended
1:16:23
centuries ago. It doesn't matter.
1:16:25
They don't care about facts, which, yeah, it's just typical
1:16:29
right wing talking points. We've heard it from so many
1:16:31
people. Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, they're
1:16:33
always gone about this stuff. And call me crazy, but I do
1:16:35
think people should generally be ashamed that that country had
1:16:38
slaves and was part of the slave trade.
1:16:41
I think understanding that that is wrong and feeling guilt and
1:16:46
shame for it is a part of making sure it never happens again.
1:16:48
So in order to determine from the nursery teacher idea and she
1:16:52
decides to go ahead with the farm idea because she thinks it
1:16:55
will make Caleb a man. So she starts planning and she
1:16:58
buys an old cattle ranch for way over market value.
1:17:01
And she starts plotting with his dad, Doug.
1:17:04
Doug's office was a fever dream of 1950s manhood.
1:17:07
The walls were dotted with diplomas and pictures with
1:17:09
famous people. There were two leather chairs
1:17:12
positioned in front of a fireplace with a cigar box
1:17:14
sitting between them. And he, at this moment, was
1:17:17
sitting behind a mahogany desk so large and ornate that it must
1:17:20
have taken through your men to get it in here.
1:17:23
I was certainly vaguely aware of Doug's politics to begin with.
1:17:26
God, family and beer. A traditional values man.
1:17:30
This is exactly the kind of person I dislike and who I would
1:17:32
genuinely feel very unsafe around.
1:17:34
And this is where I start to get, like the Donald Trump
1:17:36
comparisons, you know? So he agrees to give Natalie and
1:17:41
Caleb a small loan of 5 million. Dollars.
1:17:45
See what I mean about the Donald Trump thing?
1:17:47
And he asks her for something in return.
1:17:49
And at first she thinks he's going to ask for sex like her
1:17:52
father-in-law. Oh, but he doesn't.
1:17:57
But actually, what's even more at you than that is her
1:17:58
response. Doug was a real man,
1:18:01
effortlessly masculine. He didn't ask for power or
1:18:04
respect or submission. He demanded it.
1:18:07
He was the kind of man to climb up a mountain of dead bodies in
1:18:10
the name of touching the sky. I hated him.
1:18:12
I wanted him dead. And also, I sometimes imagined
1:18:16
what it would feel like for a man like that to have me
1:18:19
biblically. I mean, which is another way of
1:18:22
saying if Doug had asked me what I thought he was going to ask
1:18:24
me, I might have given it to him.
1:18:27
I might have even liked it, might have even asked when
1:18:30
everything was said and done for more.
1:18:34
Oh. But again, does anyone feel like
1:18:37
this feels a little bit like how you imagine Erica took Erica
1:18:40
Kirk and Donald Trump to be? Just saying.
1:18:43
Just my opinion anyway. And thankfully, he doesn't ask
1:18:46
her for that. He just says he wants her to
1:18:48
have more babies with Caleb. That's all he asks in return.
1:18:51
And she's like, yeah, sure, cool.
1:18:53
Problem is, at this point, Natalie and Caleb don't really
1:18:55
have a sex life. She's been complaining that he's
1:18:58
not exactly into it, if you know what I mean.
1:19:00
He can't really get interaction. And yet she still agrees to this
1:19:03
because one of the choices that she have, she needs that $5
1:19:05
million. So when she gets home from the
1:19:08
meeting, she finds that Caleb has not been doing his parenting
1:19:10
duties like he said he would. And he hasn't woken the babies
1:19:14
up in time. So now their whole sleep
1:19:15
schedule is off. And instead, he's been busy
1:19:17
watching conspiracy theories about how evil teachers are
1:19:20
vaccinating babies without parents consent and other evil
1:19:23
schools are making children feel worthless on purpose.
1:19:27
And do you know, Natalie, why I've been struggling so much
1:19:29
lately, Why I can't seem to find my purpose?
1:19:32
It's not my fault, actually, it's the people in charge of
1:19:34
this country who are trying to feminise men.
1:19:38
So because of all this, he agrees to live on the farm with
1:19:40
Natalie and have more babies, and to home school because he
1:19:45
wants to keep them away from the paedophiles in the school
1:19:48
system. But he'll only do it if instead
1:19:50
of cattle farm, which might actually be profitable, they
1:19:53
only grow organic vegetables in the 1800s.
1:19:58
Natalie has woken and she doesn't feel as scared this
1:20:00
time. I'm pretty sure she's now
1:20:02
certain that it's some sort of reality TV programme and a fake
1:20:05
set. Because I look around at the
1:20:07
kitchen and feel a sudden rush of amazement.
1:20:10
This is incredible, a feat of engineering.
1:20:12
It truly feels like I'm living in the pioneer days.
1:20:16
And I mean, it's no wonder that her brain immediately goes to
1:20:18
reality TV because, one, she's an influencer.
1:20:21
And, two, her mother always gave her the advice to pretend you're
1:20:24
being watched when you're doing something difficult so that
1:20:26
it'll make you smile and, like, get through it and pretend to
1:20:29
enjoy it. So thematically, this is all
1:20:31
making sense. I love that Natalie gets her
1:20:34
first experience of having to wash in freezing cold water
1:20:37
outdoors. And she says it feels like
1:20:40
waking up. So she does actually quite like
1:20:42
it. She's like, it's horrible.
1:20:43
But actually, this isn't so bad. You know, I see the good points
1:20:45
to this. And meanwhile, Mary talks about
1:20:48
how they'll have to reuse the bathing water for laundry and
1:20:52
then for mopping to make the most of it.
1:20:53
So it's not like just today when you just turn on a tap and get
1:20:56
clean water straight away. Natalie at this point keeps
1:20:59
fluctuating between feeling happy and content and feeling
1:21:02
miserable and confused. She's very up and down, although
1:21:05
when she looks up at the sky, she thinks she sees a chemtrail
1:21:08
up there. So apparently Caleb got obsessed
1:21:10
with them when they moved to the farm because he's super into his
1:21:12
conspiracies. Remember however, we know in
1:21:14
reality that those are just trails of condensation fi
1:21:18
aeroplane engines. They're nothing bad, they're not
1:21:21
chemicals or whatever. But this begs the question, if
1:21:23
this really is the 1800s, it's time travel, why would there be
1:21:26
a chemtrail? So at this point I'm leaning
1:21:29
towards the amnesia theory. Think like people say it's a ROM
1:21:34
com, but really it's a horror film. 51st Dates, you know, she
1:21:37
wakes up every day and like she has no memory of the days before
1:21:40
and she still thinks it's like like Oh my God, at the end of
1:21:43
the film where she wakes up pregnant.
1:21:44
Like horror film. That's what I was feeling was
1:21:47
happening here at this point. But then you have to ask like,
1:21:49
well, if it's the future, then why is everything all back with
1:21:51
it? Anyway, I had a lot of
1:21:53
questions. I was excited to see where this
1:21:54
went. Chapter 26 is another flashback
1:21:57
and we get the reveal that in the present day, Natalie and
1:22:00
Caleb had called their ranch yesteryear, which makes it all
1:22:03
the more intriguing. That's what 1800s may have
1:22:05
called the ranch too. So that was like helping me with
1:22:09
my amnesia theory or maybe time travel theory and we'll see.
1:22:13
And I was loving the intrigue and the mystery so far.
1:22:17
And I also love that this is just like a Fundy character
1:22:19
study as well, but the added layer of this puzzle and it's
1:22:22
kind of potential time travel element.
1:22:24
The thriller lover in me loved it.
1:22:26
I found this really enjoyable. I love this book.
1:22:29
And the chapter follows Natalie's first seven social
1:22:33
media posts over a three-year period.
1:22:36
They were slow and basic before she really knew what she was
1:22:38
doing, before she really knew she wanted to be an influencer
1:22:41
or anything like that. And.
1:22:43
There's a lot of. Reasonable enough stuff during
1:22:44
this time and some absolutely abhorrent stuff like a complete,
1:22:49
like a basic care for her Children's Health.
1:22:50
For example. During our inspection of the
1:22:54
farm we learnt about an infestation of black mould that
1:22:57
had taken over the bathroom in the house.
1:22:59
I thought of that poor old man who had been unknowingly
1:23:01
breathing in the spores and his son with the cancer.
1:23:04
Very sad. Then I realised that dealing
1:23:06
with the mould meant more time at Doug and Amelia's house.
1:23:09
So I said, can't we just take our chances?
1:23:12
Caleb looked at me. Clementine could develop asthma.
1:23:15
Many of people have asthma and gone to live a perfectly full
1:23:17
life. Caleb didn't buy that.
1:23:19
So we waited while the house was chemically treated and they kept
1:23:22
finding more mould so she was perfectly fine with her.
1:23:25
Like young baby breathing in black mould spores like this.
1:23:30
This selfishness is crazy again. Reminds me of Carissa Collins
1:23:34
and her lack of care for her kids.
1:23:36
Like, she wrote those posts about how one of her babies was
1:23:41
so I'll they couldn't hold their own head up.
1:23:43
Like, they couldn't lift their head up.
1:23:45
And so she was like, well, I could take him to the hospital
1:23:48
now. We'll go to the basketball game
1:23:50
first, and then I'll take them. And it turns out the baby had,
1:23:53
like, an untreated UTI and got really bad sepsis and nearly
1:23:55
died. And it's like, what the hell?
1:23:58
So I'm getting Carissa Collins inspired from this.
1:24:01
Although I do think with Carissa Collins, the reality was worse
1:24:05
than the fiction in this book. So yeah, so on the plus side,
1:24:10
Caleb starts to get more excited and ambitious about farming and
1:24:13
he starts to actually take time to learn stuff which is new for
1:24:15
him, hasn't really done that before.
1:24:18
Then again, they're also pretty irresponsible at 1st and make a
1:24:21
lot of mistakes. They end up getting a bunch of
1:24:23
animals that they don't have the ability to look after, all the
1:24:26
qualifications to properly look after, which leads to the animal
1:24:29
suffering and dying unnecessarily.
1:24:31
I feel like this is less of a critique of fundies and more of
1:24:34
a critique on influences in general and this culture of like
1:24:37
needing instant gratification. But at the same time, this abuse
1:24:40
of animals is something we have seen from fundy influencers like
1:24:43
Carissa Collins before when she nearly poisoned her dog and
1:24:45
wouldn't take it to the vet. Meanwhile, there's a whole
1:24:48
subplot of the father-in-law running for Senate and trying to
1:24:50
run for president again and his wife not coping with it and
1:24:53
developing some sort of drug addiction and then passing out a
1:24:55
fundraising event. The family have their priorities
1:24:57
all screwed up because they make the paramedics stop to sign an
1:25:00
NDA before they're allowed in to treat her, which is ridiculous.
1:25:03
There is so much that could be said about this, but it's like
1:25:08
with all it's like with the rest of this book, there's so much to
1:25:10
talk about. I'm not going to go into every
1:25:12
little bit in detail. At this point, Natalie and
1:25:14
Caleb's sex life is basically non existent.
1:25:17
So she gets herself pregnant by making him finish in a bowl and
1:25:21
then using a Turkey basterter, you know, basically inseminate
1:25:25
herself. That's how she gets pregnant
1:25:27
with baby #2 and the other babies.
1:25:29
I was very interested to see why they went with this Caleb
1:25:32
storyline. And like what his issue is.
1:25:34
And it's never quite fully explained.
1:25:39
We get, we get kind of like it's a dress, but not as much as I
1:25:41
would like. This is one of my critiques of
1:25:43
the book. I wish this sexual dysfunction
1:25:45
had been explored a little bit more.
1:25:48
And. I do feel like this sort of
1:25:50
thing is very common in fundy marriages though.
1:25:52
From what I've seen on like Bethany Beale's sex course
1:25:56
videos and the guests on there, a lot of people seem to have
1:25:59
these kinds of sexual dysfunction issues in their
1:26:01
marriage. So I'm glad it was included in
1:26:04
the book at all. But I do wish it had been
1:26:05
explored in a little bit more detail back in the past.
1:26:09
And Natalie says she has good days and bad days, but mostly
1:26:12
she seems miserable, to be honest.
1:26:15
And so I moved through the hours as the best possible version of
1:26:17
myself, the most obedient wife, the most loving mother.
1:26:21
When I bring the pan to the table and set it down, proudly
1:26:23
showcasing my perfectly scrambled eggs, no one is
1:26:26
impressed. No one even says thank you.
1:26:28
But I don't mind. Of course I don't mind.
1:26:30
A Good Wife never minds. Instead, I think with the blunt
1:26:33
cerebral force of a spaceship hurtling through the atmosphere.
1:26:36
How lucky am I, This life, such a blessing.
1:26:40
On good days, I amaze myself at my own bravery.
1:26:42
I take on each future and assignment with the obedient
1:26:45
pluck of a picture book Pioneer woman ironing and sewing and
1:26:48
mopping and wood tending and utter cleaning and potato
1:26:50
peeling la di da. What a life.
1:26:53
I ignore the fact that our meals are tasteless and beige and
1:26:55
usually consist of two or fewer food groups.
1:26:58
I ignore about half of thoughts that pop into my head.
1:27:00
Instead, I focus on being a tender mother and a cheerful
1:27:03
wife. I never let them see me cry,
1:27:05
especially not Maeve on bad days.
1:27:08
My thoughts swirl in eddies of relentless panic.
1:27:10
I have to leave. I cannot leave.
1:27:12
I think you might kill me. I think I might kill him.
1:27:14
I know someone is watching. I know no one is watching.
1:27:17
I'm worried I'll die here. I cannot die here.
1:27:20
I think I would rather be dead. You know all those people who
1:27:23
complain about no fault divorce being an issue and women being
1:27:28
able to instigate divorce all being an issue.
1:27:31
I think they need to realise that this is what life was like
1:27:33
for women before that was an option when they couldn't get
1:27:36
divorced. This is what life is still like
1:27:38
for a lot of women who don't have divorce as an option.
1:27:40
It's not romantic and sweet and cute.
1:27:43
It doesn't make marriages last all happy and lovey and
1:27:46
romantic. It's controlling and it's scary
1:27:48
and it puts people in misery and in danger.
1:27:51
Back in the present day in the flashbacks and Natalie has just
1:27:54
had her second child when her sister and mum come to visit.
1:27:57
Her sister Abigail is currently 29 and has five kids and is
1:28:00
pregnant with another one. When she announces she is going
1:28:03
to be leaving her husband because she is miserable,
1:28:06
Natalie's response is just as awful as you would expect.
1:28:09
I shook my head. But how can you afford a lawyer?
1:28:12
Abigail frowned. That's your first question.
1:28:16
You and Bryce have no money, how can you afford to divorce him?
1:28:20
I took out a loan if you really want to know.
1:28:22
But how did you qualify for a loan?
1:28:25
I tell you, I'm getting a divorce and all you care about
1:28:27
is the money. How about I'm sorry to hear
1:28:29
this, Abigail? How about why are you getting
1:28:31
divorced, Abigail? I rolled my eyes.
1:28:34
I know why you're getting divorced.
1:28:36
And why am I getting divorced, Natalie, if you know so much
1:28:39
because your husband is mean and dumb and drinks too much, he
1:28:42
probably calls you names in front of the children.
1:28:44
He probably hits you sometimes. Paused, waiting for Abigail to
1:28:47
confirm or deny this hypothesis. But she remained silent, her
1:28:50
expression so still, so fathomless in it's depth that it
1:28:54
looked like a great body of water at night.
1:28:56
And so I went on, ignoring the terrifying stillness of my
1:28:59
sister's face. Ignoring too the horrified
1:29:01
expression on my mother's. Lord save us all.
1:29:04
He's lazy too. He's never done anything with
1:29:06
that shop that man had. That man is and has always been
1:29:09
a loser. But now it's becoming harder for
1:29:11
you to bear. So now you, my poor sister, have
1:29:14
somehow gotten into your head that you'll be better off
1:29:16
without him, that you'll be better off without him.
1:29:18
And I'm sorry, Abigail, but you will not.
1:29:21
So this is protection, right? She's absolutely projecting her
1:29:24
own insecurities and feelings about her loser of her husband
1:29:27
onto Abigail. I think this is obvious.
1:29:30
And also, how horrible is that? Like, I can't imagine having
1:29:34
this little sympathy for my sister.
1:29:35
Crazy, she goes on and says you'll be a single mother of
1:29:40
five living on food stamps. I snapped.
1:29:41
That is what you'll be. You don't even have a job
1:29:44
history, Abigail. My God, you'd be lucky if they
1:29:46
hired you to bag groceries with teenagers in town.
1:29:49
And this is one of the reasons why I always encourage people,
1:29:51
especially women, to never be 100% financially reliant on
1:29:54
someone else. Because you never know when
1:29:56
you're going to end up on your own and need to be on your own
1:29:58
and need to support yourself, you know?
1:30:01
But Natalie, rather than offering any support or help,
1:30:04
just gets crueller and cruel. Just gets crueller and crueller
1:30:07
like she's living with a millionaire husband.
1:30:09
Like you'd think she could help out a sister a little bit, but
1:30:12
no, she's just mean. My fury circled back around.
1:30:15
And does anyone else think she's angry because she's jealous?
1:30:18
Just just a thought. My fury circled back around and
1:30:21
it suddenly felt like I was eating myself alive.
1:30:24
Have you ever thought, have you thought about where you'll live?
1:30:26
You can move in with mother for a while, but not forever.
1:30:28
And then what? You've never lived on your own
1:30:30
before? Abigail, do you know what it
1:30:32
takes to apply for an apartment? Do you even know what a credit
1:30:34
score is? Stop it, Abigail whispered.
1:30:37
Please, Natalie, stop it. I couldn't have stopped if I
1:30:40
wanted to, and I didn't want to. I was angrier than I'd ever been
1:30:43
in my life. I felt sick with it.
1:30:45
Do you honestly think the rules don't apply to you?
1:30:47
That you can just waltz away from all your responsibilities
1:30:49
completely unscathed? Of course I don't.
1:30:52
That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I do.
1:30:54
You think Bryce won't file for custody?
1:30:56
Of course he will. He'll be, he'll be remarried
1:30:58
within the year and then he and his new bride will fight for the
1:31:01
children just to spite you. He'll say you're a cruel mother,
1:31:03
a drunk, and the judge will agree with him.
1:31:05
And before long, you'll be seeing your children every other
1:31:08
Saturday. They won't even know you.
1:31:10
So of course, like I mentioned before, there's massive
1:31:12
projection here from Natalie and.
1:31:14
And we see why she, at this point, thinks back to her
1:31:18
agreement with Doug and the prenuptial agreement she signed
1:31:21
with Caleb. And it turns out that only
1:31:23
Caleb's name is on the ranch. So despite all the work and
1:31:27
organisation that Natalie put into it and getting it up and
1:31:29
running and stuff, if she ever wanted to leave Caleb because of
1:31:32
all this, she would get literally nothing.
1:31:34
And because she's from a family without money and Caleb's from a
1:31:37
family of literal millionaires, yeah, he'd probably get custody
1:31:39
of the kids. He'd get everything.
1:31:41
She'd be left with nothing. So a lot of what she's worrying
1:31:43
about for Abigail here and what she's angry about is clearly
1:31:46
projection because that's what would happen in her own life.
1:31:48
And The thing is like, it's crazy that like, this fear of
1:31:51
ending up with nothing seems worse, like money wise is worse
1:31:56
than like living a miserable, unhappy marriage.
1:31:59
It. Yeah.
1:32:00
It's a lot. The chapter ends with her saying
1:32:03
an impossible thing to imagine what might happen if my husband
1:32:06
ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own
1:32:08
star universe. His his wife might as well have
1:32:12
been a farm dog for all the rights she had.
1:32:14
Even the sweetest, stupidest man can grow cruel and cunning when
1:32:18
he learns a thing like that, which is terrifying, right?
1:32:21
But no, no, in the minds of these fundy women, feminism is
1:32:24
the real evil in this world. Not this back in the past.
1:32:29
And Natalie realises her true role if she is an 1800s woman.
1:32:34
Everyone has a role on this farm.
1:32:35
Old Caleb tends to the fields and Noah tends to the horses,
1:32:38
and Abel tends to his father and Mary tends to the kitchen and to
1:32:41
Maeve and Maeve tends to the chickens and me.
1:32:45
A few nights ago I might have said my role is to take care of
1:32:47
the laundry. That is, of course, not correct.
1:32:49
Look, the laundry is an addendum, A footnote, a mid
1:32:52
afternoon side quest for a woman with too much time on her hands.
1:32:55
This right here, is my true role.
1:32:57
To spread my legs when my husband demands, to have as many
1:33:00
children as I can until my legs give out beneath me, and to feel
1:33:03
nothing but gratitude on the hour of my death.
1:33:06
To smile when the spirit haemorrhages out of me.
1:33:09
Ha, it really? Is funny to think how I all but
1:33:12
begged Caleb in our early years of marriage to become the kind
1:33:14
of man who is standing before me now, the opposite of a
1:33:17
kindergarten teacher, a farmer, a cowboy, a patriarch, a man
1:33:22
without a single soft edge. I craved it, I prayed for it.
1:33:25
And what did the Lord do? He listened.
1:33:28
He gave me what I wanted. He gave me a man.
1:33:31
For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head
1:33:34
of the Church, His body, and is is himself its Saviour.
1:33:39
A voice in my head echoing softly.
1:33:41
America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women.
1:33:44
You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman.
1:33:48
Except I am angry. I am very, very angry.
1:33:51
So angry that I can't keep myself from saying what do you
1:33:54
want from me? I want you to behave like a
1:33:56
mother and a wife. Old Caleb snaps, and suddenly I
1:33:59
realise he's angry too, as angry as I am.
1:34:02
It's a terrifying, thrilling realisation.
1:34:05
You could strike a match through the air between US and watch it
1:34:07
flame. Then there's an absolutely
1:34:09
horrifying scene where consent is dubious, but it absolutely
1:34:14
seems like Caleb rapes her. And this theme of dubious
1:34:17
consent is something that we see throughout the book and of
1:34:20
Natalie not really understanding what it means to consent or not.
1:34:24
And this is something we'll talk about and discuss in more detail
1:34:26
later in the book, but just bear this in mind right now.
1:34:29
She can't decide whether she actually wants this or not
1:34:31
because on the one hand, he kind of looks like Caleb.
1:34:33
He kind of looks like her husband, but he doesn't look
1:34:36
like a husband. She's not sure what she actually
1:34:38
wants. And she tries to rationalise
1:34:39
this, as many Fundy women do, by saying though of course it can't
1:34:42
be rape, what's happening here? There's no such thing as a
1:34:45
husband raping a wife, which of course we all know to not be
1:34:48
true. But it's a thing that a lot of
1:34:50
Fundy women think is the thing that Morgan has recently spoken
1:34:54
about in her podcast, which is something that I've been writing
1:34:57
a script for today. And the scene is further
1:35:01
complicated by the fact that even though it hurts at first,
1:35:04
she does end up orgasming from it for what she believes is the
1:35:07
first time in her life. And she ends the scene by
1:35:10
saying, I said yes. So it's a scene that's tough to
1:35:13
read. And it's one that's complex.
1:35:15
And with new ones, that's confusing for her as a
1:35:17
character. It's confusing for us as a
1:35:18
reader. Is it rape?
1:35:20
Is it not? The consent is incredibly
1:35:22
dubious. She feels like it can't be
1:35:24
because they're married. But then again, that's not how
1:35:27
consent works. But then at the end, she did say
1:35:30
yes. So maybe she was given consent.
1:35:31
It's, it's complicated. Like I say, this pattern of
1:35:36
Natalie not quite understanding what it means to consent and
1:35:39
what consent is and isn't is something we see throughout the
1:35:42
book and it's something that comes back at the end of the
1:35:45
book and we'll discuss it in more detail.
1:35:46
Then afterwards, in the night, she decides that this whole
1:35:49
situation must actually be real and that it's just God testing
1:35:53
her. Doubt your doubts before you
1:35:55
doubt your faith, sweetheart. Sometimes the most obvious
1:35:57
truths of our world are the ones that get buried most easily.
1:36:01
Obviously, the Lord has put me here on this homestead of with
1:36:03
this family. And like all the things He does,
1:36:06
He brought me here with intention, with a plan.
1:36:09
So much of my life was dedicated to broadcasting a vision of
1:36:12
nostalgia, a better, more beautiful version of America, a
1:36:15
celebration of the days of yore. Now the Lord wants me to feel
1:36:18
the truth of my own message. He wants me to learn and listen
1:36:21
and improve and submit and. Well, I'm not.
1:36:24
Exactly. Sure what the end goal is, but
1:36:26
that's fine. He'll tell me when he's ready.
1:36:28
Mostly, though, she just hopes she doesn't get pregnant in this
1:36:30
world, which is completely understandable.
1:36:33
Back in the present. And Natalie is starting to worry
1:36:35
about money and getting cut off from Doug and his $5,000,000
1:36:38
loan, which is solely pretty much run out at this point.
1:36:42
Meanwhile, they've hired, like I mentioned earlier, Mexican
1:36:45
workers on the farm and Natalie has been secretly telling them
1:36:48
to use pesticides on the crops. But Caleb doesn't know this.
1:36:51
So he's been at these farmers markets selling these Vegas
1:36:53
organic, which is which. It's not, obviously.
1:36:56
So that's illegal. And it can come with some very,
1:36:59
very big fines if they're caught out.
1:37:02
Natalie ends up being caught out by an old friend who's seen a
1:37:05
barrel of pesticides in the background of one of her
1:37:07
Instagram posts and been like, whoa, this is illegal.
1:37:10
Tell her she needs to stop instead of Natalie accepting the
1:37:13
blame for any of this. She ends up making racist
1:37:16
comments about the Mexican employees and even goes as far
1:37:19
as to say Doug was right. What a border problem we had.
1:37:22
Like it's your employees fault for doing what you told them to
1:37:25
it. It's disgusting.
1:37:27
After feeling like a massive failure, because let's be real,
1:37:29
she is. She spends ages taking hundreds
1:37:32
of photos of herself and her family completely
1:37:34
misrepresenting their situation online, making them all, in her
1:37:37
opinion, look happier and healthier than they actually
1:37:39
are. She says I wrote a caption.
1:37:42
Sometimes I can't believe this is my actual, honest to God
1:37:44
life. And then I press post.
1:37:46
It was the most important day of my life.
1:37:48
The day I stopped working on my husband, my farm, my family and
1:37:52
returned to work an old beloved project myself.
1:37:55
I walked back inside to make dinner for my family.
1:37:57
After dinner I knocked myself up again.
1:38:00
And once again, I think this is a really accurate portrayal of
1:38:04
family vloggers and influencers. It's scary, but it's realistic.
1:38:07
This is the kind of behaviour we saw time and time again from
1:38:10
people like Ruby Frankie. This book is a perfect little
1:38:13
time capsule. Of the world.
1:38:14
We're currently living in and what some people, particularly
1:38:17
in America and some people who are influencers and family
1:38:19
vloggers are like and I think it's really great.
1:38:22
Later, Natalie decides to sign up for a social media marketing
1:38:25
course. She pays $1500 for six one hour
1:38:28
Zoom lessons, which are run by a woman with just 50,000 online
1:38:33
followers who is promising to teach them how to make 6 figures
1:38:36
a month on Instagram. Wild.
1:38:39
And I love the inclusion of scamming courses like this
1:38:42
because this is something that many fundy wives turn to for
1:38:45
income. Bethany Beale Morgan from
1:38:47
Portland, Morgan Solly Osario, just to name a few.
1:38:50
The descriptions of the course are super revealing, and in the
1:38:54
first Zoom meeting I expected to see a computer screen filled
1:38:56
with women like the ones I'd gone to college with.
1:38:58
Smart, savvy and violently progressive.
1:39:00
Instead, the Zoom open to reveal a gallery of women who looked
1:39:03
like me. This was the first time I
1:39:05
realised that the business of influence was not a secular
1:39:08
calling. Nearly everyone had a cross
1:39:10
necklace glistening on their chest, except one curly haired
1:39:12
woman from New Jersey, Rachel Weisman, who looked increasingly
1:39:16
distressed in the opening minutes of the call until she
1:39:18
finally turned her video off. We prayed at the opening and
1:39:21
closing of each meeting. Yeah.
1:39:23
Because the only people who kind of fall for these scammy courses
1:39:25
are the ones and, you know, they pay these extortionate amounts
1:39:28
for it, are the ones who are uneducated and don't know any
1:39:31
better and are often guilted into doing these things because
1:39:34
of their religion or background or circumstance.
1:39:36
You know, they're told and you know, as as a woman of God, you
1:39:41
can't get a job, you can't do this.
1:39:42
But this is how you can provide for your family.
1:39:44
But it's OK. It's just like a little hobby on
1:39:45
the side. You're still a mother and a wife
1:39:47
1st. And they kind of prey on these
1:39:49
people and their vulnerabilities.
1:39:51
It reminds me a lot of do you remember Bethany Beal's She
1:39:54
Works Smart course that she did, which was to teach women how to
1:39:58
make money by selling courses online.
1:40:02
She made a course to teach people how to sell courses and
1:40:05
she sold it for nearly $2000. Crazy.
1:40:07
She didn't get many sales, but she did get a few.
1:40:11
The similar and I, I never took that course because I was not
1:40:14
giving her that much money. I, I do not have that much
1:40:16
disposable income, but I did pay for her cheaper sex courses.
1:40:19
And then I used those videos to raise a bit of money for
1:40:21
charity. So some good came out of it and
1:40:24
I spent some money out of my own pocket, the same amount I spent
1:40:27
on the courses. I gave that to charity as well,
1:40:30
just to kind of alleviate a little bit of the, I guess the
1:40:34
guilt from giving her any money, to be honest.
1:40:37
But I want to review those courses for people, can kind of
1:40:40
correct the misinformation and educate people a little bit.
1:40:43
And what I found is by looking at those courses, the
1:40:46
similarities between Bethany's courses and the one in this
1:40:48
book. There's a lot there, a lot of
1:40:50
similarities. Yeah.
1:40:53
Oh, I'm so tired. I don't know what I'm saying
1:40:54
anymore. 3:00 AM. At this point, I'm very sleepy.
1:40:58
According to Tammy, the most powerful force on the planet was
1:41:00
the power of the divine Christian feminine trademark.
1:41:03
Pending. That is like almost word for
1:41:05
word out of Bethany's course. It's brilliant.
1:41:07
We are limitless resources, the original Energizer bunnies.
1:41:11
All we need to do to achieve our wildest dreams was to channel
1:41:13
our own infinite store of energy.
1:41:15
If you are your true authentic self, then sales will happen
1:41:18
effortless, effortlessly. She said confidently while she
1:41:21
clicked through a clearly homemade PowerPoint
1:41:22
presentation. The slide speed quickly along
1:41:25
and seemed to only loosely connect to what Tammy was
1:41:27
saying. A stock picture of a blonde
1:41:29
woman twirling in a field of flowers.
1:41:31
A screenshot of a bank account with a balance of $80,000.
1:41:34
Starting pyramid rendering of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with
1:41:37
a frowny faced lady stick figure standing at the bottom.
1:41:40
OK, fine, maybe this is a bit more effort than Bethany ever
1:41:42
put into her courses. You know she'd never make a
1:41:45
PowerPoint presentation. I could practically feel the
1:41:48
collective psychic weight of 100 relatively gullible women trying
1:41:51
to hold so many contradicting truths in their brain at one
1:41:53
time. Everything they had to succeed
1:41:55
was already inside them. But they also needed to pay this
1:41:58
woman in order to succeed. And a truly successful social
1:42:01
media sales cycle should happen effortlessly.
1:42:03
It should happen in our sleep. Yet we needed to start
1:42:05
reclaiming some of our own time from our families so that we
1:42:08
could commit ourselves to the effort.
1:42:10
And the point of this course was to remind women to sink further
1:42:13
into their own divine Christian feminine.
1:42:15
And also it was time to develop some hard masculine skills.
1:42:18
Ladies, it was time to learn some maths and most of the
1:42:22
course, like many of these funding courses, seems like
1:42:25
fluff and nonsense rather than anything actually practical.
1:42:27
I resisted typing my own questions into the chat.
1:42:30
When are we going to learn about hashtags?
1:42:32
Can someone explain the analytics dashboard on Instagram
1:42:34
to me? Why doesn't my photos get
1:42:35
hundreds of likes and only one comment?
1:42:37
Why do my cheeks itch when I haven't checked my phone in the
1:42:40
last hour? Why are you better than me at
1:42:41
this time, Elaine? Why am I here?
1:42:43
Although, like I say, there does seem to be more in this course
1:42:46
than there is in people like Bethany Beal's courses.
1:42:49
So one of the things that they do that like Bethany never
1:42:52
really did was after the lectures, they break into these
1:42:55
smaller groups and they give each other feedback on like
1:42:57
their social media accounts and stuff.
1:42:59
Except part way through, they all realise that they're
1:43:01
actually in competition with each other because they're all
1:43:02
trying to do the same thing. So rather than like being peers,
1:43:05
helping each other out, they all kind of like feel really
1:43:07
competitive, which is a bit sad, isn't it?
1:43:11
But what's interesting is that most of the conversations they
1:43:13
do have to kind of help each other are about how to look
1:43:16
authentic online. Not to be authentic, but how to
1:43:18
look authentic. Again, it's all very fake.
1:43:21
I like the caption, Robin said. I just can't really put my
1:43:24
finger on it. There's something kind of off.
1:43:27
It's a smile, Ashley Anne said. That's it.
1:43:30
Robin exclaimed. It's the smile.
1:43:32
You don't actually look happy. You look like you're grimacing.
1:43:36
15 heads nodded in unison. That's just my smile, though.
1:43:40
That's just how I smile. Here's the thing.
1:43:43
Natalie Cassidy gave me a cloying wince.
1:43:46
I think what Ashley Anne is trying to say here isn't it?
1:43:49
Looks like you're pretending. I laughed again, although it
1:43:52
sounded more like a cough. Isn't everyone?
1:43:55
Ashley Anne rolled her eyes. Well, yeah, sort of, but it's
1:43:58
not supposed to be so obvious. She looked to Cassidy for
1:44:01
approval. Right.
1:44:03
Cassidy nodded gravely. Emotions need to come across as
1:44:06
totally authentic. Why don't you practise smiling
1:44:08
in a mirror? It sounds silly, but it works.
1:44:11
You have no clue how you look to others.
1:44:14
And scarily, she begins to do this and pass it on to her kids
1:44:17
as well, which is the most terrifying thing.
1:44:19
I positioned her in front of me so that we were looking each
1:44:21
other in the mirror for the millionth time.
1:44:23
I found myself startled at how similar we looked down to the
1:44:26
skull. A little minaa of irritation
1:44:28
swam through me. You have no clue how you look to
1:44:31
others. You're a big girl now,
1:44:32
Clementine. You need to learn how to smile.
1:44:35
And this is how you get these cycles of abuse and it passing
1:44:38
on to and it passing on to future generations and your
1:44:42
insecurity is being passed down to your children.
1:44:44
It's it's all very scary, isn't it?
1:44:46
Meanwhile, Natalie finally gets her big break because Caleb has
1:44:49
got super into his manosphere spaces online and he tells some
1:44:54
host of a right wing online show about Natalie on a forum.
1:44:57
And so him on his big show with 10s of millions of viewers.
1:45:00
And he promotes her account by saying this is the kind of woman
1:45:04
who is going to get our country back on track.
1:45:05
None of that city woman. Equality of the sexes.
1:45:08
Bull poop. No, this is a wholesome
1:45:11
traditional Aryan wife. He clicked through my Instagram
1:45:14
pictures, creating a flip book effect of me smiling all over
1:45:16
this farm. Me in front of the barn, me in
1:45:18
front of a cake mixer, Me sitting on the front porch
1:45:21
caressing my bump. Man, if more families in America
1:45:24
acted like this family. Think about it.
1:45:26
Celebrating nuclear families instead of denigrating them.
1:45:29
Cherishing the separate and equally valuable roles of man
1:45:31
and wife instead of constantly challenging them.
1:45:34
Eating local, working the land, Spreading good Christian values.
1:45:38
The bearded men laughed heartily.
1:45:40
I got to say, I'm sold. What every man needs to do his
1:45:43
job is a wife who can do her job.
1:45:45
This right here, this Natalie Heller Mills.
1:45:48
This is a wife who does her job. I mean, look at her baking her
1:45:51
own bread, milking her own cows, keeping their children healthy
1:45:55
and safe and nurtured. I refresh my account again,
1:45:58
15,000 followers. Look how hard this woman work.
1:46:02
Look at how hard this woman works.
1:46:04
Look how exhausted and beautiful she is.
1:46:07
This, my friends, is the true American dream.
1:46:09
Not that hamster wheel nightmare in the cities.
1:46:12
Don't let the media fool you. So this is clearly like a kind
1:46:15
of Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder type, you know,
1:46:19
right wing, Christian, racist, sexist, all about America first
1:46:24
and all that nonsense. You know that that kind of type
1:46:26
of man clearly, and there's definitely a commentary here
1:46:29
about how in that space, the thing a woman needs to succeed
1:46:32
is to be uplifted by a man. But even what he says about her,
1:46:35
to promote her isn't even the truth.
1:46:36
He's presenting this false idea of her.
1:46:38
As Caleb refreshed 22 and refreshed again 24 her refreshed
1:46:42
again 28,000 followers, I was just beginning to process what
1:46:46
that man had said. Exhausted and beautiful.
1:46:49
Did I look exhausted? And why was that a good thing?
1:46:51
And how do you said I bake a lot bread from scratch?
1:46:54
I could count on one hand the number of times I'd done so in
1:46:56
my life. The picture I shared on my
1:46:58
account of a sourdough loaf had been a loaf I'd picked up at the
1:47:00
store. He was talking now about my
1:47:02
kitchen. Seeing I didn't use microwaves
1:47:04
because they were radioactive and caused cancer.
1:47:06
I thought of the microwave in our pantry, ugly, hidden from
1:47:08
view, and said quietly. I think there might have been a
1:47:11
mistake here. But of course all this attention
1:47:13
also comes with a lot of criticism.
1:47:14
Over the next 24 hours I would gain over 300,000 followers.
1:47:18
I was so stunned by that number it took me quite a bit longer to
1:47:21
realise how many of them were angry.
1:47:22
This crap is so fake lol this woman looks miserable.
1:47:25
Religious cult alert. Ding, Ding, Ding, this is not
1:47:28
real life of a coffee. The next day, Caleb and I scroll
1:47:30
through the comments silently. Wow.
1:47:32
He finally said, that's a lot of angry women.
1:47:34
Which is interesting because, yeah, while some of the comments
1:47:37
might seem a little bit mean, these ones here, they're also
1:47:39
right. You know, she is miserable.
1:47:42
This is fake. This is not her real life.
1:47:44
What follows is a lot of online growth, but also a lot of
1:47:46
critical comments. And when she gets these, Natalie
1:47:49
likes to look through their profiles and get all judgy about
1:47:51
them and their lives. She also gets an offer at this
1:47:54
point from her old college roommate who is doing an
1:47:56
internship at a news company, Reena, who we keep coming back
1:48:01
to. And she asks Natalie if she'll
1:48:03
do an interview with her. But Natalie's like, no, just
1:48:05
ignores her. And Natalie's like, ha ha,
1:48:07
Reena's still an intern. I've got all this big following
1:48:10
now. I'm so much better than her.
1:48:11
And the comparisons start again. Back in seemingly the 1800s,
1:48:15
things have been plodding along. Something is bothering Mary, the
1:48:18
eldest daughter, and she seems off for some reason, but we
1:48:20
don't quite find out what this is yet.
1:48:21
The eldest boy has just turned 18 and is now a man, so Caleb
1:48:27
takes him off into the woods one day and when he comes back he's
1:48:29
like Oh my God. He won't say where he's been or
1:48:32
what he's been doing or anything like that.
1:48:33
Back in the present day flashbacks and Natalie gets
1:48:36
recognised at the grocery shop by a fan only to be caught out
1:48:40
because she's left her six month old kid alone, locked in the car
1:48:44
while she went to do the shopping, which we all know can
1:48:47
be incredibly dangerous. You do not leave kids unattended
1:48:50
in cars, not dogs either. None of that.
1:48:53
On another occasion, she forgets to feed her children until 9:00
1:48:56
PM that night because she's busy filming content and Caleb's mad
1:49:00
at her being like, Oh my God, how could you forget the kids?
1:49:02
But it's like, where were you? You're a parent too, You forgot
1:49:05
your kids as well. It shouldn't all be her job.
1:49:07
And this is when Natalie decides that she needs a nanny.
1:49:10
But Caleb is like, our children don't need a nanny, He replied
1:49:13
immediately. They need a mother.
1:49:14
Or maybe you could just step up and be a parent.
1:49:16
Maybe they also need a father. But eventually he agrees to not
1:49:19
get a nanny, but instead get a full time babysitter who they
1:49:22
end up calling a nanny back in the past though, and Natalie
1:49:25
actually finds herself enjoying being there and being with old
1:49:28
Caleb. Surprisingly, this next passage
1:49:31
feels like it could have been written by Debbie Pearl and it
1:49:34
made me uncomfortable, but here we are.
1:49:35
And me, I think the Lord is happy with me.
1:49:38
I can feel Him all around me, stronger than I ever have in my
1:49:40
life. Sometimes when I'm doing laundry
1:49:42
or getting eggs from the coop, I tilt my expression to catch the
1:49:44
cold winter sunlight. I swear I can feel His breath on
1:49:47
my cheek. When I was a girl, I thought of
1:49:48
the Lord the way other girls in my class thought of crushers.
1:49:51
I imagine the lines of his face. Each night when I fell asleep, I
1:49:54
doodled His name in my notebook in cursive swirling hearts in
1:49:57
glitter gel pen pink. I wondered if He thought of me
1:49:59
as frequently as I thought of Him.
1:50:01
And sometimes, as a reward, I think of such pure thoughts he
1:50:04
would enter my body, filling me with an unbearable pleasure, a
1:50:07
sense of communion so deep and animal and satiating that it
1:50:11
left me slick and panting upon its departure.
1:50:13
I stopped experiencing these moments the day I was married.
1:50:16
But now, miracle of miracles, the feeling has returned.
1:50:19
I feel him everywhere, in the air, in the ground, beneath my
1:50:22
feet. I feel him too, On the evenings,
1:50:23
old Caleb reaches from my hips beneath the quilt, pleasure
1:50:27
beyond imagining, like I'm in a constant state of ascending.
1:50:30
For the first time in my life, I'm being properly satisfied by
1:50:32
a man. I'm not alone.
1:50:34
I'm not stuck, not lost, not forgotten, not punished.
1:50:36
I am here, a chosen one with him.
1:50:39
And I will remain here, wherever here is, until he decides to
1:50:42
take me elsewhere. Sometimes, when I have a moment
1:50:44
to myself, I drop to my knees and let the gratitude hum out of
1:50:47
me in waves. I cry, overcome by the magnitude
1:50:51
of his power and his glories. So Debbie Pearl.
1:50:55
And then when she's been there for two months, she realised she
1:50:57
hasn't got her period once. So she's like, Oh my God, I must
1:50:59
be pregnant. That's the first place her mind
1:51:01
goes. All right, everyone, and welcome
1:51:03
back to Day 2, Part 3. Of trying to film this.
1:51:07
I am so sorry if I. Look a mess and I've just cried
1:51:11
all my makeup off. In a little video I filmed for
1:51:13
my second channel just before this, in which I unboxed this
1:51:18
little beauty which is my cuddle clone of Chyra.
1:51:21
And it's a stuffed animal toy made to look just like her with
1:51:25
all her markings. It's got a little a little tummy
1:51:27
star. It's got her white toes, it's
1:51:29
got her little grey beard and all the floppy tongue.
1:51:33
She's so gorgeous. And yeah, I've just been quite
1:51:36
emotional and I'm trying not to cry again.
1:51:38
I've just had such a cry. Oh, cried all my makeup off.
1:51:41
So I probably look a bit of a mess.
1:51:42
I've tried to sort my face out but honestly I'm just a mess
1:51:47
right now. So I'm going to try and get
1:51:49
through this as best I can. I also realised in the last part
1:51:52
of filming I didn't actually show you the book.
1:51:54
It's here It is Yesteryear by Kara and Claire Burke and it's a
1:51:58
beautiful book with a beautiful, beautiful cover.
1:52:00
And I just kind of wanted to show this off because it is so
1:52:03
completely gorgeous. But yeah, I thought we'd kind of
1:52:08
jump into this now. And sorry if you're listening to
1:52:11
the audio only version and can't see the cover.
1:52:13
All my little little cuddle coup right now, but trust me, they're
1:52:18
gorgeous. And I say day 2, it's actually
1:52:20
been like 5 days since I recorded the last bit because I
1:52:25
went away to go stay with Alex for the weekend, which is
1:52:27
lovely. We had a really nice day out in
1:52:29
Wensleydale, which is gorgeous. We went to Bolton Castle,
1:52:32
absolutely beautiful. We looked around the gardens as
1:52:34
well, and then we went for a really beautiful cycle around
1:52:37
all the countryside up there and it was just, yeah, absolutely
1:52:40
wonderful. And then on Saturday we did some
1:52:43
gardening together, a little community garden.
1:52:45
And yeah, it's absolutely lovely.
1:52:46
I've had a great weekend, but I'm a little bit out of sorts.
1:52:50
And because I've not, I've not been filming this for like 5
1:52:54
days. So yeah, I've just had a little
1:52:56
refresher seeing where I am. Listen back to what I filmed
1:52:59
before and what did you say? Little cuddle COO.
1:53:02
You know, we should just get on with it.
1:53:03
Yeah, we can do that maybe. Oh God, I've already cried all
1:53:06
over her. I love her so much.
1:53:08
So back in the flashbacks of the present.
1:53:10
And Natalie has, at this point in the book, hired a nanny,
1:53:13
Louise, and she's grateful that I would never have to be alone
1:53:17
with my children again, which is something, isn't it?
1:53:20
Natalie's mother at this point worries about Natalie's online
1:53:24
content and what this is going to do to the children because
1:53:26
she's posting the children so much.
1:53:28
And again, this feels very Ruby, Frankie.
1:53:30
It just seems very ostentatious. She had said when we met a week
1:53:34
earlier for coffee. Do you really want so many
1:53:36
people seeing Jessa in a diaper? I shrugged mildly.
1:53:39
I already felt quite certain that my children were far safer
1:53:42
online, their best cells preserved inside the four walls
1:53:44
of my phone like the like little bugs and amber than they could
1:53:48
ever be in the real world. I thought of the woman at the
1:53:50
grocery store, her disturbed expression, even the cruellest
1:53:53
comment I received online was no match for that memory of her
1:53:55
face. I think you just don't
1:53:56
understand how social media works.
1:53:58
But why someone develops the fascination with one of them?
1:54:01
Or with you? You mean like a kidnapper or
1:54:03
something? She nodded nervously.
1:54:05
Mother, I highly doubt I'm important enough for someone to
1:54:07
kidnap. Do you know how many accounts
1:54:09
online have 10s of millions of followers, let alone hundreds of
1:54:12
millions? Yeah, but that's not the point,
1:54:14
is it? No matter how big your platform
1:54:16
is, it only takes one person, and it's your job as a parent to
1:54:20
protect your kids from even the potential of that one person.
1:54:23
You know, like, don't put your kids online.
1:54:25
It's not hard. And I'm currently, as I said
1:54:28
before, staying with my parents and while I'm like in the
1:54:31
process of buying a house. Which long process can take
1:54:34
months. So I'm very, very grateful to
1:54:36
have them here as this kind of back up while I'm in that whole
1:54:41
process and while my life is a bit upside down after losing the
1:54:44
little one. But yeah, like I say, I'm here.
1:54:46
And so obviously in their house there are photos of the
1:54:48
grandkids here, my niece and nephew.
1:54:50
And I noticed while I was filming some extra bits of I
1:54:54
edit over in that corner of the room and I've got my little
1:54:57
computer. Set up over there.
1:54:58
And I was noticing one day as I was filming one of my little
1:55:00
hey, editing me, let me just add a little update to the video
1:55:04
things. There were photos in the
1:55:06
background which were over there of my niece and nephew.
1:55:08
And I was like, crap, I don't want them in the video.
1:55:10
Like, it doesn't matter that they're just tiny things in the
1:55:12
background. Like I don't want people seeing
1:55:14
my niece and nephew. They're kids.
1:55:15
They don't deserve to be online. You know what I mean?
1:55:18
They don't have a choice in the matter.
1:55:20
They're not to this. They're kids.
1:55:21
They can't consent. Like it's just, it's yeah, I'm
1:55:24
not comfortable with it. So I blurred out that entire bit
1:55:26
of my video because I was like, I don't want anyone seeing my
1:55:29
niece and nephew like this. It's just we as adults have a
1:55:33
responsibility to protect the kids in our lives.
1:55:37
And it just, I don't know, I don't know why this is so hard
1:55:40
for some people to understand. It's far easier to just not post
1:55:44
kids online than it is to make a point of posting them.
1:55:46
So I just, yeah, anyway, the way I see it, I guess, is there's
1:55:50
just rarely a good reason for kids to be shown online in any
1:55:54
capacity, especially when that capacity is like family vlogging
1:55:58
or something like that. I would say there's like, I
1:56:02
don't know, it's difficult because like part of me is like,
1:56:04
well, I can understand the need for like child actors in certain
1:56:07
situations, but then again, there's been so much abuse in
1:56:11
that industry and it's messed up so many kids.
1:56:13
That part of me is like, well, is there even a need for that if
1:56:16
it's going to end up with abused kids?
1:56:18
So I, I feel like the need for an accurate representation art
1:56:24
doesn't outweigh a child's need for safety.
1:56:27
You know what I mean? Anyway, blah blah blah, let's
1:56:30
get back to the book. Other than this, Natalie has
1:56:33
been trying to hide the money she makes from Instagram from
1:56:36
Caleb because she says he can't be trusted because, you know,
1:56:40
he's a massive man child. But he finds out how much she's
1:56:43
making. So now she has to come up with
1:56:44
other ways of hiding her income from him.
1:56:47
It's all very, very unhealthy, you know what I mean?
1:56:51
Like if you hadn't married a man child, you wouldn't need to hide
1:56:55
money from him. If you felt safe with him, you
1:56:57
wouldn't need to hide money from him.
1:56:59
The fact that she doesn't trust him with what should be joint
1:57:03
income, yeah, says a lot, doesn't it?
1:57:05
But at the same time, you know, hiding income from your spouse
1:57:09
could very easily be a sign of financial abuse.
1:57:13
So there's new ones to this situation.
1:57:15
We then get the story in the book of hiring Shannon, the
1:57:18
producer, and her immediately being kind of disillusioned by
1:57:21
the whole place in the way of life because it's not what she
1:57:24
expected. I was like 90% sure at this
1:57:26
point that Shannon was just there as a plan to get dirt on
1:57:29
her for an expose, a story or something.
1:57:32
Having now read the book and looking back, I don't actually
1:57:35
think that's why she went into it.
1:57:36
I genuinely think she believed in this lifestyle and she
1:57:40
believed in the brand as a whole and she believed in everything.
1:57:43
And then she became disillusioned and she just kind
1:57:46
of happened to like film stuff along the way and photograph
1:57:50
stuff and be like, crap, Like, I'm concerned by what I'm
1:57:53
seeing. Maybe the world should see this
1:57:55
too, you know? So I don't think she went in
1:57:57
with an evil plan. Even if she did, was it evil?
1:58:00
Like, anyway, Shannon is a very, very interesting, complex
1:58:06
character in this that I wish I had more time to kind of go into
1:58:10
and talk about, but this video is already going to be long
1:58:12
enough. So I'll let you discuss her in
1:58:14
the comments because fascinating, Really, really
1:58:17
fascinating. What is interesting to me as
1:58:19
well is how naive Natalie is throughout this whole thing.
1:58:21
Like, she doesn't really see anything wrong with Shannon
1:58:25
filming everything she does, and she doesn't really see anything
1:58:28
wrong with just giving Shannon the passwords to all her
1:58:30
accounts and giving her access to every thing.
1:58:32
You know, like even during her father in
1:58:59
But then again, you can't really judge someone too harshly for
1:59:02
being naive. But then at the same time like
1:59:05
Shannons only showing the. Truth.
1:59:07
Of the situation eventually so it's not like she's doing
1:59:10
anything wrong It again complex, nuanced love this lot to discuss
1:59:15
here. It's during this point in the
1:59:16
campaign that I saw Doug as a sort of like Donald Trump type
1:59:21
character. I've mentioned this before but
1:59:22
this is where it really kind of becomes obvious.
1:59:25
So Natalie's fans call her a Nazi for being associated with
1:59:29
him and after one particular campaign speech, Shannon says. 2
1:59:33
hours later we were walking back to the car, moving in a slow
1:59:36
March along with the crowd, people with folding chairs and
1:59:39
soup them says and rolled up confederate flags tucked under
1:59:42
their armpits. That was terrifying.
1:59:44
Shannon said quietly next to me. I'll ask.
1:59:47
I laughed crisply. You're telling me, try being
1:59:50
legally bound to him. No, Natalie, that speech was
1:59:53
terrifying. I mean, I know your
1:59:55
father-in-law is intense. I always knew he was intense,
1:59:59
but that was don't you think that was different?
2:00:01
I sighed. Try to think back on the speech.
2:00:03
Something something coastal cities, the world so clearly
2:00:06
losing its way, nuclear families disintegrating and the children
2:00:09
and their children. My mother gasped in memory.
2:00:12
The children, the children and the women.
2:00:14
And suddenly the men and the women and suddenly the men.
2:00:18
But Doug had spoken so quickly, and the speaker system echoing
2:00:21
and reverberating in on itself had warped everything so
2:00:24
quickly. America, Doug roared in my head.
2:00:27
Still America. America, how long have we?
2:00:29
How long till we, America, Oh, where are you?
2:00:32
It was a combination of 1000 conversations I'd heard
2:00:35
throughout my life. The only difference in my mind
2:00:37
was that it had been dumped down a bit and maybe sharpened at the
2:00:40
tip. He's going to win, Natalie
2:00:42
Shannon said when I didn't say anything.
2:00:44
You realise, is that right, that he's going to win?
2:00:46
I rolled my eyes. It's a performance, Shannon.
2:00:49
It's political theatre, not real.
2:00:50
How is the political election not real?
2:00:53
I don't mean that. I just mean I gestured at the
2:00:55
crowd around us. All of this, the showmanship,
2:00:58
the bravado. And Shannon says to her, do you
2:01:00
honestly think there are no consequences to performance?
2:01:04
There's other things as well where, like, Doug makes a lot
2:01:07
of, like, white supremacist references and claims and, you
2:01:11
know, dancers around those talking points in his speeches.
2:01:14
And, you know, it's very clear why people are calling him a
2:01:16
Nazi. He makes a lot of fascist
2:01:18
claims. But again, Natalie kind of
2:01:20
doesn't realise this. And she definitely doesn't
2:01:22
realise it's a bad thing because this is what she's grown up
2:01:25
around. This is what she's used to.
2:01:26
This is what she's surrounded by in her life.
2:01:28
She's just like, yeah, it's just politics.
2:01:30
And if it sounds a bit scary, that's because it's just
2:01:32
theatre. She doesn't.
2:01:34
I understand the consequences of what she's seeing and what she's
2:01:38
a part of and what she is essentially endorsing.
2:01:41
So meanwhile, Shannon has been getting closer to everyone in
2:01:44
the family, everyone except Natalie.
2:01:47
This ends up with her doing things like encouraging the
2:01:49
other nannies to ask for a raise.
2:01:51
She teaches the kids about all sorts of stuff they didn't know
2:01:53
before, like the fact oceans exist.
2:01:56
Wild. There's oh, my God.
2:01:58
There's a whole other, like, supply in here that I don't
2:02:00
think I've even really touched on.
2:02:02
But it's about, like, Caleb homeschooling the kids with,
2:02:05
like, his own curriculum and how he just, he doesn't educate them
2:02:08
properly. And yeah, I'm thinking about
2:02:10
like, the Duggars here, Carissa Collins, because we've all seen
2:02:13
the curriculums they use. If you can even call curriculums
2:02:16
at this point and how like a lot of it is less based around fact
2:02:21
and having kids reach the milestones that should be at
2:02:24
with like, you know, basics of like reading and maths and so
2:02:27
on. And but instead, like Caleb
2:02:29
focuses a lot on pushing these conspiracy theories on the kids
2:02:32
and they don't know the these basic things like the fact that
2:02:35
there are oceans, you know, wild.
2:02:38
Anyway. And one of the other things that
2:02:40
Shannon eventually does is seduces Caleb as then she
2:02:44
becomes involved with him. Natalie calls it a seduction
2:02:47
from Shannon's part. But Shannon's 19 at this point,
2:02:51
maybe maybe 20. And she's 21 by the time she
2:02:54
leaves employment. So she's still young.
2:02:57
She's basically a kid. She's young, she's
2:02:59
impressionable, whatever. Caleb's in his 30s, mid 30s.
2:03:03
I don't think she was the one seducing him.
2:03:05
Plus he's a boss at Power Dynamics.
2:03:07
You know, at this point in the flashbacks, Natalie is 6 months
2:03:11
pregnant with her 6th baby. So this is all happening not
2:03:13
long before the book starts. Tonight, Caleb told me what
2:03:16
happened with Shannon. I was six months pregnant with
2:03:18
our sixth child, and I didn't sleep a wink.
2:03:20
I lay there in the darkness, staring at the ceiling while my
2:03:23
husband snored peacefully next to me.
2:03:24
The sound made smoke pour out of my ears, but of course, he slept
2:03:28
peacefully. As soon as Caleb told me what
2:03:30
was going on, what was happening under my nose, he had
2:03:33
effectively handed the problem over to me.
2:03:35
That was, after all, how all good marriages worked.
2:03:38
My husband moved instinctually through the world.
2:03:41
He did things he wanted to do and didn't do the things he
2:03:43
didn't want to do. And I, happy wife, happy life,
2:03:46
trailed beatifically in front of and behind him, sweeping the
2:03:50
ground clean for him to walk forward and then just as quickly
2:03:53
speak, sweeping his messy footsteps away.
2:03:56
That's what they told me to do, right?
2:03:58
All those women who came before me, be a mother, be a wife, keep
2:04:01
the household clean. Liars.
2:04:03
Every Christian woman I had ever met had been a big fat, lying
2:04:06
bastard. Lord have mercy on their big fat
2:04:09
lying bastard souls. Caleb was in love with Shannon.
2:04:13
That's what he told me the night before.
2:04:15
He was in love, truly in love, for the first time in his life.
2:04:18
At that moment, in his little monologue, I did flinch, I'll
2:04:21
admit that. Not like you noticed.
2:04:23
He was too busy landing the final blow.
2:04:26
I'm moving to New York, he said in the darkness, practically
2:04:29
breathless with excitement. I'm starting a new life.
2:04:32
She really challenges me, you know, she pushes me on my ideas.
2:04:36
Our conversations are incredible for a lot.
2:04:38
Isn't it like he's such a man child.
2:04:41
I thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly dislike Caleb a lot,
2:04:45
Natalie. And at this point I said to her
2:04:47
credit, confront Shannon like this.
2:04:49
I stepped inside her bedroom and shut the door behind me.
2:04:52
I smiled softly. I'm sure you can imagine why I
2:04:55
came up here. There it was.
2:04:57
A whole world spinning in her expression.
2:04:59
A long moment passed, and then she sat down on her bed.
2:05:01
Yeah, she said. I guess I can, he said.
2:05:04
You're moving to New York together.
2:05:05
Christ, Shannon muttered. That is Yikes.
2:05:09
My husband is, I said, and paused, took a moment to collect
2:05:13
myself, smooth the wrinkles of my fury into place.
2:05:16
He can be gullible. So if there was any point, I
2:05:18
paused again. I needed to be careful.
2:05:20
Maybe she was recording the conversation.
2:05:22
Not likely, but not impossible. So Natalie does have some
2:05:25
awareness. I'm aware that it's
2:05:27
inappropriate. He's your employer.
2:05:29
And so if there was any pressure on your part or if he promised
2:05:31
you any money. So I'm glad she did this.
2:05:34
And Shannon says no, he didn't pressure her.
2:05:37
But for the first time in this book, I had to give Natalie
2:05:40
credit here for asking about this.
2:05:41
First and foremost, I thought this was great.
2:05:43
I thought this was commendable. Other than this, they start
2:05:46
being awful to each other. It all gets worse from here on
2:05:49
out, and Natalie just gets worse and worse and worse.
2:05:53
As we'll go on to see. Shannon tells Natalie that she's
2:05:57
absolutely awful because she treats Caleb like he's stupid.
2:06:00
But he is, and that she should she, Natalie should be grateful
2:06:04
for everything that Caleb has created, even though Natalie did
2:06:08
all of it. Wild.
2:06:10
But again, like I, I yes, I understand where Shannon's
2:06:13
coming from because she is also kind of brainwashed.
2:06:16
You know, she thought this was his perfect life, this wonderful
2:06:19
thing. And she's clearly from this
2:06:20
background as well, where even though she's a bit more out of
2:06:23
it than Natalie was, and she's a bit more educated and she's a
2:06:27
bit more aware, she's clearly still from this background where
2:06:30
she thinks men are the providers and Bill doesn't do everything.
2:06:33
Like, so she just assumes Caleb's built it all and Caleb
2:06:36
did everything when in reality he did nothing.
2:06:38
It was all Natalie. So you can't.
2:06:40
Really, I mean you can fault Shannon for thinking that but
2:06:43
you can't necessarily blame her because it's her upbringing and
2:06:46
her background and how she's been socialised and brought up,
2:06:49
you know? But anyway, Natalie then calls
2:06:53
Shannon a whore and a home wrecker.
2:06:56
Again, I understand her anger. If I was Natalie, I'd probably
2:06:59
do the same in her position, but just objectively, not really a
2:07:03
fan of a 19 year old child being blamed for this, you know?
2:07:09
But I understand the emotions. I understand the anger.
2:07:12
I get it, yeah. Overall though, like I know
2:07:15
they're fictional, but I did just find myself wanting to
2:07:17
scream at these two women for having like this sort of fight
2:07:21
and rivalry and nastiness towards each other over a
2:07:24
mediocre little man child who is completely not worth it, you
2:07:28
know? Anyway, this is where things get
2:07:32
absolutely horrific and Natalie tries to strangle Shannon.
2:07:35
It kind of just comes out of nowhere.
2:07:38
It happens. Like there's this attack, she
2:07:41
eventually let's go, but still, that's pretty horrific.
2:07:44
Turns out this whole incident was way worse than I even
2:07:48
realised when I first reading, but we'll get to it when we get
2:07:51
another revelation later. There was something that I
2:07:54
missed in this passage on my first reading that, yeah, I just
2:07:58
for some reason glossed over it. And he had a whole other meaning
2:08:01
and made me see this scene in a whole the way.
2:08:03
And I think it's a really good testament to how this book is
2:08:05
written and I guess the efficacy of unreliable narrators, because
2:08:11
we're seeing this from Natalie's perspective, right?
2:08:13
We're being told about it from her perspective.
2:08:16
So of course, you gloss over the details that she wants us to
2:08:18
gloss over. We don't see them as a, as they
2:08:21
are and so on. Like she misses out these
2:08:23
important parts. So then later when we're
2:08:26
listening to Shannon's side of things, we're like, wait, did
2:08:29
that actually happen? Then you go back and reread it
2:08:31
with the context that, you know, you're like, oh, crap.
2:08:33
So we'll discuss that when we get to it.
2:08:35
But just bear in mind, there's something missing from this
2:08:40
section on purpose, you know, And, but Natalie then goes into
2:08:44
full damage control mode and she calls up Doug and asks him for
2:08:48
help. She knows that if Caleb does
2:08:50
leave her, she will have absolutely nothing because of
2:08:52
the prenuptial agreements and because the farm that she has
2:08:55
built is all in his name, her whole brand and everything.
2:08:59
All the money she's made from her work will go to Caleb.
2:09:02
How unfair is that? And at this point, she has
2:09:05
managed to syphon off $70,000 in savings, which I mean, to
2:09:09
someone like me, that's a life changer.
2:09:12
You know, someone who is from a working class background who is
2:09:15
still like, you know, I'd say I'm like in the middle classes
2:09:20
now, but still at a point where you, like, you live paycheck to
2:09:22
paycheck and you know, saving for a house and stuff, it takes
2:09:25
time. It absolutely does.
2:09:27
So something like having $70,000 in savings, unimaginable to
2:09:31
someone like me, life changer. However, to someone like
2:09:35
Natalie, who has five children to look after, that's not money
2:09:39
that will last long, you know? So we cut back to the present
2:09:43
slash past, if you will, that the whole 1800s looking
2:09:47
farmhouse timeline and things have been happening.
2:09:50
Maeve, the youngest daughter, is now seriously ill with a really,
2:09:53
really bad fever. Meanwhile, Mary has a little
2:09:56
crush on a local man with a beard whose name we don't learn.
2:10:00
We later find out that's for a good reason, but Mary has a
2:10:03
crush on him. We then cut back to another
2:10:06
flashback in chapter 50 and we learn, or at least it seems like
2:10:10
the Q&A bits that we were reading in the very.
2:10:12
First part of the book. If you remember then they were
2:10:14
actually questions and rehearsed answers that the new PR team
2:10:18
that Doug has hired had sent over to Natalie for her to like
2:10:22
rehearse and answer. So that any drama that might
2:10:25
arise from this any, you know, if she's asked questions by the
2:10:28
press or whatever, she has these rehearsed answers that are PR
2:10:32
friendly. And that's.
2:10:34
Oh, I'm dropping my phone. That's what she was doing in
2:10:36
that first part of the book. She was rehearsing these answers
2:10:39
with the PR team back in the 1800s.
2:10:41
And Mary's no really worried about Maeve.
2:10:43
And so Mary is like to Natalie, you're going to have to go and
2:10:47
get a doctor. Yeah.
2:10:48
So Maeve helps her pack food. And then Natalie sets off on the
2:10:53
lookout for a doctor, but also with the intention of never,
2:10:55
ever coming back to the farm. I said at this point and this is
2:10:58
one of my. Like a big.
2:10:59
Criticism, criticism of the book.
2:11:02
But one of my main criticisms is that I do wish we'd had a little
2:11:05
more in these 1800 scenes. I wish we got to know a little
2:11:09
bit more about old Caleb. I wish we got to know in more
2:11:12
detail about his relationship with Natalie and what that was
2:11:14
like on a day-to-day basis. Like tell us more about him and
2:11:17
how he treats her like that. I wish that can't speak.
2:11:21
I wish that had been developed a little bit more, but that's OK.
2:11:25
I'll, I'll talk more about my criticisms of the book at the
2:11:28
end of this video because there are a few.
2:11:30
It's not a perfect book, but it's still very good.
2:11:32
Anyway, back to the flashbacks in our time.
2:11:35
And, you know, the whole PR crisis time.
2:11:36
Natalie wakes up 1 morning and tells Caleb that Shannon has
2:11:40
been gathering evidence on them and doing stuff behind their
2:11:43
backs, like giving Clementine, the eldest daughter, a phone
2:11:46
against Natalie's wishes and all sorts of stuff like that.
2:11:49
Caleb, being the useless man child that he is, simply snorts
2:11:53
and goes back to sleep. He doesn't give a down.
2:11:56
And then all hell breaks loose. Caleb starts getting emails like
2:11:59
this and he finally realises this might be a problem his.
2:12:02
So the emails he gets are things like I'm reaching out from Pop
2:12:05
Weekly magazine for comment on the assault allegations that
2:12:08
have recently before. Another e-mail dinged onto the
2:12:11
notification screen looking for comment and then another press
2:12:15
inquiry. Natalie, Caleb said.
2:12:17
You have to believe me, I didn't hurt Shannon.
2:12:19
I didn't do anything to her, I swear.
2:12:21
Shut up, I snarled. There was no time to explain to
2:12:24
Caleb what had happened. While Mama was cleaning up your
2:12:27
mess, darling, she made a little oopsie herself.
2:12:29
I threw the phone at Caleb's chest.
2:12:31
It hit him and he let out a squeak of fear.
2:12:33
So at this point, like Caleb hears abuse and assault
2:12:36
allegations or whatever and thinks he must be the one
2:12:39
accused, not realising it's Natalie again.
2:12:42
Feel a little bit of the whole, like, patriarchal sexism is
2:12:46
coming in there like. But you know, what can we say?
2:12:48
Men usually are the ones assaulting women, so I guess at
2:12:51
least he made the right assumption there, or the wrong
2:12:53
assumption. I don't know what I'm saying
2:12:55
anymore. I'm tired, I'm emotional.
2:12:58
We're just getting through this together, Okay?
2:12:59
We can do this, I said. At this point, I can't say I
2:13:02
feel an ounce of pity for any of these people, but damn is it
2:13:05
entertaining because the drama at this point, Shannon goes
2:13:10
public with Natalie's assault and it is all over the news.
2:13:13
She's giving interviews and Natalie, Caleb and Doug, like I
2:13:16
say, go into like mass PR mode. Doesn't help them that while she
2:13:21
was working for them, Shannon took like a crap tonne of photos
2:13:23
and videos while she was there that she's sharing too.
2:13:26
So all these claims she has of like, you know, illegally using
2:13:28
pesticides and claiming the veggies, organic mistreatment of
2:13:32
the animals, mistreatment of the children and all this like
2:13:35
stuff. Shannon has videos of it all.
2:13:38
Again, she's only showing the truth though.
2:13:40
She's not making stuff up. She's only showing what's there.
2:13:42
So is she really the bad guy in this?
2:13:46
No, she's not. Not at all.
2:13:48
But it is. Crazy because this is such a
2:13:50
well written book and the fact it's from Natalie's perspective,
2:13:53
I almost found myself sympathising with her at times.
2:13:56
And at times I was like, yeah, you know what?
2:13:58
If someone slept with my husband after living in those crappy
2:14:01
circumstances of like having to put up with him for all those
2:14:03
years, I can't say for sure I wouldn't snap and be angry
2:14:06
either. Like, I like to think I
2:14:08
wouldn't, but no, maybe I would. I mean, I wouldn't do what
2:14:11
Natalie did, as we'll find out, but I think I'd be angry too.
2:14:15
Maybe not strangling and assaulting in the way she did,
2:14:18
but definitely angry. Like, again, I can understand
2:14:21
maybe some of the name calling, even though objectively I don't
2:14:24
like it. I can understand why in that
2:14:26
heightened emotional state it might just come out, you know?
2:14:29
But you know, at the same time, obviously, objectively, I'm
2:14:33
hypercritical of people like Natalie in the real world and
2:14:36
their lifestyles and their ideologies.
2:14:38
So obviously I found myself siding with Shannon and knowing
2:14:41
that like, yeah, she was completely in the right here.
2:14:43
She was a victim in this and she's only exposing the truth
2:14:46
about them. So but the fact that you even
2:14:48
start to feel any empathy for Natalie, I think is a real
2:14:51
testament to how well this book is written.
2:14:53
And also, like, I, I mean, it's a testament to how complex the
2:14:57
characters are definitely. But also like I, I find.
2:15:01
It's very realistic too, because.
2:15:03
I I found this happening in real life as well.
2:15:05
So I'm trying to like explain this.
2:15:07
I'm going off script here, but for example, when I was making
2:15:10
that big, the seven hour long video on Paul and Morgan, for
2:15:12
example, after watching literally hundreds of hours of
2:15:15
their content and just submerging myself in like the
2:15:18
last 10 years of their life. I did that for like a month
2:15:21
straight basically. And I found myself having so
2:15:25
much, like, empathy for them as people and really feeling for
2:15:28
them at times. And it's such a confusing place
2:15:30
to be in where you're like, I see them as real people,
2:15:33
understand them as real people. And I see that in some
2:15:36
circumstances, they are the victims.
2:15:38
And in some circumstances, like, you know, they deserve a lot of
2:15:42
compassion for the things they've been through.
2:15:44
So for example, Morgan's fertility struggles and things
2:15:48
like that, like you really, really do feel for them.
2:15:50
You have so much compassion for them, but at the same time
2:15:53
you're like, oh, but then they give you whiplash because one
2:15:56
minute you go from be like, Oh my God, I just want to give them
2:15:58
a hug to like them spewing racist and homophobic nonsense
2:16:02
and transphobic nonsense, like, and all this horrific stuff
2:16:05
online. You're like, oh, oh, Oh, no, no,
2:16:08
no. So it's interesting how you can
2:16:10
feel so much for people, but at the same time be so critical of
2:16:14
the objectively bad parts of them, you know, And I feel like
2:16:17
that's what it is with Natalie. We spend so long in her
2:16:20
perspective and in her head. We start to empathise with her
2:16:23
on these certain bits. But at the same time,
2:16:25
objectively you are so critical of these bad, bad things she's
2:16:30
done and continues to do. So it's in that sense, it's a
2:16:32
really damn well written book and it's really realistic and
2:16:36
it's it's like real life and it's the things you actually
2:16:40
feel when you're watching these influences.
2:16:42
And so for that I just excellent, excellent writing,
2:16:45
really excellent writing, fantastic.
2:16:49
Like I say, the author really shows a really good fundamental
2:16:52
understanding of who these funny influences are and what
2:16:55
motivates them. And some people I've seen the
2:16:59
view reviews say that they find it a little one-dimensional.
2:17:02
It's like, Oh, no, little influences, like, and I'm like,
2:17:05
but you know what, The number of parallels I can draw between
2:17:08
this fictional Fundy influencer and the ones that I've covered
2:17:12
over the last eight years or so, like, I do think it's quite an
2:17:15
accurate take on so many aspects of their life, you know, it's.
2:17:20
Yeah, Anyway, where were we? So in the midst of all the PR
2:17:25
crisis, Natalie tries to turn to her mum for support.
2:17:28
And instead her mum just, like, really opens up to her about her
2:17:31
own life and where she is and how she's been going through a
2:17:34
lot of ideological changes herself at the minute.
2:17:36
It's one of the big things that her mum tells her is how her and
2:17:40
Abigail remember the sister, the other daughter had been going to
2:17:43
a new and more progressive church and how she, she opens up
2:17:47
and she says that she's actually been lying her whole life about
2:17:50
what happened with the girl's dad.
2:17:51
He didn't die, obviously. And Natalie's, yeah, I knew
2:17:54
that. But it also turns out he didn't
2:17:56
cheat on the mum. She cheated on him.
2:17:58
And then instead of, like, running away with the affair
2:18:00
partner, she realised, actually, I don't want to be with a man.
2:18:03
I don't want to live with a man. I like being alone.
2:18:05
I like being single. I like being a single parent.
2:18:08
I like being a single woman. I don't want a man in my life.
2:18:11
And since she's been going to this new progressive church and
2:18:15
Abigail's been dating the pastor, she's like, you know
2:18:17
what? I think I was wrong about a lot
2:18:19
of the things I was brought up with and a lot of the things
2:18:21
that the old church I went to taught me and a lot the things
2:18:23
that I passed on shoot girls. And I'm I'm starting to like see
2:18:27
this whole new world. And she becomes a lot more
2:18:29
progressive about issues like gay marriage and stuff like
2:18:33
that. And Natalie is shocked and
2:18:36
appalled. And she's like, how dare you
2:18:37
think this. How dare you have cheated on
2:18:39
dad. How dare you want to be single?
2:18:41
How dare you now be supporting gay marriage?
2:18:44
How dare you with all of this stuff.
2:18:46
And she tells her mother that she's being taken advantage of
2:18:49
by her new church and she's been taken adventure by the pastor
2:18:52
that abigails dating and and one of the things she tells her mum
2:18:55
is that you're too nice. And in response, her mum says,
2:18:59
do you know what, Natalie? I I don't think I am too nice.
2:19:03
In fact, I'm very proud of how nice I am.
2:19:05
I think it's a good thing. And if I'm being honest, I am
2:19:08
very disappointed with how not nice you are.
2:19:11
Mother, you have no idea how hard things are right now if you
2:19:14
just listen to me. And here is where the strangest
2:19:17
moment of my entire life, my mother, that good Christian
2:19:19
woman, snapped. No, she shouted so loudly that I
2:19:23
held the phone away from my ear. You listen to me, young lady.
2:19:26
This is your problem. This has always been your
2:19:29
problem. You think kindness is some silly
2:19:31
frivolous side virtue when it is in fact the whole damn thing.
2:19:36
I'd never heard her say a curse word in my life.
2:19:38
Mother, I spluttered. I just, She roared in return,
2:19:41
her anger vibrating through the phone like some like some
2:19:44
energetic hex. Why is it so hard for you to be
2:19:47
kind? And at this point I'm like, good
2:19:49
on her, love this, love this for her, love the mother.
2:19:53
I will say the mother and Abigail, great characters love
2:19:56
them. They're great and I like their
2:19:57
arch. I like who they become really
2:20:00
damn impressive. And I love that she called her
2:20:02
out for this. I think it's great.
2:20:03
Again, though, you do feel for Natalie a bit here.
2:20:06
You feel sorry for her. She is going through a crappy
2:20:08
time and she does kind of need her mum, but at the same time,
2:20:11
she's just reaping the consequences of her own actions.
2:20:13
So just, oh, you feel so many conflicting things back in the
2:20:18
past. And Natalie is walking through
2:20:19
the wood when she eventually stumbles across something.
2:20:22
A little wooden Hut with a blue truck outside and a cabin that
2:20:26
has a sign of the front door saying manosphere.
2:20:28
And I was like, what the hell? So clearly this isn't the past
2:20:32
and is, or at least this is what I was thinking.
2:20:36
I thought it was that theory we came up with earlier where isn't
2:20:39
the past, but it's like the future, but it's like they're
2:20:42
living in the past. That that was my theory earlier
2:20:46
on. That's what I was like.
2:20:47
It's got to be that right now. And again, I said, as long as we
2:20:51
don't get it, it's all a dream. I'm going to be happy.
2:20:53
And I will tell you now it's not an it's old dream.
2:20:55
So I was happy. I think it's a good, solid
2:20:58
reveal. We're back in the present day
2:21:00
and Shannon is telling her story on TV.
2:21:03
And it's interesting because as much as Natalie is criticised
2:21:09
for putting on this front of like, you know, pretending to be
2:21:12
someone she isn't, Shannon kind of does the same thing too, in a
2:21:15
way. So at this point, she's changed
2:21:17
her hair and clothes to look less alternative and more
2:21:20
trustworthy to the public. So even even though the story
2:21:23
that she's telling is entirely the truth, it's interesting that
2:21:26
she has to or she feels still she has to appear a certain way
2:21:30
to be more credible. You know, if she'd stayed the
2:21:32
way she was with facial piercings and pink hair and
2:21:35
dressing the way she did, it's interesting that she feels and
2:21:38
that others told her, the public probably wouldn't have taken her
2:21:42
as seriously and wouldn't have believed her, which is obviously
2:21:45
sad. And that's something we should
2:21:47
be critical of the public for. And it's sad that she felt she
2:21:49
had to do that, but it just. Yeah, interesting, isn't it?
2:21:53
Again, all these little things, like, I think it's so nuanced
2:21:56
and well thought out. And there's so many little
2:21:58
things we can discuss about this book.
2:21:59
It's great. So like I said, the story she's
2:22:02
telling is the truth. And she talks about how when she
2:22:04
was 19, she started working like, ranch.
2:22:06
She's 21 now. Caleb's 35.
2:22:09
So like I said earlier, their affair, if you can call it that,
2:22:12
is pretty damn creepy on his part.
2:22:14
Other than this, she brings up the things you mentioned before,
2:22:17
her concerns about the animal, animal abuse, the kids not
2:22:20
wanting to be filmed, not having a proper education, and all of
2:22:24
which anger Caleb and Natalie who are watching this on TV.
2:22:27
But again, it's accurate. So it's also during this time
2:22:31
that Shannon talks about the attack by Natalie.
2:22:34
And as I alluded to earlier, it seems there might be more to it
2:22:38
than we got from Natalie's perspective, something I missed
2:22:41
on a first read. And the thing I alluded to
2:22:43
earlier is that when Natalie strangled Shannon, when she
2:22:47
finally. Got off her.
2:22:49
She was literally straddling her as she strangled her, and
2:22:53
Shannon's jeans were pushed down by the time Natalie got off her.
2:22:56
So she'd been wearing jeans at the start and they were pushed
2:22:59
down, like down to her knees by the time Natalie got off.
2:23:03
In the interview, Shannon says how she felt violated and the
2:23:06
implication is she may have been sexually assaulted or raped by
2:23:09
Natalie in the attack. This was obviously downplayed in
2:23:13
Natalie's remuneration of the event, and it was just jeans
2:23:19
were down. That was it.
2:23:21
That's all we got in the original retelling of what
2:23:25
happened from Natalie's perspective.
2:23:27
Because Natalie obviously is downplaying it.
2:23:28
She's not going to tell us everything.
2:23:30
She's this unreliable narrator who obviously wants to make
2:23:32
herself look good and like the victim.
2:23:34
But now Shannon's just laying it all out and it's just
2:23:38
disgusting. I'll be honest, it was at this
2:23:40
point, all my sympathy for Natalie kind of went out the
2:23:43
window and it was like all this like empathy and compassion I'd
2:23:47
been building up. I was like, well, I know she's
2:23:49
in the wrong, but I can see gone at this point.
2:23:51
I was like monster. But not only was I shocked that
2:23:55
it had happened and like shocked that Natalie did that, I was
2:23:59
shocked that I missed it. And the fact that, like I said,
2:24:03
being from Natalie's perspective and her being this unreliable
2:24:05
narrator, we, we were, I guess kind of meant to gloss over and
2:24:09
not understand how serious it was.
2:24:11
But I, I was so shocked. I was like, I had to go back and
2:24:14
reread and I was like, Oh my. Like the implication is there.
2:24:19
The admission that her genes were down were there, but.
2:24:23
It is so. Easy to miss and I think that's
2:24:26
kind of very telling of society as a general like society in
2:24:33
general, isn't it? We've spent so long hearing
2:24:37
about stories of rape and sexual assault from perpetrators who
2:24:42
are downplaying what happened and telling as well this was
2:24:44
some really rape, It wasn't serious.
2:24:46
She wanted it, she deserved it. Like when we spend so long
2:24:51
hearing from the perpetrators and them downplaying it, it just
2:24:57
becomes so normalised that we do.
2:24:59
Like, we stop looking for these red flags and we just gloss over
2:25:02
it. And I think again, also because
2:25:04
we weren't necessarily expecting it from a woman to a woman
2:25:07
because that that isn't the norm.
2:25:09
Again, I think that's why it's easy to kind of gloss over it.
2:25:13
Maybe if Caleb had been the one attacking Shannon and he'd had
2:25:18
this throwaway line about her jeans were down, maybe we would
2:25:22
have picked up on it. Maybe I would have picked up on
2:25:23
it more. I think this was like showing me
2:25:26
my own bias and my own blinders, and it's made me more aware of
2:25:31
that and want to change that, You know, and I know this is a
2:25:33
fictional story, but I think these are lessons that we can
2:25:36
learn and apply to our real life, you know?
2:25:38
Oh, sorry, baby, you knows, then these are lessons that we can
2:25:41
apply to our real life. Like, like I say, yeah.
2:25:44
I think if it was Caleb attacking Shannon and that Jeans
2:25:47
line of being in there, I'd have zeroed in on it and been like,
2:25:50
well, we know what the implications of that are.
2:25:52
And I I'd have been much more on it.
2:25:54
But the fact it was a woman doing it to another woman, I
2:25:57
absolutely just glossed over it. Didn't think that hard, didn't
2:26:01
read into it. And then you get this
2:26:03
revelation. You're shocked, even though the
2:26:06
implication was there all along. And yeah, it's something I'm
2:26:11
definitely knowing, like it's something I understand is a
2:26:15
fault within me that I miss that.
2:26:17
And I'm glad that it's been pointed out to me in this way.
2:26:20
And it's something that I want to make sure I do better on in
2:26:23
my real life going forward, you know?
2:26:26
And again, I love a book that challenges me and makes me think
2:26:29
about my behaviour, my preconceptions, the way I read
2:26:34
things, the way interpret things.
2:26:36
I think it's fantastic. Really, really do.
2:26:38
Cannot fault it for this. The other thing is that this all
2:26:42
kind of makes sense within the context of Natalie.
2:26:44
So this is something that I think I, I'm pretty sure I
2:26:47
mentioned when I filmed a few days back, It's only like an
2:26:51
hour ago for you guys, but there was a scene in the beginning of
2:26:54
the book that I mentioned I wanted to come back to now.
2:26:57
I wasn't going to talk about it then.
2:26:58
I want to talk about it now. Do you remember when Natalie, do
2:27:03
you remember the chapters when Natalie first went to college
2:27:05
and she had that night when she was drinking and it was her
2:27:08
first and only time having alcohol.
2:27:10
And her and her roommate went out with some other girls and
2:27:13
they they had a good time and it was fine.
2:27:14
And then Natalie got grumpy and she went back to the room early
2:27:17
and she tried to go to sleep. Well, something happened in that
2:27:21
room that I want to talk about now.
2:27:25
So the first night when drunk, Natalie was already in bed at
2:27:29
this time, and Natalie's roommate Rena brought a man
2:27:33
back. And Reena was drunk.
2:27:36
The man was drunk. Natalie was drunk.
2:27:39
Reena and the man thought Natalie was asleep, but she
2:27:42
wasn't. And Reena and the man, she was
2:27:46
into the man, but then he did something to her that Reena
2:27:50
didn't like. And Reena specifically asked him
2:27:54
to stop and not do that. We we don't know what it was
2:27:57
because it's all in the dark and Natalie's just hearing this.
2:27:59
But he did something. Rena didn't like it.
2:28:01
She asked him to stop and she specifically said it hurt.
2:28:06
He then asked if he should leave, but she was like no, no,
2:28:09
I don't, don't want you to. And he then continued to have
2:28:13
sex with her. But it was clear that she was
2:28:16
still in pain during this time, and she specifically asked him
2:28:19
to slow down. Because you're hurting me.
2:28:23
It's not clear whether he did or not, but when he left, Rena
2:28:28
immediately, just like, left the room and was clearly in a bit of
2:28:31
a state, presumedly to get to the bathroom.
2:28:34
And Natalie at this point is only thinking about herself and
2:28:36
how traumatic listening to someone have sex was for her.
2:28:39
She doesn't realise that Rena had been hurt by this man and
2:28:43
had to ask him to stop. He then continued to hurt her
2:28:46
and she she had to ask him again to stop doing that.
2:28:50
And it's unclear whether he did because he definitely continued
2:28:52
to have sex with her until he'd finished and then he left.
2:28:56
But there's no indication of if he actually listened to her or
2:29:00
not and if she was OK with it or she felt violated or anything
2:29:04
like that. All Natalie cares about is, Oh
2:29:07
no, I had to listen to this. And then she throws up over the
2:29:10
side of the bed and the focus is entirely on Natalie.
2:29:15
She only cares how this made her feel.
2:29:17
She doesn't understand the significance of her having to
2:29:20
tell this man to stop because he's hurting her twice.
2:29:24
So later, Natalie told her friends about this, and she
2:29:26
calls him a predator and she says he does.
2:29:29
He did these things I didn't like, and when I asked him to
2:29:31
stop, he didn't. And at this point, Natalie
2:29:35
absolutely lost it on Rena. And she calls her a liar.
2:29:38
And she's like, you're making this up.
2:29:40
You wanted it. And she says all these
2:29:42
absolutely horrible things to Rena.
2:29:45
And like I say, since we only saw this incident through Anne
2:29:48
and the Shannon incident through Natalie's perspective, even when
2:29:53
there are plenty of red flags that we can see now that the
2:29:56
genes been down the straddling in the Shannon incident that
2:30:00
repeatedly asking him to stop and saying it hurts in the Rena
2:30:03
incident because we're only seeing it from Natalie's
2:30:06
perspective. And she thinks like especially
2:30:09
with the Rena one, she's like, no, no, we can't have been
2:30:12
assault because blah, blah. And like all her things looking
2:30:15
back now, we can be like, oh, it seems Natalie doesn't really
2:30:20
have a full understanding of consent.
2:30:23
And that again makes me without her versions of events and kind
2:30:27
of trust Rena when she says what happened to her was assault and
2:30:31
for Shannon when she says what happened to her made her feel
2:30:34
violated and so on like. And so because of all this,
2:30:37
obviously I found myself supporting Shannon Arena most in
2:30:40
this story and realising that like this.
2:30:44
Character we've been. Following all along has clearly
2:30:46
been having these issues understanding consent, but it's
2:30:49
not necessarily clear until it all comes together at this
2:30:52
point. Like it's quite a shock.
2:30:54
It's not what I expected, but it feels quite accurate because we
2:30:57
we know a lot of fundy creators don't seem to fully understand
2:31:02
the concept of consent. You know, look at and one of the
2:31:07
videos I've got coming up that I'm going to film soon.
2:31:09
I've just finished writing the script for and I started it the
2:31:12
other day and I've just finished it tonight.
2:31:15
It's looking at Morgan and Carl Morgan of Paul and Morgan, their
2:31:20
third podcast episode in which Morgan keeps going on and on
2:31:24
about how, you know, wives owe sex to their husbands.
2:31:28
If you're married, you owe your partner sex.
2:31:30
You shouldn't be saying no. Like it's very clear from that
2:31:32
she doesn't fully understand the concept of consent.
2:31:35
From a lot of the podcasts that Guild defined and Kristen and
2:31:40
Bethany, from what they put out, it's clear they don't fully
2:31:42
understand consent. And this is quite common amongst
2:31:44
fundies. And it's it's clearly what's
2:31:48
happening with Natalie here. She doesn't understand that even
2:31:51
even an assault she witnessed, she doesn't understand it as an
2:31:55
assault because she doesn't understand consent.
2:31:57
And so not only does that have consequences for Rena because,
2:32:01
you know, Natalie called her a liar to her face.
2:32:03
And obviously that's going to be very traumatic for a victim.
2:32:06
But it means that, you know, she herself can end up being a
2:32:10
perpetrator of assault as well because, again, she doesn't
2:32:13
fully understand it. And it's just.
2:32:16
Yeah, very scary, right. Anyway, back to the book.
2:32:19
Sorry that there was a lot of off script rambling from me
2:32:22
there, so I really hope it made sense.
2:32:23
I just I just have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this
2:32:26
book. It it's so damn good.
2:32:29
A book hasn't made me think like this in a while.
2:32:32
It hasn't given me such an emotional response.
2:32:34
There's so much in here that I want to talk about and could
2:32:37
talk about. Like you can pick any random
2:32:39
page and pick a passage from it and I could probably be here
2:32:41
talking for like 3 hours about just like this one random page.
2:32:44
You know it, It's so, so many thoughts.
2:32:47
I love this. It's everything I want in a
2:32:50
book. It is entertaining, it is easy
2:32:52
to read, but it is damn thought provoking and I love that.
2:32:57
Right. So back to the book.
2:32:58
What was also really interesting, interesting to me
2:33:01
was the father in That's basically what Doug said that
2:33:14
night, what he roared for hours and hours while a rotating cast
2:33:18
of side characters, me, then Amelia, then finally just the
2:33:21
lawyers said, normally at nothing.
2:33:24
If only his stupid little son had raped our stupid little
2:33:26
producer. If that had happened, it would
2:33:29
have been over and forgotten in two weeks.
2:33:31
But a predatory woman? Unthinkable.
2:33:34
A good Christian mother and wife who allegedly found another
2:33:37
woman attractive, who who took what she wanted without asking,
2:33:41
killed the witch. Burn her.
2:33:43
And honestly, shocking. But this is again, such a great
2:33:46
thing to bring up because men do get away with sexual violence
2:33:50
all the time, but the minute it's a woman?
2:33:53
People. Seem quicker to crucify her
2:33:57
often and. But not true.
2:34:00
There are some exceptions like especially when it's predatory
2:34:03
older women with younger boys. There seems to be another double
2:34:06
standard there where that's seen as like cool by certain men when
2:34:09
it's not it's still predatory. But yeah, in cases like this
2:34:13
where it's a woman with a woman, like, yeah, it seems they're a
2:34:16
lot quicker to blame and crucify than they are with men.
2:34:19
And it's infuriating to me that men don't get the same response.
2:34:23
People always go on about how false allegations were ruining
2:34:26
men's life. You know, they don't.
2:34:29
Real allegations don't ruin a man's life.
2:34:31
You know, a man can rape a woman one day and then, you know, the
2:34:36
next, still have his job and entire career ahead of him, all
2:34:39
this money and support and people who believe in him and do
2:34:42
this and this and, you know, become president of the United
2:34:45
States if he wants. Being an actual rapist doesn't
2:34:48
ruin a man's life for the minute it's a woman.
2:34:51
Yeah, it there's often a lot more pressure on women.
2:34:57
There's a lot more disgust for women who do it.
2:35:00
And don't get me wrong, it's not saying we should go easier on
2:35:03
women. I'm saying where is this disgust
2:35:06
for the men as well? A rapist is a rapist no matter
2:35:08
the gender, so why can so many men keep getting away with it?
2:35:12
This is actually something I'm discussing in another video I'm
2:35:15
making about the online so-called Rape Academy.
2:35:20
Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that.
2:35:22
And I'm going to be filming a video about that either later
2:35:25
tonight or another day this week.
2:35:28
My script is done. I I have a lot of thoughts about
2:35:31
it, but yeah, kind of all ties in.
2:35:35
OK, Right. I keep going off script today.
2:35:37
I'm so sorry. I'm just talking and talking.
2:35:39
So Natalie obviously starts getting a lot of hate online.
2:35:43
Her sister is understandably disgusted with her.
2:35:47
I mean, I think I'd be the same if I found out that about one of
2:35:49
my siblings. I'd be like, what the hell?
2:35:51
Not that they would, I don't think, but you know, that would
2:35:53
be my response too. Then we switch back to the 1800s
2:35:57
world for Chapter 55, and Natalie enters the cabin marked
2:36:01
Manosphere. Knowing what we know now,
2:36:05
calling this cabin Manosphere so damn cringy.
2:36:08
And for that I mean like the men are cringy, not the author so
2:36:12
believable that they would do this, but cringes and it'll
2:36:16
cuddle. Cool.
2:36:17
Suddenly I'm staring at a framed picture of my own family hanging
2:36:20
on the opposite wall. It's from a long time ago.
2:36:23
Me, Caleb, Clementine, Samuel and baby Stetson.
2:36:27
I don't remember the date was taken, but I do remember the
2:36:29
caption that accompanied when I shared the picture online.
2:36:32
God is pleased when families work together.
2:36:35
Even little things like that are so revealing, aren't they?
2:36:37
The fact that she doesn't remember the photo being taken,
2:36:40
or what happened or the actual memory about it, but she
2:36:42
remembers her Instagram caption so revealing.
2:36:46
My heart is a wet, dead thing in my chest.
2:36:48
My gaze swings slowly across the room.
2:36:50
I see a dirt packed floor and a table.
2:36:52
On one table, a hot plate. Next to the hot plate, three
2:36:55
plastic packs of ramen. Beneath the table, a mini fridge
2:36:58
with a cord that's connected to an electrical outlet.
2:37:01
Then a radio in the other room, flickering on through the farm
2:37:04
window of this room, the front vendor of a truck.
2:37:07
And right in front of the window, another table which is
2:37:09
holding the radio. And in front of the radio,
2:37:11
sitting on a plastic folding seat, is a man.
2:37:14
By his feet is a pile of vegetables overflowing out of an
2:37:17
old plastic milk crate. Potatoes, carrots, celery,
2:37:20
beets, the kind Mary chops and dices and then drops into soup.
2:37:25
There are grocery store stickers all over them.
2:37:28
It's the neighbour, the shorter one, one of the men Mary has a
2:37:32
crush on. Remember that.
2:37:35
He's facing away from me, whistling softly as you now
2:37:38
recognise. It takes me a moment to process
2:37:40
what he's doing, pulling vegetable from one crate,
2:37:42
pulling the grocery stickers off, then dropping them into
2:37:45
another crate. The neighbour freezes.
2:37:48
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
2:37:51
The neighbour looks over his shoulder.
2:37:52
His eyes are wide. Mama.
2:37:54
He blurts. I take one step back, then
2:37:57
another. Dog, Sir?
2:37:58
I whisper. Mama, he says again.
2:38:01
His face is contorted into ecstasy or perhaps torture.
2:38:04
And oh, the reveal. The two neighbour men are her
2:38:09
sons, Samuel and Stetson. Oh, with that, she just starts
2:38:16
running like crazy. Like she keeps throwing out this
2:38:18
book. Just run, run, run.
2:38:20
I am so here for whatever the hell is happening at this point.
2:38:23
I love this. I was saying like in my little
2:38:26
thing, are we thinking at this point she got some kind of brain
2:38:28
damage maybe from a suicide attempt, which made her forget
2:38:31
years of her life? And old Caleb is just Caleb
2:38:35
years after the flashbacks. And even Natalie is much older
2:38:38
because she hasn't been able to see herself.
2:38:39
There's no like proper mirrors anywhere.
2:38:41
So maybe she's like got 10 kids now, 9910 kids, I don't know how
2:38:47
many it is at this point. And Mary, the eldest, is
2:38:51
actually the one she was pregnant with like in the
2:38:54
flashbacks. Don't mind doing flashbacks like
2:38:57
that. Mary, like the the eldest is the
2:38:59
one she was pregnant with in the flashbacks.
2:39:01
And so she's actually like a middle kid.
2:39:03
And then the neighbours, her older kids, Samuel and Stetson.
2:39:07
And I said at this point, maybe Mary didn't have a crush.
2:39:10
She was just like wistfully looking at her older brothers,
2:39:13
wishing she could get to know them.
2:39:15
No, no, that was wrong. That theory was wrong.
2:39:17
Mary absolutely had a crush on one of her older brothers
2:39:20
because she didn't know they were her older brothers.
2:39:23
The reveal is so good, we'll get.
2:39:25
There, we'll get there. I mean, we're basically at the
2:39:27
end of the book now, so I'm not like spoiling anything too far.
2:39:30
Ahead, it's just. I want you to.
2:39:31
Be with it as it unfolds. It's great.
2:39:33
It's great. So at this point, oh, I was
2:39:35
having so many thoughts, so many theories.
2:39:37
Yes, great, love this. So chapter 56 starts in the
2:39:41
present day in the flashbacks and Natalie's just like giving
2:39:45
up. So she finds a bottle of pills
2:39:47
that her mother-in-law gave her years ago.
2:39:49
She doesn't know what they are, but she starts taking them and
2:39:52
these are the ones that led to her mother-in-law having an
2:39:55
overdose years ago. And they seem to be some sort of
2:39:58
like kind of like an anti anxiety medication but also
2:40:02
something that's not exactly healthy for you.
2:40:05
It's never clear what they are. They're just little white pills
2:40:07
that can be dangerous if you take too many.
2:40:10
But first, she has a confrontation with Caleb.
2:40:13
He thinks she's gay and humiliated him because she's
2:40:16
gay. Like that's the worst thing here
2:40:18
and not the fact she sexually assaulted someone.
2:40:21
OK. He also asks if This is why she
2:40:24
never wants to have sex with him, which is interesting
2:40:26
because she's like, wait, you're the one who never wants to have
2:40:29
sex with me. You can't even get a proper
2:40:31
erection. And then he's like, yeah,
2:40:33
because usually they're like, a dead body.
2:40:36
And that reminded me so much of Bethany.
2:40:37
Beal's going on about lying there, like, dry bones in all of
2:40:40
her sex courses. Anyway.
2:40:43
So they have this, like, back and forth of like, well, you
2:40:45
don't want it. No, you don't want it When you
2:40:47
see This is why communication is important.
2:40:50
They end up just insulting each other back and forth, me, me,
2:40:53
me, me, until Caleb just slaps Natalie.
2:40:56
See, I don't like him awful. I'm like, OK, I know Natalie
2:41:00
sexually assaulted someone, but that doesn't excuse a husband
2:41:04
slapping his wife. But then again, there's been
2:41:07
other instances of violence like Natalie throwing the phone at
2:41:09
him earlier and hitting him, so that's not excusable either.
2:41:13
They're all awful is the point I'm trying to make.
2:41:16
So this is where it all kind of gets crazy, but actually not
2:41:19
that unbelievable when you remember that Doug is kind of
2:41:21
like this Donald Trump type of character, right?
2:41:25
Do you know what they think of you online?
2:41:26
Caleb said, standing over me. They think you're a woman who
2:41:29
needs to be disciplined, that you're out of control, that your
2:41:32
head is too big for your shoulders and I should have
2:41:35
reined you in years ago. And they're right.
2:41:37
Effing devil bitch. My father was right.
2:41:41
I should have divorced you when I had the chance.
2:41:43
I looked up it in. I looked up at him.
2:41:46
Is that what he wants you to do? Divorce me?
2:41:49
He took a step away from me, breathing hard.
2:41:51
That's what he wanted me to do, Yes, but you know what he wants
2:41:54
to do now. I tasted iron.
2:41:56
My lip was bleeding. Not in the slightest.
2:41:59
He wants to kill you. I shook my head slowly.
2:42:03
Don't be ridiculous. I'm not.
2:42:06
He said a car accident would be easiest.
2:42:08
These winding, mounting roads, such a such a steep drop.
2:42:12
He shrugged. It was his turn to watch me
2:42:15
absorb this information. No one would suspect a thing.
2:42:18
After all, what were good Christian men if not experts and
2:42:21
making their good Christian women vanish from the world?
2:42:24
How boring. How deeply and utterly unfair.
2:42:27
I did everything I was supposed to do.
2:42:30
I had the children and married the man and created a universe
2:42:33
for us all to live in. And what was I going to get for
2:42:35
it? Murdered, apparently featured in
2:42:37
some future documentary about the latest pregnant woman to
2:42:40
break her neck in a ditch somewhere.
2:42:42
Caleb might go to gaol for a year or two.
2:42:45
Probably not. Regardless, he'll be remarried
2:42:47
within the decade. He'd have a second round of
2:42:50
kids. Which is all horrifying, but
2:42:53
honestly, yeah, I absolutely believe this is what happens to
2:42:56
women in these types of families.
2:42:58
I absolutely think men like Doug would make this happen.
2:43:02
Seriously. I don't actually find this
2:43:05
unbelievable, But in response to all this, Natalie says she can
2:43:09
fix this by talking to Doug. Which of course she can't.
2:43:12
She's just a woman. Remember back in the 1800s
2:43:16
timeline, which we now know is not the actual 1800s, it's the
2:43:19
future. Natalie is so scared and shocked
2:43:23
and completely surprised by all of this that she ends up just
2:43:26
running around in circles and accidentally finding her way
2:43:29
back to the farm. There, old Caleb says that he's
2:43:32
glad she didn't take Maeve with her because, you know, she's not
2:43:37
vaccinated. I'm about to reply, and then a
2:43:39
strange sound cuts me off. The sound of an engine.
2:43:42
A car is rolling up the driveway.
2:43:43
Not a blue truck, but a red Subaru rolling slowly through
2:43:47
the drops and divots in the bumpy dirt Rd until it pumps up
2:43:50
to the until it pulls up to the barn and stops.
2:43:53
The engine is killed. It's at this moment that a woman
2:43:56
gets out of the car and approaches them.
2:43:57
And apparently she looks just like Natalie.
2:44:00
So I'm like, Oh my God, this has to be Clementine, right?
2:44:02
That's the only thing that makes sense.
2:44:04
Then we get Part 3 of the book, the final part of the future,
2:44:07
and it is Clementine. She's an adult now.
2:44:10
And this is where we get the whole big like reveal, explain
2:44:13
to us and everything. So this is not the 1800s.
2:44:16
This is as we expected the future.
2:44:18
They're still living on Yesteryear Ranch.
2:44:20
They just don't have phone lines or Internet and they proper like
2:44:24
got rid of all the modern stuff. So no electricity or anything
2:44:28
like that. It's all just proper looking
2:44:30
like 1800s farmland, like an 1800s ranch and, and, and this
2:44:35
is what they've been living in the kids.
2:44:38
Are. Her kids, but like the ones she
2:44:40
had after that pregnancy. This section is also
2:44:45
interspersed with questions which seem to be part of some
2:44:47
sort of interview of Natalie and they give us a good idea of
2:44:50
what's been happening in the years since all the drama.
2:44:52
By the end of the book, we find out what this interview is.
2:44:55
These questions are part of like a pre interview process for an
2:45:00
interview that we're going to see at the end of this section.
2:45:02
So we'll, we'll get there, don't worry.
2:45:04
It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs Helen Mills.
2:45:06
I'm Lucy, one of the producers assigned with preparing you for
2:45:09
the interview tomorrow. Before we get started, though,
2:45:12
are you comfortable? Can we get you anything?
2:45:14
Coffee, water, kombucha. And while I have you, this might
2:45:17
be rude. Please tell me if it's rude, but
2:45:19
I just need to know. Is it nice having so much access
2:45:23
to choice after seven years of living sparsely, or are you
2:45:26
overwhelmed? I believe you've already been
2:45:28
prepped on the talking points of this interview, so I'll just run
2:45:31
through a quick overview of what we plan to cover tomorrow.
2:45:34
What we're really curious about is what happened after your
2:45:37
former producer accused you of assault.
2:45:39
Your social presence really changed after that.
2:45:42
It became increasingly intense, I guess you could say, in terms
2:45:46
of your home, studying, lifestyle.
2:45:47
And then when you chose to delete your account so abruptly,
2:45:50
well, let's just say your followers had a lot of
2:45:52
questions. We'll spend some time today
2:45:54
unpacking that time period. And then after that, we can talk
2:45:56
about your father in law's failed presidential campaign.
2:45:59
And then, well, you can drive that part of the conversation.
2:46:02
How does that sound? So we're getting a lot of
2:46:04
context filled in here, a lot of kind of exposition thrown at us.
2:46:09
But it's kind of what we need for this endpoint in the book,
2:46:11
you know, back to adult Clementine being at the ranch.
2:46:15
And and they're all like, Oh my God, why are you here?
2:46:19
And Clementine turns around and goes, why are you here, Dad?
2:46:22
Clementine says. Have you ever even asked
2:46:24
yourself that while you're still here?
2:46:26
After all this time? Great question.
2:46:28
We were trying to be good Christians.
2:46:30
We really were trying good Christians.
2:46:33
It's only here when I realise I'm speaking.
2:46:35
And so I forge on, woods stumbling and stuttering like a
2:46:37
radio channel moving in and out of frequency.
2:46:39
Something about being a Good Wife, a good mother.
2:46:41
Something about God, something about love.
2:46:44
Clementine watches me with an expression like flat soda as I
2:46:47
trail off into silence. And then she turns to her
2:46:49
father. Is she always like this now?
2:46:53
He pauses, and then, in the kind of diplomatic tone that would
2:46:56
really make his father proud. There are good days and bad
2:46:58
days. Rambling narrator Natalie
2:47:01
interrupts to say. On good days, I'm calm.
2:47:03
I believe that if I do a good enough job, if I prove to the
2:47:06
world that I really am living out here on the land as an
2:47:08
honest woman, a good Christian, a traditional wife, and the
2:47:12
angry women will eventually forgive me and the momentum will
2:47:15
swing back in my favour. And the state of Idaho will drop
2:47:18
all its pending charges against me.
2:47:19
The ones the lawyers warned me would come before Doug paid them
2:47:22
all off. Such sexual assault, aggravated
2:47:24
assault, improper working conditions, wire fraud, animal
2:47:27
abuse, child abuse. Do you see, if I finally
2:47:31
actually and truly became the thing I claimed so long to be,
2:47:34
then no one could call me a liar anymore.
2:47:36
A liar anymore, a liar anymore. A liar anymore.
2:47:38
A liar anymore. So she's clearly in some sort of
2:47:41
like manic state at this point. She's like drifting in and out
2:47:45
of like knowing what's real and not swat this reality and
2:47:47
fantasy. It's all kind of confusing and
2:47:50
she doesn't always know where she is or when it is.
2:47:52
And a lot of this it's never fully explained.
2:47:54
But it kind of comes down to her abusing these pills that her
2:47:58
mother-in-law was also taking that she's been taking.
2:48:01
And throughout the 1800s bits, we've seen Mary preparing these,
2:48:07
like, things, like remedies for her.
2:48:09
And it turns out that the pills have been like, crushed up and
2:48:12
put into these, like, home remedies.
2:48:14
And so she's been drugged this entire time.
2:48:16
She spent the last, I think it's something like 13 years,
2:48:20
essentially being drugged. And that's why she can't
2:48:22
remember everything. But sometimes she doesn't.
2:48:24
Sometimes she doesn't. And she's very up and down and
2:48:26
all over the place. And then there are the bad days.
2:48:29
You don't need to know about those, Clementine.
2:48:31
You don't need to know about the panic attacks and the conspiracy
2:48:33
theories, the tests from the Lord, the producers in the
2:48:35
trees, the pebbles, the microphones, the mornings I wake
2:48:38
up and feel so spin around. I think I've been kidnapped.
2:48:41
So it's partly the drugs, partly this big mental breakdown, to be
2:48:44
honest, after the reveal about the medication and the like,
2:48:50
herbal tonics with the crushed medication in her stuff,
2:48:52
Clementine says. So she's constantly moving in
2:48:55
and out of her pharmaceutical haze.
2:48:57
Perfect. That's just perfect.
2:48:59
And we learned that the man in the Hut that she stumbled across
2:49:01
was her son's stepson, now all grown up.
2:49:05
And then it cuts back to the interview.
2:49:07
So tell me if I understand this correctly, your father-in-law
2:49:09
resolved Shannon's Law to sue out of court and then paid the
2:49:12
media to stop covering the story?
2:49:14
Any person who spoke about you on social media in any
2:49:17
spectacular, in any speculatory fashion, received a ceasing
2:49:21
disorder from his lawyers. He strung on local law
2:49:24
enforcement to drop the case they were building against you.
2:49:27
And then you, Natalie began again.
2:49:30
You ripped out the hardwood. Floors renovated, the walls and
2:49:33
ceiling removed, all signs of modernity from your barn and
2:49:36
farming areas. You decided to live like those
2:49:38
olden days. For what, though?
2:49:41
To prove a point, to protect yourself from legal troubles?
2:49:44
You're going to need to help us make sense of this, Natalie.
2:49:47
You're going to need to help us understand.
2:49:50
And you know, a few years ago I might have said this was far
2:49:51
fetched, but actually, no, I believe it.
2:49:54
It's a little exposition heavy at this point.
2:49:56
But like I said earlier, at this point in the book, I don't mind
2:49:59
it. I think it kind of works.
2:50:00
A memory fluttering past me and Caleb in the early days of the
2:50:03
experiment, as she now calls it. The experiment, explaining the
2:50:07
game to toddler Mary. That was how we talked about it
2:50:09
then. A game, an experiment, just a
2:50:11
fun little trial. It was gradual, sometimes
2:50:14
deliberate and sometimes instinctual.
2:50:16
Like Chequers. Like chess, Cowboys and Indians,
2:50:19
Barbie Dream House, but backwards.
2:50:20
We're going to pretend. It's the olden days, sweetie
2:50:23
pie, the pioneer days. Just play pretend.
2:50:26
Just a summer activity. Just a creative way for the
2:50:28
family to bond over traditional values while we hid from the
2:50:31
outside world and figured out a plan.
2:50:33
Just just just there was a great plan, I swear.
2:50:37
But at some point over the years, I really can't remember
2:50:39
when, the hiding became the plan, the beginning and the end.
2:50:44
The children left when Clementine turned 16.
2:50:46
A month earlier. We had finally sold our car, the
2:50:49
last piece of modernity we'd been holding on to.
2:50:52
Time to live off the time to live off the land, kiddos.
2:50:55
Clementine must have known what was coming.
2:50:56
She took the kids one morning for a walk and they never came
2:50:59
back. She knew those words so well.
2:51:01
And so this really feels like the Frankie family, doesn't it,
2:51:04
with Clementine being Sherry, like helping the younger kids
2:51:07
and trying to protect them. Later in the book, the
2:51:09
interviewer asked Natalie, some of your children have, as
2:51:12
adults, become passionate activists against Child
2:51:15
Exploitation on social media. How does that make you feel?
2:51:18
And again, this makes me think of Sherry, Frankie, and all the
2:51:20
good work she's doing now. So again, we've got those
2:51:22
parallels. Doug was on board with the idea
2:51:25
and then he wasn't. He couldn't believe we sold the
2:51:27
car. Came to visit one day and saw
2:51:28
Caleb dig in a hole for an out house.
2:51:30
He said we'd lost our effing minds.
2:51:32
But by then it was too late. The hallway had dug too big.
2:51:36
Literally and metaphorically, obviously.
2:51:38
And so he refers slowly down the hill and never visited us again.
2:51:42
And my mother, we weren't speaking much by then.
2:51:44
By the time she realised what was happening, she was.
2:51:47
Then we were. It happened slowly.
2:51:50
I say the transition that believing it happened so slowly.
2:51:54
And then so at this point, Natalie's finally kind of
2:51:57
started to snap out of what we've been seeing over the book
2:52:01
in this particular like future timeline where like, you know,
2:52:05
she thought it was like a time jump.
2:52:07
She's like, why am I not pregnant?
2:52:09
Oh, I'm pregnant now. She's kind of snapped out of
2:52:11
that and realised the reality and it's like, oh, I remember it
2:52:14
all. It's all coming back to me and
2:52:16
but she's also realised, crap, I haven't had my period and so
2:52:20
she's like oh blah blah blah blah blah.
2:52:22
And then she says when I found out I was pregnant and then I
2:52:24
found out I was pregnant again and everything changed, I
2:52:27
realised I had to leave. There's a long silence in the
2:52:29
room. I couldn't.
2:52:30
I can't give birth in this place again, I added firmly, looking
2:52:34
around at everyone. The last time I trail off,
2:52:36
suddenly sick. The last time, The last time
2:52:39
with Maeve was terrible. Oh mum.
2:52:42
Clementine sighs. Are you saying?
2:52:45
Caleb shakes his head. Are you saying you think you're
2:52:47
pregnant? Natalie?
2:52:48
I'm saying I am pregnant. I say, and I need to, well, I
2:52:52
need to get rid of it, which is huge for a friendly woman to be
2:52:54
saying that. But anyway.
2:52:57
I pause, like in the full weight of their shock sinking.
2:52:59
They were supposed to be so shocked here and their mother
2:53:01
talk openly about the need for an abortion.
2:53:03
How modern of me? See darling, look at this old
2:53:06
dog with her new trick. I know it's awful, but I just,
2:53:09
well, I need to get rid of it and soon.
2:53:11
I must be 12 weeks long by now, ma'am, Clementine says you're 50
2:53:16
years old. You're not pregnant.
2:53:18
Now it's my turn to fall silent. Come again?
2:53:21
It was unbelievable that we could have Maeve, Caleb Mutz
2:53:23
softly. And that was 10 years ago.
2:53:25
So the lack of periods are likely menopause, not pregnancy.
2:53:30
So yeah. And then there's this absolutely
2:53:32
horrifying revelation of what happened to Maeve, the ninth
2:53:35
child, I think it is during the home birth.
2:53:38
And again, I this is horrible because it's so realistic.
2:53:42
And we've seen so many fundies have these horrifying, dangerous
2:53:47
home births where they've nearly died.
2:53:49
All their kids have. And it's heartbreaking to see.
2:53:51
But yeah, this is what happened with Maeve.
2:53:53
And again, realistic Maeve's sweet thing is 10 years old.
2:53:58
Yeah, that's right. That's that sweet girl my little
2:54:01
shadow is. How would a modern woman say it?
2:54:04
My daughter has learning deficiencies.
2:54:06
My daughter is developmentally challenged.
2:54:08
My daughter was born blue in the face, not breathing for minutes.
2:54:12
And my husband is not a midwife and I am not a doctor.
2:54:14
And so we wasted precious time screaming at one another, a dead
2:54:17
child on the floor between us, until 8 year old Mary thought to
2:54:21
breathe into her little sister's mouth.
2:54:24
Horrifying, terrifying, scary as hell.
2:54:29
Also the fact that the child 8, an 8 year old child, had to step
2:54:33
in and save her little sister's life.
2:54:35
It's just heartbreaking, isn't it?
2:54:38
God, it's I, I think I've spoken about this before me videos, but
2:54:41
I was born not breathing. I was born with my umbilical
2:54:44
cord wrapped around my neck. Literally.
2:54:47
It was like suffocating me during birth.
2:54:51
Between that and my hip problems were like my hips were
2:54:53
dislocated really badly and like really badly damaged because it
2:54:57
was such a traumatic birth. And like I say, I was born blue.
2:55:00
I was born not breathing. Luckily my mum, being a
2:55:03
responsible woman, was in a hospital in the best place to
2:55:06
be, surrounded by incredible professionals who saved my life.
2:55:12
They got me breathing again and at first the doctors were like
2:55:16
she'll probably never walk. But then luckily I have been
2:55:18
able to walk, and while I still have a lot of hip trouble today
2:55:21
and hip pain, and there are some days when it hurts too much to
2:55:24
walk, there are other days when I can literally go out wearing a
2:55:27
nice pair of heels and walk fine and it looks like there's
2:55:30
nothing wrong with me. So I have the ups and downs, but
2:55:32
the point is they saved my life and they gave me the medical
2:55:35
treatment I need to get me walking mostly normally.
2:55:38
And yeah, I'm incredibly grateful for that.
2:55:40
And I don't understand why there are so many people out there who
2:55:44
are still like, oh, I don't need medical care.
2:55:45
I do. The people who've done it
2:55:47
before, it's like, yeah, people have done it before and they
2:55:48
died. People have done it before.
2:55:50
And then you end up like this with a child having to save the
2:55:53
life of your other child and you're like the one and one of
2:55:57
your kids essentially getting some sort of brain damage
2:56:00
because they were born not breathing and they didn't get
2:56:02
the care because no one trained was there to help them.
2:56:05
Just because people have done without in the past, that
2:56:08
doesn't mean we should need to today.
2:56:10
And I understand not everyone can afford the medical care for
2:56:14
giving birth in America. And that is absolutely a
2:56:17
fundamental flaw with America's healthcare system and in
2:56:20
general, private paid for healthcare systems like that.
2:56:23
You know, the traumatic birth that my mother had with me and
2:56:26
me basically kneeling, dying and having all these health problems
2:56:29
and my hip problems, my walking problems and stuff that would
2:56:32
have more than bankrupt my family if we were born, if we
2:56:36
were American, you know, But living in the UK, we get it.
2:56:40
All three on the NHS. Every single thing was covered
2:56:42
by the NHS. Didn't cost my family a penny.
2:56:45
Not to give birth, not for because my mum was 38, nearly 39
2:56:49
when I was born. I think is it or was was it
2:56:52
3720381 of them? I think she was 38 when I was
2:56:54
born. And because of that, she was
2:56:56
considered like a geriatric pregnancy.
2:56:58
So she had to have a lot more care during the pregnancy.
2:57:02
She had to have an amnio to like check how it was and check there
2:57:05
weren't any major birth defects or anything like that.
2:57:08
And so there were a lot of complications with that.
2:57:09
Pregnancy didn't cost my mum a thing.
2:57:12
Set like, you know, a 2 LB bus match, you know, it wasn't even
2:57:15
that back then, like A50P bus to the hospital, you know, all the
2:57:19
extra tests and everything, all the trauma of my birth and all
2:57:23
the stuff that was happening there didn't cost a thing.
2:57:25
And that's the way it should be, genuinely.
2:57:28
That is what we pay taxes for. That is what we pay our National
2:57:31
Insurance for. And so that when we are ill,
2:57:35
when other people get ill, it doesn't cost some things.
2:57:37
So people get the care they need.
2:57:39
And I just, I think that's the way things should be.
2:57:43
Yeah. And I think seeing some of the
2:57:45
experiences like this and, you know, just experiences of other
2:57:50
people in my life and experiences I've had myself and
2:57:54
with those like with uterus issues and other health issues
2:57:57
and things like that. I just, I don't understand why
2:58:00
more people are more appreciative of the amazing
2:58:03
medical system that we have today that isn't there for us
2:58:06
that is saving lives. These amazing, trained, educated
2:58:09
people who are working all hours of the day for honestly not
2:58:14
enough pay to save our lives. You know it just, I think we
2:58:17
need to show a little more appreciation and to understand
2:58:21
how lucky we are. I know.
2:58:22
Anyway, sorry I'm rambling off script again.
2:58:23
I keep doing this today, don't I?
2:58:24
God, I'm so sorry. And then, oh God, I hate this
2:58:28
bit. Right.
2:58:29
Mary speaks before Caleb can. She raises a hand.
2:58:32
Her expression has such an emotional velocity to it that
2:58:35
she suddenly looks like a mirror of Clementine.
2:58:37
Are you saying that the neighbours are my brothers?
2:58:39
So it turns out she didn't know they were her brothers and she
2:58:43
did have a crush on one because they're the only men she's ever
2:58:45
seen. So she had a crush on her
2:58:46
brother, and I hate that. I hate that so much.
2:58:50
And it also turns out that there's a lot of stuff that's
2:58:53
been going on behind the scenes that's been like hidden from
2:58:56
Natalie, like where the food comes from and stuff like that.
2:58:59
The fact that they're getting it from the supermarket and
2:59:01
bringing it in rather than actually growing it themselves
2:59:03
because they're still useless. She says they provide a food
2:59:07
year after year. But you know what?
2:59:08
I didn't wonder once. I have become.
2:59:11
Bear with me when I say this. A good mother, effing Christian
2:59:14
woman, I do not anymore ask questions of my husband that he
2:59:18
does not want to hear. And my husband, Oh yes, a very
2:59:21
good Christian man, does not tell me things that I do not
2:59:24
need to know. Again, these statements alone I
2:59:27
could talk about for hours, right?
2:59:28
It's always fantastic. Then, then, then the big, big,
2:59:32
big revelation. Clementine isn't just here for a
2:59:35
visit. She is here to do a whole cherry
2:59:37
Frankie and rescue these kids. She Oh, she's brilliant here.
2:59:41
We love this, right? Oh, yeah.
2:59:43
Did I forget to mention that? Silly me, I didn't come here for
2:59:46
lunch. I came here for the.
2:59:48
Kids. She pulls the folded up.
2:59:50
Paper out of her jacket pocket. I have a warrant if you'd like
2:59:53
to see. She hands it to Caleb.
2:59:55
He doesn't read it, just shakes it and says, what is this?
2:59:58
Something I've been wanting to do for a very long time but
3:00:00
couldn't until Doug run out of money and Stetson called the
3:00:03
officers and agreed with everything I've been saying for
3:00:05
years. Clementine looks at me.
3:00:06
So thank you mother, for reminding my brother how crazy
3:00:09
you truly are. Natalie panics at this point,
3:00:12
not necessarily because the kids are being being taken away and
3:00:14
she's in trouble, but because she doesn't want to be left
3:00:18
alone with Caleb, which is saying something, isn't it?
3:00:20
But Clementine is having none of this.
3:00:22
She doesn't care. She takes the children away.
3:00:24
She rescues them. Natalie tells Caleb she hates
3:00:27
him. Caleb says he hates her too.
3:00:29
Then Natalie decides once again she needs to get away.
3:00:31
She needs to leave the ranch. She says there'll be
3:00:33
consequences if I leave, but none so great as the
3:00:36
consequences of staying well. I say impatiently, do you want
3:00:40
to come with me or not? A long moment passes.
3:00:42
Yes, he says, I think I do. I reach for his hand and
3:00:46
together we walk. And that is where the main book
3:00:49
ends with a true toxic relationship.
3:00:53
But we also get an epilogue five years later.
3:00:56
And the interview questions from the producer in the last bit are
3:01:00
for the interview that is happening in this section.
3:01:03
So we're on the very last part of the book now.
3:01:05
The epilogue, like I say, it's five years later.
3:01:07
And this scene opens with Natalie wearing ankle cuffs in
3:01:11
what appears to be a replica of her kitchen or maybe her actual
3:01:15
kitchen. But she's still having these
3:01:17
delusions and doesn't doesn't think it's really her kitchen.
3:01:19
A man named John has been trying to get it perfect but he's got a
3:01:22
few details wrong and Natalie shouts at him for it.
3:01:26
So from what I can tell, this is her kitchen on the same ranch,
3:01:30
but they've redecorated it for this interview and to look like
3:01:35
it looked in her influencer days, I think.
3:01:38
I not sure. A producer who may or may not be
3:01:40
named Lucy. She is named Lucy is trying to
3:01:43
ask Natalie questions. Like, Natalie, can I ask you a
3:01:46
question? When we were driving up to the
3:01:48
house, did you look out the window?
3:01:50
I hesitate. Then say yes.
3:01:51
So you saw when we turned into your old dirt Rd?
3:01:54
I've always hated games. And this feels like a game.
3:01:56
Yes. And you saw the mountains and
3:01:58
the big red barn? Yes.
3:02:00
So help me understand, how could this not be your house?
3:02:04
I open my mouth and close it. Suddenly I feel unmoored.
3:02:06
Do you see how I might be confused, Natalie?
3:02:08
Well, yes, I say. But so she's definitely still
3:02:12
having these delusions. She doesn't understand where she
3:02:14
is. There's like a definite
3:02:15
disconnect from reality, both from trauma, religious and God.
3:02:21
Just years of an abusive, toxic relationship and life and the
3:02:26
mental health problems that she's having, plus the years and
3:02:29
years and years of whatever medication she's been constantly
3:02:32
fed. This is when Natalie's old
3:02:35
roommate Rena shows up and she is absolutely shocked to see
3:02:38
Natalie, who is now 55. So is she?
3:02:40
They're both 55, but she's like, Oh my God, it's been years.
3:02:43
Obviously, I'm so shocked by how you look.
3:02:47
Rena is the one who's going to be interviewing Natalie for a
3:02:49
new show and that she is now the anchor of Serena's smashing it.
3:02:53
She's doing really well. We love that for her.
3:02:55
It is on the advice of Natalie's lawyers because she apparently
3:02:58
needs to engender sympathy with the public.
3:03:01
I can only assume because the numerous charges against her
3:03:03
have finally landed her in prison.
3:03:05
Child endangerment, animal abuse, and so on.
3:03:08
And through this whole process, even with all her mental health
3:03:10
problems and even with everything going on, even with
3:03:13
all the consequences of her actions that she's facing,
3:03:16
Natalie is still the same rude, mean, stuck up person she has
3:03:20
been throughout this whole book. All right, Rena says she's
3:03:23
smiling now. And forgive me, Nathalie, but
3:03:25
you do know this interview will be seen by quite a lot of
3:03:28
people. Oh, yeah, And if I camera girl
3:03:30
says it's pretty much guaranteed to go viral.
3:03:32
Virality, I informed the girl mildly, is a curse.
3:03:36
But yes, I look at Rena. I'm aware of how this will work.
3:03:40
I'm not an idiot, you know. Of course you're not.
3:03:42
I just. God, Rena, you are always so
3:03:45
annoying. I survey her bemused expression.
3:03:47
I was always prettier than you, but I'll admit, you look fine
3:03:51
for your age. That's very nice of you.
3:03:53
This is a huge win for her career.
3:03:55
This interview with me, I'm surprised she hasn't thanked me
3:03:58
yet. So Natalie still has these,
3:04:01
like, big delusions of grandeur that we've been seeing
3:04:04
throughout the book, you know, And Rena's smashing it.
3:04:06
She's a news anchor and she's got a great life.
3:04:09
She's got a family, She's happy as hell.
3:04:11
Natalie has literally had all her kids taken away from her.
3:04:14
He's going to be going to prison, has spent her life in a
3:04:16
toxic marriage. God knows what's happening with
3:04:19
that. And yet she's still looking down
3:04:21
on Rena, this happy, successful woman.
3:04:24
Like, it's so sad. It's so, so sad.
3:04:27
Rena starts her interview and I'm not quite sure if it's been
3:04:29
broadcast if I can't figure that out.
3:04:31
But anyway, she starts it, and Rena looks into bright white
3:04:34
light. My name is Rena Magliotti.
3:04:36
I'm the nightly news anchor for WUBZ Chicago and I am Natalie
3:04:41
Heller Mills former roommate Chris Crisp Smile.
3:04:45
A few months ago I received a call from ABC News with a highly
3:04:48
unusual request. They were hoping to interview
3:04:50
Natalie, who is currently serving out a 30 year prison
3:04:53
sentence for four counts of aggravated child abuse, among
3:04:57
other lesser charges. I was told that Natalie was
3:04:59
interested in having a conversation only if the
3:05:01
conversation in question. Was with me.
3:05:04
To say I was surprised by this request would be an
3:05:06
understatement. Tonight I want to get to the
3:05:07
bottom of why exactly Natalie would choose me of all people to
3:05:11
interview her. Great.
3:05:12
Love this for Rena. Very, very interesting.
3:05:14
Also, again, that 30 year sentence feels very Ruby
3:05:17
Frankie. So again, it's clear the author
3:05:19
has really pulled from real life as inspiration for this book in
3:05:22
a way that makes it feel really accurate.
3:05:24
And I love this. It's great, really well done.
3:05:26
But like, not in a way that's disrespectful to the people
3:05:29
involved or the victims or anything like that.
3:05:31
Just in a way that feels very real.
3:05:33
But before we get any further, Rena asks Natalie what she
3:05:37
thinks about the memoir her daughter Mary has just released.
3:05:40
Again, feels very Ruby and Sherry.
3:05:42
Frankie coded, doesn't it? The book ends with us getting to
3:05:46
read a little passage from Mary's book, which includes some
3:05:50
really heartbreaking lines about how she was basically
3:05:53
parentified. Like then the little girl grew
3:05:55
up and realised her Mama was sick.
3:05:56
When she was old enough to understand part of the little
3:05:59
girl, her Mama was filled with evil spirits.
3:06:01
He said it was her job now to take care of the house and her
3:06:04
siblings. He told her she needed to become
3:06:06
a mother for her own Mama, and so she did.
3:06:09
Heartbreaking. No child should have to go
3:06:11
through that and parent their own parent, you know?
3:06:13
Especially not when her husband's right there.
3:06:15
He could have been doing so much more.
3:06:17
Caleb is the worst. Natalie is also the worst.
3:06:19
There's a lot of bad people in this.
3:06:21
And the book finally ends, though, with Mary telling
3:06:23
Natalie through her book that she misses her and how she's sad
3:06:27
for how much of life in the world she's missed out on.
3:06:30
And that's where the book ends. And it's a brilliant ending to a
3:06:34
brilliant book. And I, as you can probably tell
3:06:37
throughout this video, I have so much to praise it for.
3:06:39
There are, like I mentioned, a couple of very light criticisms
3:06:42
I have of it. So, for example, I wish there
3:06:45
had been a little more detail at times and put into the 1800s
3:06:50
timeline or future as we now know it was.
3:06:53
And I wish we'd seen a few more details about like her
3:06:56
relationship with the kids and how she treated the kids.
3:06:59
And there was definitely like evidence of some child abuse.
3:07:03
But I kind of wish we'd seen more of it on the page.
3:07:06
Not that I enjoy seeing that. I just I think it would have
3:07:09
been good to see how differently she treated her first lot of
3:07:13
kids and this lot and how different their relationships
3:07:16
were. I think it also would have been
3:07:18
really interesting just in general throughout the whole
3:07:21
book to see more about the differences between how the
3:07:23
girls and the boys were parented between the kids, both in sort
3:07:28
of both timelines in the in the modern day in the 1800s, if you
3:07:32
will. I'm still calling them not to
3:07:33
make it clear which ones. I mean, even though we now know
3:07:35
it's like present and future. But yeah, I think it would be
3:07:39
really interesting to look at the differences in how the boys
3:07:41
and girls were raised a little bit, a little bit more.
3:07:43
There were definitely some examples in there, but I think
3:07:45
it could have been expanded on a bit more.
3:07:48
I also wish her relationship with old Caleb in the 1800s
3:07:51
timeline was expanded on a bit more.
3:07:53
I wish that was in there. And I think maybe we could have
3:07:58
had a little more explanation about what exactly was going on
3:08:01
with Natalie to make her have these mental health episodes.
3:08:05
A bit of an explanation about what that was and what was going
3:08:07
on. Maybe more of an explanation
3:08:09
about why she couldn't remember certain stuff.
3:08:11
And a bit like, I wish it had been a bit clearer at the end of
3:08:13
what exactly she did remember and didn't.
3:08:16
But that's kind of the issue with having an unreliable
3:08:19
narrator is that you never really know.
3:08:21
So that was done well, but part of me just wished for a little
3:08:24
more explanation there, for that to be a little clearer.
3:08:27
And but yeah, those few criticisms are minor details
3:08:33
really. I think for what we did get from
3:08:35
this book, it's absolutely fantastic.
3:08:38
I'm basically with those criticisms.
3:08:40
I'm just asking like for a little more icing sugar on top
3:08:43
of my cake, you know, like it doesn't need those things.
3:08:47
They just would have made it even more good.
3:08:50
That word, you know, I'm trying to say, it would have made it
3:08:53
even better. There we go.
3:08:54
That's I'm looking for. Oh, gosh.
3:08:57
Sorry. It's currently past three.
3:08:59
Oh, yeah. I'm getting very tired.
3:09:02
Where am I at? Yeah.
3:09:04
But overall I thought this was a fantastic book.
3:09:06
OK, Just editing. Me jumping in quickly was like a
3:09:09
couple of other points that I've been thinking about while I've
3:09:11
been editing that I didn't mention in my original script.
3:09:13
And one of the big things is the heights on the door when she
3:09:18
first wakes up in the 1800s and how they're like March with
3:09:21
years like 18, whatever, 18, whatever, Which makes me think
3:09:24
like, did they do that on purpose to kind of really lean
3:09:27
into the delusion or like why is it there?
3:09:29
Is it just to throw the reader or is that like an in world
3:09:31
reason for it? Like she want to try and make it
3:09:34
as authentic as possible, or do they actually mean something
3:09:37
else? Like maybe it was like not an I
3:09:40
was going to say the 18th of I don't know, I don't know, I
3:09:42
don't know. There's something new Thing was
3:09:44
I feel like this book could have also worked if it really did
3:09:47
have that like sci-fi element and there really was a time
3:09:49
travel element to it. And I've seen like what life was
3:09:51
really like. And then if it had like kind of
3:09:54
Natalie learning her lesson, I mean, like, oh, things weren't
3:09:56
really better back then. That was kind of what I what I
3:09:59
was expecting from the book. And I think it would have been a
3:10:01
really good and interesting take to have.
3:10:03
But I'm not mad that it didn't do it and that it went the way
3:10:06
it went. I just think it could.
3:10:08
Be really cool. She could have been like
3:10:09
rambling on about like what about like my world and this and
3:10:12
this and cameras and phones and you know, she asks where her
3:10:15
phone is and everyone like, are you crazy?
3:10:17
And then she starts rambling on about stuff and.
3:10:19
Maybe she gets like accused of witchcraft or something that
3:10:21
could. Have been a really fun thing to
3:10:23
do and seeing how bad like women were treated back then.
3:10:25
But it as it is like with the story we have, I do wonder like
3:10:29
why didn't she ask these things if she's just waking up, why
3:10:31
isn't she like where's my phone? Why's this where's this Why
3:10:33
didn't she ask those questions? And I get why from a books
3:10:36
perspective she didn't because they would have been like we got
3:10:39
rid of them and that would have answered it straight away.
3:10:41
But kind of in story I want to be like, well, why didn't she
3:10:43
ask? Why didn't she think she could
3:10:44
ask? Like, that's a very, very minor
3:10:48
plot hole for me, but it's there and.
3:10:51
The other thing? That I kind of wish was answered
3:10:53
that wasn't was where did her memories go from the last?
3:10:57
Like, what was it, 15 years, 20? Yeah, like 15 years.
3:11:02
So where did those memories go? And why did she, like, wake up
3:11:05
at this point? And why did the narrative start
3:11:07
there? In particular, what triggered
3:11:09
her to, like, lose those memories and come back now?
3:11:11
Or is this, like a thing that we keep seeing happens in cycles?
3:11:14
It's kind of hinted that it's cyclical, but in that case.
3:11:18
I don't know. I can't just.
3:11:19
Wish there's a little bit more. Explanation there for that?
3:11:22
The other thing that I forgot. To talk about in my main video
3:11:24
that I do want to mention is there were questions that I've
3:11:27
seen people ask about Natalie and Caleb's sexualities.
3:11:31
And a lot of people will be like, well, does this mean like
3:11:34
Natalie was actually gay the whole time?
3:11:35
And that's all thing. And I don't, I don't think it
3:11:37
was. I think it all ties into
3:11:39
Natalie's weird ideas around consent and just kind of sex in
3:11:46
general, to be honest, because, because I don't think what she
3:11:49
did to Natalie was fuelled by attraction.
3:11:52
It was a power move to her. Sex has always been something
3:11:57
that like she's seen men used to dominate women and that's kind
3:12:00
of culture she's been brought up in.
3:12:02
So if she did assault. Natalie in that way, I think it
3:12:04
was a means of a certain power over her, not about sexual
3:12:06
attraction. I don't think there's anything
3:12:08
in that book that suggests Natalie had any attraction to
3:12:11
women. She just saw.
3:12:12
That kind of act as something dominant, something aggressive.
3:12:18
At least that's my opinion anyway.
3:12:19
I think a bigger question was around Caleb's sexuality.
3:12:22
I thought that was kind of in question at 1st until he slept
3:12:25
with Shannon and I was like, oh, so maybe, you know, he does like
3:12:27
women. There's just like this whole
3:12:29
purity culture thing getting in his head and a lack of
3:12:31
sexification, which means that, you know, their that aspect of
3:12:36
their relationship as a couple has suffered.
3:12:39
Again, that's something that I wish we'd seen explode in a
3:12:41
little bit more detail, but one book can't do everything, so I'm
3:12:44
not mad that it wasn't. Yeah.
3:12:46
I don't have a huge amount to say on the Shannon debate
3:12:48
because we didn't really get a lot of her, but I found it
3:12:52
interesting. At first I thought she was like,
3:12:54
you know, one of us undercover essentially, like a bit of a
3:12:57
snarker, a bit of a critic of fundies, and she was going
3:13:00
undercover to, like, uncover things.
3:13:02
But then when we saw that like interview of her, like she gave
3:13:05
these idea, she gave these answers of how like, you know,
3:13:08
she idealised women like Natalie and her and all her friends were
3:13:11
following this and they wanted to be travelized too.
3:13:12
And she thought the message she was putting out was so
3:13:14
brilliant, showing to work for her.
3:13:16
And I do think she was just like a naive and fashionable very
3:13:19
young girl who believed in all this stuff and then very quickly
3:13:23
became disillusioned by it. And then when she was like kind
3:13:27
of lost and not really sure what to do, the media kind of snapped
3:13:30
her up. I was like, well, you know, if
3:13:32
you're going to tell this story and expose this and this, you
3:13:34
need to look a certain way and do that.
3:13:35
So I think. Throughout the whole.
3:13:38
Like, I think Sharon, Sharon, I think Shannon's whole character
3:13:42
arc was her just being like moulded and turned into this
3:13:47
like, ideal sort of person by all these like influences around
3:13:50
her. And I do kind of wish we'd seen
3:13:52
a little bit more of her. But I think even by the end of
3:13:54
the book, she wasn't quite sure who she was.
3:13:56
But she was starting to do the right thing by me.
3:13:58
She was only 21. So that's like a whole, whole
3:14:01
part of growing up, isn't it? And figuring out who you are.
3:14:05
Yeah, I find it quite complex. I do.
3:14:10
I say this I feel like. In some ways, the book might
3:14:13
have been better if the whole Caleb sleeping with Shannon
3:14:17
thing hadn't happened, but you also needed that inciting
3:14:21
incident for Natalie to attack Shannon in that way, for
3:14:26
everything to happen and kick off.
3:14:27
But I feel like there may be other things that could have
3:14:29
done that work that were more consistent with their
3:14:31
characters. So maybe either we'd seen Caleb
3:14:35
being inappropriate with other women before and so we kind of
3:14:38
knew that was a character trait of his, which didn't make it
3:14:41
shocking, or we could have had a different inciting incident.
3:14:45
So for example, naturally criticised, you know, for
3:14:49
example, Shannon criticised Natalie one too many times or
3:14:52
questioned her parenting techniques, or posted some
3:14:54
content without her consent or made a mistake and accidentally
3:14:58
posted content that reveals something bad about her or
3:15:01
something like that. I feel like there could have
3:15:02
been a different inciting incident like that.
3:15:04
But yeah, well, it is absolutely fine.
3:15:08
I feel like perhaps the people who are questioning nathlete
3:15:13
sexuality are maybe? How do I put this because I've.
3:15:18
Made a lot of comparisons between the characters and real
3:15:20
life funnies and content creators that we know.
3:15:22
And one of the big parallels I've made is between Natalie and
3:15:25
Ruby, Frankie. And obviously there were
3:15:28
speculations about Ruby, Frankie, and Oh my gosh, who's
3:15:33
the other Connections woman now? No, I'm sorry, my name is My
3:15:36
mind's gone blank and I put the name on screen when I edit this.
3:15:38
But there were questions around Ruby's relationship with the
3:15:43
woman from Connections and even Sherry in her book gave these
3:15:49
revolutions about like, you know, them sharing bedrooms and
3:15:51
sharing a bed and all this sort of thing and saying there might
3:15:54
have been something in their relationship.
3:15:55
And I feel like because there's so many parallels between Ruby
3:15:59
and Natalie, people might be looking at that.
3:16:01
I mean, like, what was that an aspect of Natalie's character as
3:16:03
well? Because it was in Ruby.
3:16:05
But I didn't, I didn't really see that personally in Natalie.
3:16:09
And I think that's a big difference between them because
3:16:11
we have to remember Natalie is fictional.
3:16:13
She is this amalgamation of lots of real life people and also
3:16:16
some completely fictional made-up elements.
3:16:19
So yeah, OK, I think that is me done.
3:16:23
OK, actually, forgive me, it's late at night.
3:16:26
I've just finished editing the entire video.
3:16:27
And I've got one more thing I want to add in, and that's I've
3:16:30
seen people mad about the discussions of racism in this
3:16:34
book, all lack of. And one person said like, sure,
3:16:37
they show that Natalie's racist. They show that her father in
3:16:39
law's racist. There's never any consequences
3:16:41
of that. And again, that's the point.
3:16:44
She's a white, CIS, straight upper class woman.
3:16:50
Of course there's no consequences of racism for her.
3:16:53
Of course her being racist doesn't affect her.
3:16:55
And that's the exact point and the problem.
3:16:58
She doesn't even realise how bad her actions and views are.
3:17:01
She never sees the consequences that they have on other people
3:17:04
because she's just so sheltered and stuck in her own stupid
3:17:08
little world and stuck in her own little bubble and she
3:17:11
doesn't give a damn about anyone else or how her views and
3:17:13
actions and how the politics of her literal father-in-law are
3:17:16
affecting other people. She doesn't care.
3:17:19
And that's the point. That's the criticism of Natalie.
3:17:23
She can say all this racist nonsense and she never faces any
3:17:25
consequences for it. Not really.
3:17:29
So. I understand that people maybe
3:17:31
wanted to see her face some consequences.
3:17:34
They want to see some more discussion around it.
3:17:36
But I think as readers, we know it's bad.
3:17:39
We know there are consequences for it.
3:17:42
The problem is she. Doesn't so she can't discuss it
3:17:46
in the book because like, she doesn't know about.
3:17:49
Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm making sense
3:17:51
anymore. I'm so tired.
3:17:53
But yeah, you know what I mean. There's a bit of a trend at the
3:17:57
minute of like trad wives featuring in books of various
3:18:00
genres. And another one that I have just
3:18:03
been I've seen recommended in the comments today was a book
3:18:07
actually called Trad Wife, which has been on my to read list for
3:18:10
a little while and I haven't read it yet, but I would like
3:18:13
to. Maybe that's another one I can
3:18:14
review if you guys are interested.
3:18:16
But I think it's really good that popular fiction is bringing
3:18:20
these issues kind of more into the forefront of the public eye
3:18:24
and so on. I think it's really good.
3:18:26
Sorry, this bits all off script at the end here.
3:18:29
And my head is so fuzzy and I'm so tired and my brain is so
3:18:33
overworked at the minute, isn't it?
3:18:36
Yes. I'm not quite sure what I'm
3:18:37
saying anymore. But the point is, I love this
3:18:39
book. I think there's so many really
3:18:40
good things about it. Oh, that was the thing I was
3:18:43
going to say. My other thing is I wish we'd
3:18:45
seen a little bit more from Shannon in the aftermath of the
3:18:49
assault and her outing the family and all of that.
3:18:54
I wish we'd seen a little bit more of her perspective there,
3:18:56
heard a little bit more of that, heard a little bit more about
3:18:58
what happened to her and hopefully how she recovered from
3:19:01
it. I wish that I'd been in there,
3:19:03
but again, I understand it wasn't.
3:19:05
This book is from Natalie's perspective and she's so self
3:19:08
centred she wouldn't give a damn.
3:19:10
So of course, we didn't get that covered, but it's just something
3:19:15
where I wish, I wish we'd seen it.
3:19:17
I want to know what happened to her.
3:19:19
I want to know that story. But I understand why it wasn't
3:19:22
covered in here because of who Natalie is.
3:19:24
So again, it's not something that makes the book bad.
3:19:27
It's just, you know, that little extra bit that I wanted.
3:19:31
But yeah, that's me done for today.
3:19:33
This has been a long video. I didn't expect it to be this
3:19:35
long. I just have so many things to
3:19:36
say. And honestly, there's so much
3:19:38
more about this book that I absolutely haven't covered yet.
3:19:41
So if you haven't read it yet, I thoroughly recommend you go out
3:19:45
and read it for yourself because even though I've covered a lot
3:19:47
in this video, there's still so, so much you can get out of this.
3:19:50
And I really, really think you'll enjoy it.
3:19:52
So. And also, it's just been really
3:19:54
nice to talk about a book that I like for this long and for once,
3:19:59
you know? Normally on this channel, the
3:20:03
videos that do better are I guess the more negative reviews,
3:20:06
which is fine. It can be really fun to do bad
3:20:08
book reviews. But I also really like talking
3:20:09
about books that I do like as well.
3:20:11
So I do have a few videos like that here on my main channel we
3:20:13
can go check out. I've got like a whole happy
3:20:15
stuff playlist of it's, it's nice happy stuff, things that I
3:20:19
like talking about. So some good books, some good
3:20:21
poetry. I've got some history videos on
3:20:23
there, a little bit of everything really.
3:20:25
Some videos talking about like mushrooms and fungi and stuff
3:20:27
like that. But also over on my second
3:20:30
channel, I have been posting. There's also some happy stuff
3:20:33
over there about like gigs I've been to.
3:20:36
And I do these like monthly reading wrap UPS.
3:20:39
I'm a little bit behind at the minute because Blues and COO got
3:20:41
me behind and I still got marches to record.
3:20:44
And now we're nearly at the end of April, so I'm going to have
3:20:46
that record soon. But at the end of every month
3:20:50
for this year, I've been doing these little reading wrap UPS of
3:20:52
like, this is everything I've read in the book.
3:20:54
This is everything I've read in the month.
3:20:56
Here are my brief thoughts on everything.
3:20:58
And I point out which books I really loved.
3:21:00
And this year has been fantastic for reading.
3:21:03
I have read some damn good books this year.
3:21:05
It's probably my best reading year yet for like the amount of
3:21:09
sheer good books I've read it. Oh, it's been fascinating.
3:21:12
And because of that, I've been like reading a lot more because
3:21:15
like, you know, I haven't been getting down from reading some
3:21:17
disappointing books. It's just been like 1 great book
3:21:20
after another and I'm loving it. So if you want to check those
3:21:23
out and they're not as in depth as videos like this, but they're
3:21:26
from my second channel and they're just a nice little bit
3:21:27
of happiness and maybe you'll get some book recommendations of
3:21:31
stuff that you'll enjoy too. March is going to be a good one
3:21:33
when I record it. I read a tonne of thrillers, a
3:21:35
bunch of horror books, and Oh my God, were they good.
3:21:39
It's exciting. Sadly though, this month I have
3:21:41
read a bad horror book and that is another video that I've
3:21:44
written a script for because I'm not going to tell you what it is
3:21:47
just yet. You're gonna have to wait and
3:21:48
see. But it's a book that had so much
3:21:52
potential and there's bits in it that have the potential to be
3:21:55
really good, like the whole monster in it, if you will.
3:21:58
It's so damn creepy. The whole premise is creepy.
3:22:02
It's all based on Japanese folklore and Oh my God, the
3:22:07
setting, the folklore behind it, the whole history of the setting
3:22:13
could have been so damn good. It was fantastic.
3:22:16
And then the book itself was a mixture of terrible writing and
3:22:21
the most annoying characters and a plot that just could have been
3:22:24
amazing and was just a massive let down.
3:22:27
So I've got a whole video ranting about that that's going
3:22:29
to come out on this channel very soon.
3:22:30
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about that with you.
3:22:32
Sorry, I'm going off topic here. I'm just having a little ramble.
3:22:34
And but for now, yeah, please let me know your thoughts down
3:22:37
in the comments below. If you have any of the books you
3:22:39
would like me to review or any of the content and you'd like me
3:22:41
to respond to or talk about or things like that, please let me
3:22:44
know down in the comments. I am, I'm working a lot at the
3:22:48
minute and it's been a nice distraction since losing Cuckoo
3:22:52
and like I said earlier, God, like I said earlier and I think
3:22:58
I'm working on like 6 or 7 concurrent videos at the minute.
3:23:00
So I've got lots and lots of really good content for you.
3:23:03
Like I say, I've got this video, I've got 2 Morgan and Cole
3:23:07
podcast responses and they've released another episode since.
3:23:11
So I'm going to watch that script that probably make a
3:23:13
review for that soon. I've got the horror book review
3:23:19
for I've got a second channel video unboxing this gorgeous
3:23:23
little girly. I've got a second channel video
3:23:26
that is all recorded, but I just need to do a voice over for
3:23:29
where I'm making this little cutie, which is a mini museum to
3:23:33
Kyra. So you can see me make this over
3:23:36
on my second channel soon. Just got to record the voice
3:23:38
over and then that'll be ready for you guys.
3:23:41
And how many is that? Oh, and then I have a response
3:23:46
to, I think I alluded to earlier in this video, there's a
3:23:51
horrific website out there called Motherless, I think it
3:23:54
is, which is basically a porn website.
3:23:57
And on it, there's a category called Sleep, in which men have
3:24:00
been recording themselves, dragging their wives and
3:24:03
partners and girlfriends and then raping them in their sleep.
3:24:07
And they have also been charging other men to watch this on live
3:24:12
streams and taking requests from these men in return for money
3:24:15
about what they're going to do to their wives to assault them.
3:24:18
And there's a whole massive Telegram group like 1000 Men all
3:24:22
telling each other how to do this, selling drugs to each
3:24:25
other to knock their partners out.
3:24:26
And it's vile and disgusting. However, there is also a lot of
3:24:30
misinformation out there around the story and some misleading
3:24:33
numbers and figures. So I'm talking about that story
3:24:36
in depth and like, correcting the misinformation, telling you
3:24:40
what you need to know and what this means, and looking to some
3:24:42
of the theory behind just generally rape culture and the
3:24:46
issues surrounding that. And it's going to be quite a
3:24:48
heavy video, but it's all scripted and I'm ready to record
3:24:51
it soon. It's just, yeah, it's going to
3:24:53
be a heavy one. But I think it's important to
3:24:55
talk about. So anyway, thank you for
3:24:58
listening to me ramble right now.
3:24:59
Like I say, let me know your thoughts on this book and this
3:25:01
video. Let me know what videos you want
3:25:02
me to make in the future. And for now, thank you so, so
3:25:06
much for watching today. Thank you for sticking with me
3:25:08
throughout this video. If you'd like to see more for
3:25:10
me, you can go follow me over on Instagram at Rachel Oates with
3:25:13
A0I. Post all kinds of fun photos up
3:25:16
there of like nature photography and places I've been on day
3:25:19
trips, hanging out with my lovely friends, going to lots of
3:25:22
gigs and because I also am a live music photographer in my
3:25:26
spare time, which is always really fun.
3:25:28
Recently I've just been going to a bunch of gigs for fun and
3:25:30
taking my little Fuji. So my photos aren't anything
3:25:32
special. I often get photo passes to
3:25:34
music festivals and concerts so I can go and take photos there
3:25:37
and I photographed some really cool bands.
3:25:39
So if you want to keep up with that, you can follow me on
3:25:41
Instagram and if you'd like to help support my work, because
3:25:43
obviously all my videos do get demonetized because of the zero
3:25:45
subject matter, you know, trad wives and fundies and religious
3:25:50
trauma abuse rate, you know, all the serious stuff that needs
3:25:55
talking about but sadly isn't advertiser friendly.
3:25:58
Yeah, all my videos do get demonetised, which also means
3:26:02
YouTube will put ads on them but not actually paying me for it.
3:26:06
So if you want to help support me, I do have Patreon.
3:26:09
I have channel memberships and I also have merch available on my
3:26:13
merch store and photography and art prints available on my web
3:26:17
store. On my website.
3:26:19
All the links are down in the video description if you want to
3:26:21
check them out. There's everything there.
3:26:23
I've got a couple of books out too and with poetry and
3:26:25
photography and art and essays and all that lovely stuff.
3:26:28
So you can do that. I'm so bad at this whole self
3:26:31
promotion thing but I think I've got it all this time.
3:26:34
So it is 3:15 in the morning. I am exhausted.
3:26:38
But thank you for being here with me today.
3:26:40
I appreciate this. I hope you all have a wonderful
3:26:42
rest of your day and hopefully it's not as late where you are
3:26:44
and if it is I hope you can sleep soon and but otherwise
3:26:48
have a great day. Be kind to people.
3:26:50
I appreciate you watching and I'll see you and I'll see you
3:26:53
guys again very soon for me and a little cuddle COO.
3:26:57
Bye guys. Good just girl.
3:27:00
Obviously she'll never replace my actual Chira, but it's so
3:27:04
nice having just want to hug again, Like she just she's the
3:27:09
same size as my Kyra, so it's so nice to have her like I can pat
3:27:14
little bum like I would Kyra. It's just, yeah, no one will
3:27:18
ever replace coupe, but it's nice having someone to hug in
3:27:20
the meantime, you know?