On Yesteryear, and the price of performance

I read Yesteryear while away in The Hague last week. On Tuesday, I visited Keukenhof, an intimidatingly neat garden and spiritual home for die-hard tulip fans. There are 7 million tulip bulbs planted there, and approximately 70 million selfies taken in front of each tulip daily. As I skirted the tulip-addled hordes, posing for photos of themselves blocking the blooms from view, my mind drifted back to the book. Because, with all the people there to take photos of themselves near the tulips instead of looking at the tulips they were near, Keukenhof started to feel like somewhere that seems fun to visit, rather than actually being fun to visit. And what could be a more apt analogy for Yesteryear Farm, the titular home of Natalie Heller-Mills: the tradwife influencer living a totally super-happy, flawless Christian life.

Or maybe – as with my tulip travails - there’s another story, just out of shot.

As you may have discerned from my subtle hint,Yesteryear is awash with performance. Every adult but Natalie’s sister Abigail is playing a role - whether it’s Caleb swallowing his kindergarten teacher ambitions to become a ‘super-manly-man’, his mum maintaining the image of a politician’s wife via a consistently spicy narcotic blood-level, or producer Shannon presenting herself as the picture of a naïve-but-principled whistle-blower. Natalie has been indoctrinated into performance from a young age, acting out her mother’s story about their lives: good, Christian women, humbly getting by after the sad, fictional death of their actually-very-alive father. As a result, she is both hyper-aware of performance, and yet shocked by the full realisation of its inescapability. Slowly, her belief that only ‘Angry Women’ are performing erodes, as she comes to realise that ‘flawless Christian women’ aren’t exactly authentic, either.

Motherhood is a central and incendiary subject within the novel, and a particularly significant site of performance. While in another universe Natalie might have acknowledged her post-natal depression, in Yesteryear there is no room for ambivalent mothers. The gap between the idea of motherhood Natalie received and the motherhood she finds herself living is devastating. In the aftermath of birthing Clementine, Natalie completely shuts down, unable to bond with or care for her baby. Addressing the overwhelming emotion seems impossible, and even when her sister Abigail tries to properly talk about motherhood with her, she avoids the conversation. Rather than confront her struggle to feel genuine and comfortable in motherhood, she leans into performing it, having multiple children and curating them into her Instagram image. She focusses on seeming like someone who loves motherhood, acting the role of serene, picture-perfect ‘Mama’, instead of finding support to become a nuanced and human mum.

What’s the influence of the influencing?

Although almost everyone in Yesteryear is performing, there are fundamental differences when it comes to performance in the online world. Natalie grew up performing within her local community, playing her allocated role at school and church. For her children, performance isn’t discretely kept to certain spaces - it follows them into their home. From birth, they’re allocated their online persona (for example, ‘Jessa is our resident firecracker’), and play it to a global audience, for commercial gain. With so many eyes on them, their performance is under constant scrutiny, which makes it seem even more fragile – a cardboard cut-out ready to be toppled by the wrong product in a Target shopping trolley. As all their world becomes a stage, the space that’s just for them to be themselves diminishes to zero.

What’s wrong with a bit of ‘image re-touching’?

So, why is all this performance a bad thing? For starters, it’s knackering. Natalie’s infatuation with ‘Online Natalie’ creates constant disingenuous play-acting. Maintaining her Instagram image conjures huge pressure, trying to preserve a mask in which she feels people are perpetually looking for holes. But most importantly, Natalie’s commitment to performance wrecks her relationships.

In her ceaseless quest not to be herself, Natalie prevents anyone from connecting to her, or even liking her – and as the reader, she gives us a similar treatment. Although things are clearly not fine, Natalie regularly insists they’re actually peachy: ‘I’ve never had that much trouble with anything in my life’, ‘I was perfect at being alive’. We see glimpses of truth, when her emotion becomes overpowering - but rather than leave the mask off and let us in further, she puts it straight back on. In one example, she acknowledges to the reader that the farm is a failing exercise in make-believe - but on the next page, she’s back in role, lying to her mum about their produce being organic, refusing to let go of the pretence.

The constant performance creates a frustrating experience for the reader, as so many questions go unanswered. Natalie doesn’t tell us what sort of life she actually wants, rather than feels she should want (she told Caleb her dream was the farm because ‘this was pretty much what every good Christian girl from back home claimed to want’). She doesn’t share her feelings about her sister Abigail, and why she wants such distance from her. She doesn’t discuss her acquiescence to the ‘home-schooling’ that leaves her kids not knowing what an ocean is, especially striking within the context of her own academic achievement. For every minute of reality Natalie shows us, there’s a sense that long days of it remain concealed, and it feels like the novel ends with us barely having got to know Natalie at all.

What can we take from Yesteryear Farm, if not organic courgettes and hand-hewn soap?

Yesteryear hits hard because it puts its finger on a new phenomenon that we’re living in real-time, and are still struggling to balance our relationship with: how do we manage the modern incarnation of ‘audience’? There’s the question of withstanding scrutiny and pressure from outside observers – but also, how to be part of the audience, looking in on online lives. No selfie uploaded from Keukenhof that day would have shown the crowds – every shot would have looked like the photographer was blissfully alone in the garden. Distinguishing performance from reality isn’t easy. Like Natalie, we can get caught up in the image, and get stuck living the life we ‘should’, rather than the one we want. This an issue we’re all facing, which Yesteryear encapsulates so well: performance creates the pressure to seem, rather than freeing us up to actually be.

Yesteryear ends in irony: having turned her children into content, one daughter turns Natalie into content, through writing a memoir about her. The ‘real’ Natalie is even more fractured, now recreated through someone else’s interpretation of her. Throughout the novel, Natalie clings to her sense of being right about how best to live life, and takes more and more extreme measures to try to prove that she nailed it - that she really is happy. And ultimately, Yesteryear is a story of someone desperately trying not to face their own unhappiness, or to acknowledge being completely lost and terrified within their own life. Rather than try to wrestle with the complicated reality, Natalie erases more and more of herself, in the hope that she’ll be left with just the air-brushed version. She’s so desperate to make the performance real, that she entirely abandons actual reality. Because, it would be great if life really did look like an Instagram highlight reel – wouldn’t it?