Rich Text

In 2006, “The Devil Wears Prada” was already on the brink of being a paean to the bygone glory days of magazines. The hollowing out of print media was already well underway. The brief boom of digital media was in the offing, but that would quickly collapse as well. The prosperous era of Vogue that the original movie was satirizing has ended. Twenty years later, we are all – magazine editors, digital journalists, freelancers and self-employed newsletter purveyors – fighting over the meager scraps that remain. 
This is the world that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” places us in. A world where plucky journalist Andy Sachs has found professional success and acclaim, neither of which protect her from her insolvent publication laying off its staff. A world where Miranda Priestley’s Runway still has prestige and cultural impact, but must chase web traffic and produce fashion spreads on shoestring budgets. And a world where, just as in this one, tech billionaires treat vital industries like playthings. 
It is the sad state of the media that brings Andy, who has just been laid off via text while receiving an industry award, back to Runway. The magazine has been savaged online for spotlighting a brand that a later exposé revealed to be using sweatshop labor, and their prodigal daughter, now a respected and unemployed investigative reporter, is hired to restore the publication’s journalistic gravitas. Meanwhile, Miranda is fighting to save her promotion to global head of content for Elias-Clarke, which owner Irv Ravitz has been dangling over her head. But before their happy ending, Andy and Miranda also must navigate McKinsey consultants, tech bros, and billionaires who see no distinction between the art of fashion and A.I. slop. To save their careers, ultimately, they have little recourse but to find a billionaire they trust more than the other billionaires.
In this episode, we discuss the film’s depiction of a media industry that has been ravaged by late-stage capitalism, of goofy tech billionaires, and of billionaire divorcées. We get into the idea of the “good billionaire,” who uses her wealth benevolently, and why it always seems to be a woman. We also talk the changing face of fashion, as unevenly depicted as it was in this movie. And we discuss “TDWP 2” as a girlboss movie (complimentary?!), and the space it makes for female ambition.  Hope you enjoy! xo
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"Summer House" and "The Valley" are two Bravo shows about young(ish) people on opposite coasts working through a plethora of banal relationship horrors. In this episode, we dive into the last few episodes of both shows.
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It was only a matter of time before the tradwife novels arrived. Not only have we been fascinated by these women – and their addictive yet alarming blend of aestheticized nostalgia porn, motherhood and domestic arts tips, and veiled (or not-so-veiled) reactionary politics – for at least half a decade, they are public figures optimized for projection, psychological speculation, and sheer fan fiction. After all, how well do we really know these women? Beneath their carefully constructed images, the precisely curated videos and photos of maternal and wifely bliss they show us, what are they truly thinking? What drives them? And what darker or less wholesome parts of themselves are they cropping out of the frame? These are not the self-narrativizing, confessional mommy bloggers of 20 years ago: they're the opening scene in a horror movie or a thriller, and we're just waiting for the grisly reveal.
This week, we're discussing the book du jour, Caro Claire Burke's buzzy tradwife novel "Yesteryear." This isn't the first tradwife novel – for example, our friend Jo Piazza published an extremely fun murder mystery set in this world last year, "Everyone Is Lying to You" – but it is at the center of the cultural conversation right now. So this seemed like an excellent time to discuss not just Burke's literary take on the topic, but also the unique allure and unique problems of the tradwife novel.
In "Yesteryear," we follow the story of Natalie Heller Mills, a Christian tradwife influencer whose profile is unmistakably inspired by the ur-tradwife, Hannah Neeleman (known as Ballerina Farm). She has five photogenic children and one on the way; she has a handsome cowboy of a husband; she has two nannies, and an on-site content producer. She has a closet full of expensive dresses and cashmere sweaters that she wears each morning to collect eggs from the chicken coop, and a rustic kitchen with hidden appliances. But one morning, she awakens in a version of her life that she barely recognizes, a wholly unromanticized homestead with no microwave, no cashmere sweaters, and no nannies. Instead, she has four children she doesn't recognize, and a hardened, weathered husband who will brook no disagreement. As the novel progresses, we learn more about how Natalie built herself an influencing empire, and the scandal that was threatening to destroy it – and, ultimately, why she ended up back in 1855.
It's an irresistible premise, especially for those of us who have contemptuously dismissed tradwives as living out a safe, cosplay version of a past that was always more dangerous and oppressive than their content seems to admit. What would a modern tradwife do if she awoke on a real homestead? She couldn't hack it! Right? Burke is a compelling writer, and her heroine is unlikable, unreliable, and deeply fascinating. The novel plumbs her psyche for all the resentments and wounds that have formed her into such a bitter and calculating person – and, ultimately, an unstable one. There's a lot in the book that makes it an obvious hit (no wonder it's already been optioned for a project starring Anne Hathaway!). But we also found some aspects of the book disappointing or perplexing.
In this episode, we dug into the idea of tradwife fiction writ large, and the challenges we see as inherent in the genre. We also talk through the whole of "Yesteryear" (so a huge spoiler alert here!) and touch on some of the major themes. And we discuss some of the aspects of the book that didn't work for us, like the glossing over of her experiences of pregnancy, postpartum, and the effects of having a large number of children, as well as the relative absence of broader political context. And did that big twist work for us? We're a little bit torn!
We hope you enjoy! xo
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During the season 3 premiere of "The Valley," there is a scene that lit us up with rage.
Kristen Doute's fiancé Luke Broderick is having a heart-to-heart with fellow castmate Jesse Lally about his relationship. “Our relationship is completely lacking intimacy, which is tough,” he says. “[Kristen] shuts down every advance. At what point do you stop trying?” On its face this seems like a normal thing to express frustration to your friend about... until you realize that Luke is whining about not getting enough sex from his partner who is just THREE MONTHS POSTPARTUM. The man legitimately wants a gold star for not pressuring Kristen for physical intimacy before she has been medically cleared by a doctor.
This scene also made us think about similar conversations we've seen between Jace Terry and Mikayla Matthews on the latest season of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives." And then, in episode 2, not only did Luke bring these "issues" up again, but we saw a similar exchange between Danny and Nia Booko! Three makes a trend, so we knew we had to discuss. We got into why so many men seem unable to grasp that their partners might need some physical space after a traumatic medical experience like birth, what it says about how male partners use weaponized incompetence, and how the Bravo community is responding to these on-screen issues!
In this podcast episode, we also take a slight detour to discuss our April 6th outing to see Mark Ballas and Whitney Leavitt together in Chicago on Broadway! We recap what the show was like, the energy in the room, Whitney's theater-kid vibes, and what this means for how she is constructing her career trajectory outside of "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives."
Hope you enjoy! Xo
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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote at the outset of her 1979 essay collection "The White Album." This was always descriptive, rather than self-congratulating. It's not that our souls are fed by art, but that we need to convince ourselves that our lives are more than random chaos. In order to continue on, in order to give meaning to lives filled with pain and drudgery and confusion, we must edit and construct. We must, as the girlies say, romanticize our lives.
And wives are asked to endure a great deal by romanticizing it. Perhaps that is one reason we are so gripped by their raw confessions.
In two much-discussed recent memoirs, Lindy West and Belle Burden puncture the fairy tales of wifehood that they once bought into, reiterated, and sought to embody. In "Adult Braces," West's followup to her hit memoir "Shrill," she reconsiders the triumphant ending of her earlier book: her marriage. In "Adult Braces," she admits that her marriage was troubled from the start by her husband Aham's insistence that they embrace polyamory, a desire she hoped to dispel by becoming the perfect wife. She learns that Aham (who has since come out as nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns) has secretly acted on their arrangement and has a girlfriend, Roya; as she processes his betrayals, she rents a van and road trips to Florida to find herself. When she returns, she is ready to turn their couple into a throuple. Her vision of a happy marriage has been revised.
But for Burden, the happy marriage disappears into a puff of smoke. After almost two decades of marriage, during which she gave up her legal career to raise their three children, she discovers that her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. Soon after, he walks away from not just Burden, but their children, their home, and their entire life. Left to pick up the wreckage, she spends the memoir sorting through her ideals of marriage, wifehood, and motherhood, trying to understand how she surrendered herself financially and emotionally to a man who could sever himself from her so abruptly.
Both West and Burden find themselves grappling with the crumbling of the stories they told themselves, and reevaluating the wifely roles they sought to embody. They linger over the value that being married to men granted them in the eyes of the world, and the terror of having that taken away; they consider how their anxiety about being a perfect wife (and, in Burden's case, mother) may have made them brittle and exhausted. But we also see what relief they find in being able to sink into having a partner to protect, if not control, them. If there is a cost to pay, well, it's a bargain they were happy to make.
In this episode, we discuss both books (and West's ill-fated rollout, the fevered discourse around the state of her polyamorous marriage, and Aham's furious public response). We delve into their conceptions of ideal wifehood and how they revise them as their marriages founder. We discuss the much-rumored death of millennial feminism, and whether embracing the right ideology can ever really make you happy. And, of course, we discuss how being a Good Wife always, always means doing PR for your husband – and consider whether a divorce memoir is so alluring because the author can finally stop spinning.
Hope you enjoy! xo
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