The Housewife by Natalie Barelli * * * *
I read The Housewife by Natalie Barelli as the final book in my Trad Wife Reading Project, and it turned out to be something of an outlier. Most of the books in this project dealt directly with tradwife influencers. Yesteryear , Trad Wife: A Novel , The Trad Wife , and Everyone Is Lying to You all explored women constructing some version of traditional femininity for an online audience. Their homes, marriages, pregnancies, recipes, and carefully chosen dresses became part of a public performance. The Stepford Wives obviously predates social media, but it examines the darker fantasy beneath the same ideal. The Housewife is different. There are no influencers, no social media empire, and no ideological community built around traditional gender roles. Its protagonist simply enjoys being a housewife. Jodie loves cooking, cleaning, and maintaining an immaculate home. Cleaning genuinely calms her. She is meticulous about everything, from the arrangement of the house to the meals she prep...