Sarah Langan’s Trad Wife is a sharp, unsettling horror novel about the dangers lurking behind the perfectly curated image of domestic bliss, using social media, patriarchy, and the modern trad-wife movement as the raw material for a genuinely disturbing story. The novel follows journalist Jenny Kaplan to Black Swan Farm, where she expects to expose the deception behind trad-wife influencer Mia Wright’s idyllic online persona. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a nightmare in which nothing—and no one—is quite what it seems.
This is the second novel I’ve read this year with Trad Wife in the title, and I believe there’s at least one more out there that I haven’t read yet. That alone says something about how much cultural attention this particular phenomenon has received. The trad-wife trend has become a subject of endless discussion, particularly on social media, where women debate everything from the validity of choosing a traditional domestic role to the political implications of promoting that lifestyle to millions of followers. It’s also an excellent example of the way our cultural anxieties inevitably find their way into art, and particularly into fiction. We write about the things we are afraid of, fascinated by, angry about, or simply unable to stop discussing. And in Trad Wife, Langan turns all of that discomfort into horror.
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