Ellen Coyne

But obviously, you know, living in Ireland, I think a lot of women are forced to work outside of the home because a lot of families require two incomes.

And I think...

That's kind of why this kind of people are so fascinated by this because they like having a look into these worlds that are so far divorced from our own.

Yeah, and also I think sometimes there's kind of like a reductive idea that any woman who wants to work within the home is some sort of feminist traitor.

I know like in my day job working in Leinster House, you often hear people talking about how many women are forced out of the workforce after having children as if it's universally a bad thing.

But economists don't tend to do sentiment analysis on that data.

So we don't actually know how many women are choosing to work within the home after they have kids because of their choice.

But again, the fact is that it's a luxury that you're only afforded if your husband has a salary big enough to run an entire household on.

Because we generally are talking about heterosexual relationships in the context of trad wives.

Yes.

So the premise, and there is no spoilers in this because this happens very early on in the book.

This character, who most people think is very heavily based on Ballerina Farm, has become this multimillionaire influencer.

She's a massive online following and she's kind of promoting conservative politics around women and their gender roles.

But she wakes up one day in her fantastic, sprawling house and

everything is a little bit uncanny and she finds out that she's actually in a 19th century version of her reality.

So the lifestyle that she wanted is suddenly in front of her.

And there's a lot of tedious chapters where she's hand washing clothes, kind of trying to cook food from scratch, sitting miserably, darning by the fire.

And I suppose that's why the book has attracted so much attention.

Yeah, and that's why the book is so popular.

People think it's kind of skewering this social media fantasy.