Off Book with Elizabeth Richardson: Tradwives, Substack, and the Rise of Pop Fiction
What happens when the book everyone tells you is going to sell…doesn’t?
If you’re Elizabeth Richardson, apparently you let it sit for a while, watch the exact cultural conversation your book is about explode online, and then decide to serialize the whole thing on Substack.
Honestly? Publishing plot twist.
This week on Off Book, we’re talking with Elizabeth Richardson, author of Trad, a serialized novel about a woman who pretends to be a tradwife online, goes viral, and proceeds to completely derail her life.
Meet Elizabeth Richardson
Elizabeth Richardson is an author, extremely online person, and creator of Trad, which she is currently releasing chapter by chapter on Substack.
But Trad was never supposed to be a Substack novel. Elizabeth originally wrote the book with traditional publishing in mind. She had an agent. They sent it out to editors. People loved the premise. Everyone thought it was going to sell.
And then it didn’t.
There wasn’t even one obvious reason why. Just publishing doing the deeply comforting thing publishing sometimes does where everyone says, “This is great!” and then nobody buys it.
Eventually, Elizabeth moved on.
Until Yesteryear arrived.
The Very Weird Timing of Publishing
One editor had mentioned during the submission process that another tradwife book had sold in a major deal, which may have affected the market for Trad.
That book was Yesteryear.
Elizabeth read an early copy, immediately knew it was going to be big, and watched as the book helped fuel an even larger online conversation about tradwives, domesticity, performance, motherhood, and the women turning all of it into content.
Suddenly the timing that had once worked against Trad started working in its favor.
A writing friend kept telling Elizabeth to serialize the novel on Substack.
She resisted.
Then she got FOMO.
Relatable.
Elizabeth started with a tiny newsletter audience, imported those subscribers to Substack, announced the project on Instagram, and began releasing chapters.
Readers found it quickly.
And a book that had essentially “died on submission” suddenly had another life.
So…What Actually Makes Someone a Tradwife?
This gets complicated very quickly.
Being a stay-at-home mom does not automatically make someone a tradwife.
Baking bread does not make someone a tradwife.
Having a lot of children does not make someone a tradwife.
Even living what looks like a very traditional domestic life does not necessarily make someone a tradwife.
A huge part of the conversation around Trad is the difference between living a traditional lifestyle and performing one for an audience.
There’s the actual life.
And then there’s the content version of the life.
The perfectly lit kitchen. The homemade bread. The beautiful children. The husband going off to work while someone apparently has both the energy and available daylight to churn butter from scratch before lunch.
At what point does the lifestyle become an identity?
And at what point does the identity become a product?
When Does the Scam Become a Scam?
This was one of our favorite parts of the conversation.
Elyse is fascinated by scammers, specifically the moment when a questionable idea officially crosses the line into a scam. Because a surprising number of famous scams do not begin with someone sitting down and announcing, “Today I will commit fraud.”
Sometimes something works.
Then it works a little too well.
Then people believe you.
Then you have to decide whether to tell the truth or keep going.
That tension is at the center of Trad.
Elizabeth was partly inspired by the real-life story of a woman online who pretended to be a tradwife, complete with an entirely fictional husband account.
And once you start pretending to be your own husband on the internet?
We have probably crossed a line.
The fascinating part is that even people caught up in the situation questioned exactly what the scam was. Money wasn’t necessarily the point.
Maybe attention was.
Maybe belonging was.
Maybe friendship was.
Which makes the whole thing much stranger.
The Tradwife Story We Aren’t Talking About
Elizabeth was also interested in a perspective that gets much less attention.
The children who actually grew up in deeply traditional or fundamentalist households.
Not influencer children.
The people whose childhoods genuinely looked like the lifestyle now being repackaged online as beautiful, aspirational content. What is it like watching strangers romanticize a version of the life you actually lived?
Because those experiences might look very different once the sourdough starter and linen dresses are removed from the frame.
That tension shows up throughout Trad, particularly through Hannah’s relationship with the religious world she came from and the family members who never left it.
They aren’t performing traditional life.
They’re simply living it.
And those are two very different things.
Introducing: Pop Fiction
Then Elizabeth introduced us to a genre we would like officially added to the literary taxonomy immediately:
Pop fiction.
No, you probably will not find a “Pop Fiction” shelf at Barnes & Noble.
Yet.
Elizabeth uses the term for books inspired by pop culture, internet culture, celebrity, reality TV, media, trends, and whatever society happens to be obsessing over at that exact moment.
It can overlap with satire.
It can be romance.
It can be literary fiction.
It can be a thriller.
The genre matters less than the fact that the story is holding up a mirror to the culture surrounding it.
And suddenly we realized we read this category constantly.
The Devil Wears Prada to TikTok: Why Pop Fiction Matters
Elizabeth traces some of her love for pop fiction back to Lauren Weisberger and books like The Devil Wears Prada.
Those stories were capturing a very specific culture and moment.
Fashion magazines. Celebrity. Status. Work. Ambition. Consumerism.
And decades later, we still immediately understand what those books were saying about the world they came from.
Which raises an interesting criticism of pop fiction.
Does writing directly about internet culture, influencers or the latest cultural obsession make a book date itself?
Probably.
But is that necessarily bad?
Elizabeth argues that these books become markers of a particular moment.
The wellness influencer era.
The tradwife era.
The tradwife backlash.
Reality television.
Influencer houses.
Publishing discourse.
Books like these tell us what people were fascinated by, worried about, buying into and pushing back against. That feels less like a weakness and more like cultural documentation.
The Elizabeth Richardson Pop Fiction Syllabus
Obviously, once someone invents a genre on Genre’d, we need reading assignments.
For someone new to pop fiction, Elizabeth recommends R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, a publishing satire that also understands the internet extremely well.
Then there’s Jessie Gaynor’s The Glow, which takes on the wellness industry, magazine culture and the strange evolution from wellness philosophy to wellness business to…possibly something resembling a cult.
For an extremely current version of the genre, Elizabeth recommends Leigh Stein’s If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, a novel about influencers living together in a California hype house that somehow becomes what Elizabeth describes as a “gothic hype house.” (A book Katy just read and loved).
Which is frankly enough information for us to want to read it.
We also get into The Compound, The Most Famous Girl in the World, Female Fantasy, American Psycho, and the pop-culture lineage connecting books like The Devil Wears Prada to the fiction being written about internet culture today.
Rich People Behaving Badly
When Elizabeth wants a comfort read, she has another highly relatable requirement:
Rich people behaving badly.
Give her The White Lotus energy.
Give her terrible decisions.
Give her characters who absolutely should not do the thing they are about to do…and then do it anyway.
There is something deeply satisfying about watching fictional wealthy people make spectacularly bad decisions because, as we establish, rich people simply have access to a much larger scale of bad behavior.
The possibilities are limitless.
The only writing problem?
Elizabeth occasionally has to Google things like, “What soap do rich people use?”
Research is research.
Being Extremely Online Is Actually Useful
There is also something refreshing about Elizabeth’s refusal to treat pop culture as inherently unserious.
Sometimes people seem almost proud that they haven’t watched the popular show, read the buzzy book or followed the cultural conversation everyone else is having.
Meanwhile, the three of us are asking a different question:
Why?
Being a fan is fun.
Recognizing an Easter egg is fun.
Understanding the weird internet reference buried inside a book is fun.
And when you understand the cultural context surrounding a story, you sometimes understand the story differently.
Case in point: Katy and Elyse read The Compound and thought parts of it sounded practically dystopian.
Reality TV viewers informed us that no, actually, that was basically just Love Island.
We stand corrected.
Final Thoughts
Elizabeth’s version of pop fiction feels particularly suited to where books are right now.
Readers are constantly moving between books, TikTok, television, celebrity stories, podcasts, memes and whatever discourse the internet has decided we are all required to have an opinion about this week. Of course fiction is going to absorb that.
And maybe instead of dismissing those books because they are tied to a particular cultural moment, we should pay closer attention to what they are documenting.
Trad does exactly that.
It takes the online mythology of the tradwife, mixes it with influencer culture, religion, identity and one woman making increasingly questionable decisions, and asks a very internet-era question:
What happens when the version of yourself you created online becomes bigger than the real one?
Books Mentioned in This Episode
The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
Chasing Harry Winston by Lauren Weisberger
Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
The Glow by Jessie Gaynor
If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein
The Most Famous Girl in the World by Iman Hariri-Kia
Female Fantasy by Iman Hariri-Kia
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Find Elizabeth Richardson
You can read Trad as a serialized novel on Elizabeth Richardson’s Substack and find her on TikTok and Instagram, where she talks books, tradwives, internet culture, writing and occasionally survives going viral.
At the time of our conversation, Trad was nearing the end of its serialization, so consider this your invitation to catch up.
Join the Conversation
Are we officially making “pop fiction” a genre?
What book would you put on the syllabus?
And most importantly: at exactly what point does pretending to be your own husband online become a scam?
We have thoughts.
Find Genre’d on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at @genredpodcast and tell us yours.
Read widely. Judge freely.
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