Published July 21, 2026 03:41 am
Caro Claire Burke’s 2026 novel first year Is a hit. multiple weeks at #1 new York Times Hitting the hardcover bestseller list and an Amazon MGM film starring Anne Hathaway, the story of a traditional wife influencer named Natalie Heller Mills who wakes up in 1855 and lives the very real pioneer life she is portraying online is clearly connecting with audiences.
on the surface, first year A satirical satire of the “traditional” housewife couple, Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, behind massive success Ballerina Farm accounts and consumer goods brand. Many readers see the novel as an oblique portrayal of the hypocrisy behind which some influential people use modern forms of marketing and consumer culture to sell old-fashioned ideals, values, and ways of life that they themselves do not fully embrace.
However, one of the things that makes the book complex and interesting is that some of the guiding values that Natalie’s online presence represents, however bad, are also some north stars for those of us who love the outdoors: sustainability, minimalism, self-reliance, and anti-consumerism, to name a few. Aren’t those good things? In my view, the novel never lands on a definitive condemnation or absolution for Natalie and the digital influencer lifestyle she represents. Instead, it explores the human desires and tensions that live behind our small, modern screens.
To better understand the realities behind making an impact on indoor and outdoor spaces, I spoke to three different digital creators: katie bouea writer and influencer with a half-acre homestead near Salt Lake City; Jill WingerPodcaster, author, and influencer behind the widely popular Prairie Homestead; And DJ BrandtProfessional free riding mountain biker, self-described “half influencer and half mountain biker,” and my soon-to-be brother-in-law. He introduced me to the realities of his actions and I think I can say with confidence that there is no Natalie Heller Mills in this group.
Editor’s note: Readers, beware. Spoilers galore below.
“Authenticity” is a tricky business
Hopefully in the year 2026, it’s no secret which version of the person you encounter online is Is Simply a version, a curated set of images or videos that create a character, which may or may not approximate who that person is in real life. However, no matter how obvious this version may seem, we can all feel parasocial connections with people we have never met, connected to their online presentation, wishing for it to win and being heartbroken when it doesn’t live up to our expectations… Real. For their part, influencers either acknowledge the difference by pointing it out in the content they create or refuse to acknowledge things their audience can’t see that would undermine it.
first year There’s clearly an interest in the latter type of influencer, which presents this tension in an ideal modern consumer-culture locale: a Target with an in-store Starbucks. As Natalie and her daughters partake in the most sacred of caffeinated consumption rituals, she meets a high school classmate who is quick to point out the difference between the online Natalie (who would never shop at a place like Target) and the real Natalie standing in front of her, happily floating “beneath the mind-numbing fluorescence.”
When I asked Bouye, Winger, and Brandt questions about their “real” versus “online,” each offered a unique perspective, but they agreed on one point: No matter how hard you try, there’s no way to get all of life’s real messiness on a feed. But that doesn’t mean the effort isn’t worth the effort.
“This is something that has always been important to me: thinking about community and viewers, readers, consumers, followers,” Bouye said. “You have to treat them well and respectfully. And I think that part of it is showing the whole truth.” To do this, Bouye has done things like creating a series of videos of hauling mulch so his Instagram viewers can see the not-so-aesthetic realities behind what he does day to day.
But she’s also clear about the lines between her time dedicated to content creation and the time needed to actually run the household: “To be completely honest, when I’m shoveling dirt out of my chicken coop, I’m not thinking about setting up my tripod. I’m working; it’s not content time, and I found that it’s really hard to consistently share household content because when you’re working, you’re in your sweat. You’re hot, you’re really busted, and you’re not really thinking about…Instagram.’
For her part, Winger has recently spent time navigating her audience as she publicly shared that she and her husband are in the process of divorcing, a reality that doesn’t match the persona she’s built over the past decade. “I was tired of the homesteading stuff I’d produced in the past,” she says. “It was then that I realized; it was starting to seem disingenuous, and so I had unconsciously primed my audience to be like, ‘Hey, Jill is doing different things. Jill is having some awakenings. Jill is now running a restaurant. She’s doing other entrepreneurial things. She’s a homesteader, but not just one.’ …Divorce was not part of that equation at that time. When I announced it, like two months ago, I probably had more people supporting and understanding than I did. Of course, I had clunkers. There were some days I had to turn off my phone and just cry because it was hard.”
However, despite the uproar generated by her announcement, Winger is clear about what she believes, whether online or in real life: “I try to be the same.”
As a professional athlete, Brandt has sponsorships he has to keep in mind when he posts, and he sees it as lightly influencing his choices online, but not at the expense of denying his authentic self: “Trying to stay authentic, feeding the algorithms, and keeping up with the companies — it can be a weird line to try and walk,” Brandt says. The way he goes about it is to only promote products or clips that he truly believes in. “I can’t be one of those guys that just pulls out a bunch of crap and shoves it down your throat, just because I know the algorithm wants to see it. I can’t really get away from posting a clip or promoting a product that I don’t think is half as good.”
First comes love, then comes personality
Natalie is a deeply flawed heroine first year. He is harsh towards the people around him. She does not acknowledge the hidden money and labor that makes her life possible (her husband’s father is a presidential candidate who spends most of her life’s money). She does not take responsibility for the ways in which her online persona contributes to toxic political discourse.
But when you watch Natalie do all this, you also have insight into the early life that shaped her, the college experiences that radicalized her, and the pressures of adult- and motherhood that lead her to forge the persona of her past. Because of this, there’s something fundamentally human about Natalie that you can’t dismiss; She doesn’t come to terms with the past and doesn’t work backwards to become an individual. The story opens in the opposite direction.
So how did it work for the actual creators I spoke to? What comes first, the love of the thing or the business it creates?
For Winger, the love of getting his hands dirty outside turned into an impact he never imagined. Winger told me he started his journey in 2010 with “no big aspirations.” She explains: “I was just newly married, and we had a new property, and I had a desire to make it productive and make it mean something to me and the family. There was no homesteading or anything online at the time… I just wanted to tell someone that I was so excited about yogurt and chicken, and so it started as a journal kind of personal thing, and then it turned into Prairie Homestead over the years”. “I always expected it to be a fringe thing forever. That’s why I was attracted to it because I like a little bit of fringe. I like a little bit off the beaten path.”
Brandt’s trajectory has been similar in the sense that his online presence grew out of things he loved and communities he was authentically a member of, rather than being created as a clever way to get people’s attention. “I created my Instagram account in 2012, so I was a little behind, but not too far behind, on early Instagram… I think the reason social media content appealed to me is that even before that, (the biking community) had a mountain biking blog website called pinkbikeAnd he was like the source for anything and everything mountain biking. Brandt told me that getting a photo of the day or a video of the day on Pinkbike, which is now owned by Outside Inc., meant everything to him. And before all that, Brandt says he loves “making videos with his friends and taking pictures with his friends.”
From this place of love, the type of sponsorships that could cause Brandt to quit his day job finally arrived in 2017. Brandt says it was hard for him to “give credit to how good I was at riding a bike” versus the things he was posting on social media. “Now it’s pretty obvious with my contract being broken, but earlier in the game, I don’t really know.”
And Bouye echoed the same teleology. “We moved to this property in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, looking for wide-open spaces. I was really tired after working on election cycles and political things for so long in the outdoor industry and really wanted to do something with my hands. I really felt the calling to get back to making something that matters and that contributes to society in some way and just got super into it.”
(Some) influential people like to read about influential people
first year is a novel about the pressures and realities of modern dominant culture. Naturally I had to ask Bouye, Winger and Brandt if they’d read it.
“Carol Claire Burke is a friend of a friend of mine and Hannah (Neeleman) is a friend of a friend of mine, and it’s all just fun and playful and a good story,” Bouye said. “Let the raw milk wash over you” and enjoy it. And Bouye had a recommendation for anyone in love. first year; she says to try everyone is lying to you By Joe Piazza.
Winger, who also studies first yeartold me that she was more entertained by Burke’s depiction of “the duality of the life of an influencer” because I’ve seen it in other influencers, and I really intentionally set up my life… in a way that it wasn’t like that… I’ve been very strict with myself in my content to make sure that that’s not what I’m doing. So I thought it was entertaining in a satirical way.
For Brandt? He told me he hadn’t heard of it, and wasn’t particularly familiar with Neelemans or Ballerina Farms.
