Memoir · Coming soon
Tradwives and Other Dangerous Fantasies
One Man's Legacy of Destruction.
A memoir and cultural critique of the systems that produced — and still protect — the lives behind the nostalgia.
Three generations of one family, traced through coercive control, economic dependence and the long aftermath of unchecked patriarchal authority. Written without romanticising, simplifying or softening the reality of abuse.
About the Book
Beginning with a husband's devastating suicide — his calculated final assertion of control — the book moves outward through three generations of one family to examine the mechanics of patriarchal power: how it organises a household, what it costs the women and children inside it, and how it survives long after the man at its centre is gone.
It is a memoir, but it is also a systems-level account. Coercive control, sexual violence, reproductive coercion and economic dependence are read not as private misfortunes but as predictable outputs of legal, financial and cultural structures that were designed to keep women in place and are still defended today.
The narrative documents what those structures looked like from the inside, and what they continue to look like for the people still navigating them — including the impossible calculations survivors make between physical safety and economic survival, and the institutions that remain better organised to protect perpetrators than the people they harm.
Why Now
The nostalgia is winning the argument.
A cultural movement is rebuilding the conditions this book describes. Reproductive rights are being rolled back. Women are being told, in increasingly explicit terms, to return to roles that depend on their economic and legal subordination. The aesthetic of the obedient wife is sold as freedom.
This book is what those arrangements actually produced for the women and children inside them — not as accusation, but as record. It exists because the nostalgia is winning the argument, and the people who lived through the original version are running out of time to correct it.
Themes
- Coercive control and the architecture of domestic power
- Economic dependence as a mechanism of entrapment
- Generational trauma and inherited silence
- Invisible systems that enable and conceal abuse
- Legal and cultural protection of perpetrators
- The gap between nostalgic mythology and lived reality
A Note to Readers
Content Note
The book contains depictions of domestic violence, sexual violence, incest, child abuse, suicide, substance abuse, harm to animals, medical trauma and death.
These are documented as they occurred, without dramatisation or resolution imposed on them. Readers are encouraged to engage with the material on their own terms and with support where needed.
Publishing Information
- Category
- Memoir · Literary Nonfiction · Cultural Criticism
- Word Count
- 85,000 words
- Status
- Completed manuscript, seeking representation