How Caro Claire Burke Wrote the Biggest Book of the Year

To begin with, the publisher let me know that you’re now at about 1.4 million copies sold. Does that compute?

It’s a number that I think is too abstract for me to really understand at this point. I get weekly sales updates, so I’ve known that we were moving toward that. But, no, it’s insane. It’s bizarre.

I do think that it helps me, in a way, because obviously there has been a lot of noise around this book, and I can tend to fixate on one person’s reaction to it. When there are moments like “a million copies sold,” that actually has a very grounding effect, of me realizing, Oh, my God, there are so many different opinions about this book. It helps me couch it in a way that gives me some perspective. Does that make sense?

Yes. Obviously, you haven’t gotten a million angry e-mails.

Yeah, I’ve only gotten nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, so we’re doing well.

We’re in a strange cycle with the book right now. Initially, it really took off, and then there was the backlash, and then there’s the backlash to the backlash, and now we’re in some miasmic fourth phase where it’s all mixed up together. But, currently, at this moment, what is your thinking about how the public is receiving the work?

I think you probably have a better understanding at this point of the discourse than I do. I’m pretty tapped out. But I do think that there was a period of time, probably right after I hit No. 1 on the New York Times list, where it felt to me like the discourse around the book was veering in a direction that I wasn’t excited about. I don’t feel that way right now. I feel right now that there has been a little bit of a balancing effect in terms of how people talk about it.

Can you talk more about that moment you felt the discourse was going a bit off the rails?

When we hit No. 1, that was, I think, three weeks in. I was in London at the time, and immediately, I was, like, This is too much. I’m a début novelist. No one knows who I am. And that was when the stuff with Anne Hathaway started to really pick up, and I felt a palpable shift from critics and readers alike, where it was, like, “No book is worth this.” It went from “What is this book? Is this book good?” to “Is it worth the hype? Is it worth being on ‘Seth Meyers?’ ”

We’ll definitely dig into that. But I want to go back for a bit. Can you walk me through the backstory of the book, and how you came up with the idea? Why was this a story you felt you had to tell?

It was two years ago, the winter of 2024. I’d been writing for about a decade. That previous summer, I’d gone on submission for another manuscript, and it got rejected. My agent was very supportive about future projects, but I just said, “I need some time off.” So I downloaded TikTok. I think I was just bored. It was the first time in my adult life that I wasn’t working on a fiction project. Part of it was just timing. I downloaded TikTok exactly as the “trad wife” conversation took off.

Your TikTok videos were how I first learned of you, actually. I was surprised at how fearless you were just to hop on and share your opinions about everything, even when you were wading into choppy waters like, say, debating whether or not Taylor Swift is good for feminism.

I think, because I was in my late twenties at the time, and none of my friends were really on TikTok, it felt, ironically, very private. It just felt like a back door to have the types of conversations that I had wanted to have for a long time, but that I had never had the credibility to talk about. I had been pitching essays forever, but I’m a terrible pitcher, so I never got the essays approved. I am a person who has opinions. And I think, quite frankly, that I was at a point in my life where what I had done so far didn’t match my expectations for myself. I didn’t have the type of credibility that you or Jia Tolentino or Andrea Long Chu or any of these cultural critics get to have, where you have an opinion and it matters because you said it. It felt like I hadn’t done the right things. I hadn’t gotten the right résumé. Then I was out there sharing my thoughts about feminism and media literacy, and all of a sudden I have Tressie McMillan Cottom in my comments.