Unmasking "Trad Wives" and Serializing on Substack with Elizabeth Richardson
In this episode of The Write and Wrong Podcast, host Jamie is joined by contemporary romance and pop fiction author Elizabeth Richardson. Elizabeth works at Duke University and is currently serialising the release of her debut novel, Trad, on Substack. She discusses the bizarre real-world internet drama that inspired the book, why she chose to serialise it online after it failed to sell to traditional publishers, and how she mines pop culture for her wildest story ideas.
Key Takeaways:
Trad is about a woman who pretends to be a "trad wife" (traditional wife) online as a joke, but slowly catfishes society as she gets deeper and deeper into the lie.
The book was directly inspired by a real-world incident in 2025 involving a Twitter user named "Patriarchy Hannah," who ran an extreme trad wife account and a fake husband account before being exposed as a fraud.
Elizabeth wrote the book quickly and went on submission to traditional publishers, but it failed to sell. After sitting on it, she decided to serialise it on Substack, dropping two free chapters a week.
She mines pop culture for inspiration; her next project is a speculative romance inspired by a friend's dream about NFL player Travis Kelce.
Elizabeth chose Substack over traditional self-publishing because it required significantly less marketing lead time, allowing her to rapidly capture the current cultural zeitgeist surrounding "trad wives".
The Real-World Drama Behind Trad
Elizabeth’s debut novel, Trad, follows a woman who begins pretending to be a trad wife online as a joke. However, as the account goes viral, people start taking her seriously, and she finds herself trapped in a massive lie, catfishing society while blowing up her real life in the process.
The premise was pulled directly from a wild internet drama Elizabeth witnessed in 2025. A Twitter user operating under the handle "Patriarchy Hannah" ran an extreme trad wife account, claiming to have 14 kids and discipling small groups of women on how to submit to their husbands. It was eventually revealed that the woman was a total fraud, even going so far as to run a secondary account pretending to be her own husband so the two accounts could interact.
Fascinated by the drama, Elizabeth texted her agent and immediately set to work turning the concept into a novel.
Exploring the Fallout of an Aesthetic
While the premise of Trad is highly entertaining, Elizabeth also wanted to explore the darker, more complicated sides of the subculture. While much of the current conversation focuses on the children of internet influencers, Elizabeth was interested in the children of actual offline trad wives.
Having grown up adjacent to a conservative Christian environment, Elizabeth knew people who lived this lifestyle long before it became an internet aesthetic. She wanted the book to ask: what happens to the kids who grew up in this environment, left it, and now have to watch the internet glamorise and romanticise their childhood as a trendy aesthetic? She noted that real trad wives are far too busy running their farms and attending church to set up tripods and monetise Instagram accounts.
Serialising on Substack
After writing Trad quickly, Elizabeth and her agent took it out on submission. While editors were excited to read it, the book ultimately didn't sell. Disappointed, Elizabeth sat on the manuscript for nearly a year.
However, when books like Yesteryear began making headlines, Elizabeth realised the "trad wife" wave was cresting and she needed to act fast if she wanted to ride it. Knowing that traditional self-publishing requires a massive amount of marketing lead time, she opted for a faster route: serializing the book on Substack.
She combined some of the shorter chapters to better fit the platform and began releasing two chapters a week entirely for free. The platform's built-in social features, combined with word of mouth on Instagram, helped the book find a dedicated audience. While the entire book is free to read, Elizabeth noted that she was pleasantly surprised to find that several readers opted into her paid tier simply to support her work.
A Satirical Cabin Read
When asked what book she would want if snowed in at a cosy woodland cabin, Elizabeth selected The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clark (a pen name for V.E. Schwab and Kat Clark). The newly released locked-room mystery follows a group of authors sent to a Scottish island and given 48 hours to write the ending to a deceased famous author's unfinished book—only for people to start dying. Elizabeth praised the book for being a witty, dry satire of the publishing industry.
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