“It seems that a lot of popular culture wants to portray marriage and motherhood as demeaning, restrictive or simple,” she told Matchar for the piece. But one stood out: Natalie Holbrook (now Lovin), Matchar’s chief subject, who, back in 2011 , had a new baby named Huck and wrote a blog called Nat the Fat Rat. Most of the blogs lost their appeal after I had spent 12 hours reading their entire archives. I wouldn’t have admitted back then, but I was also reading as a person curious about wife- and motherhood. And though I wouldn’t have admitted back then, I was also reading as a person curious about wife- and motherhood, territory I could see in the distance but had not yet entered myself. I was certain that the authors were all on the verge of sticking their heads in an oven. The disparity between my assumptions about their real lives and the lacquered image they presented - even the chaos of childrearing somehow picturesque - was fascinating. Moreover, Mormons have long been an object of suspicion and curiosity in non-Mormon America, and the women’s religious devotion added another level of voyeuristic appeal. On the surface, I was doing what looked a little bit like hate-reading - some of the bloggers were so smarmy, the writing so breathless, the lives so artificial. I was in grad school, and Matchar’s piece caused me to spend what was probably hundreds of hours delving into the back catalogues of the women named in the article.
This essay materially changed my internet consumption habits, along with those of a number of women I know. The essay pointed out the avenues blogs offered for subterfuge, for masking pain, but ultimately Matchar parsed the perusal of these blogs as a pleasure - and not even a very guilty one. Matchar and her similarly childless and striving friends read the blogs because they were “uplifting,” and because they put a positive spin on domesticity, she wrote. In 2011, Salon published an essay by Emily Matchar called “Why I Can’t Stop Reading Mormon Housewife Blogs.” Matchar, a self-described “standard-issue late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminist” - more or less how I might have described myself at the time - obsessively followed a group of young white women who were chronicling dreamy, picture-perfect lives with beautiful young children, good outfits, tidy homes, and handsome husbands.
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