Review: "The Rise and Fall of the Non-trad Wife" by Natasha Ansari

The Rise and Fall of the Non-trad Wife by Natasha Ansari
Published June 2025
★★★

I recently went down a rabbit hole that started with a tradwife murder mystery and kind of...went from there. This came up in my search, and I couldn't tell whether or not it was about, well, tradwives (women voluntarily staying at home and, like...being 1950s housewives, but in the 2020s?). But it was on Kindle Unlimited, and I make questionable reading choices when I temporarily have Kindle Unlimited, so I thought I'd give it a go.

Now: This was not the sort of tradwife story I was looking for. That's just as well (because tradwife life sounds terrible, and I wouldn't wish it upon Ansari or almost anyone else), but I'll just put that up front in case the title raised questions for anyone else. But this is a story of expectation vs. reality: Ansari got married in part because that was the societal expectation, and over time she found that what she wanted and expected out of marriage was not what her marriage looked like, and not what it was going to look like. And: that she was going to feel more like herself if not in this marriage.

This is one for readers who have followed convention and then realized that convention isn't, or isn't entirely, for them. It wasn't what I was looking for, but that's not a fault of the book (I was looking for something pretty specific!), but it's a very fast read. Here's hoping that Ansari's life looks more like one that she wants now.