Helllllllllo all. Happy Monday. It is definitely summer and I am already feeling it. How about you?
Sicilian Inheritance currently has more than 1,700 reviews on the Amazon! Let’s get it up to 2k by July 4th! If you haven’t left a review please do (we had some one stars from Piazza-haters…ex-boyfriends and Philly mag editors…that totally brought our ranking down slightly). Even if you didn’t buy on Amazon you can still review and it weirdly helps boost visibility for the book.
Sicilian has also been chosen as one of Amazon’s best books of 2024 so far which is WILD AND WONDERFUL and I am so honored.
If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, grab one today for you and a friend :) We have sold about 40,000 copies of this book so far and I am telling you this because I have promised complete transparency about the whole process. We don’t talk enough about numbers and when we don’t we are pretending they don’t matter when we all know they do.
Now onto Nara Smith. Who the hell is she"? I was asked about Nara in an interview recently when a reporter called me to be an expert on trad wives. Apparently I am now one of America’s leading experts on #tradwives. You truly never know where life will lead you when you get an economics and communications degree from a top university.
I dodged the question because I had never heard of her. And then she appeared again in my friend Sara Petersen’s newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops so I decided to call Sara and have her give me a primer for Under the Influence.
AND THIS BROUGHT UP SO MANY THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS about how we identify and label women. Way more than I thought it would.
Now, Nara is a big, big deal influencer. Let’s be honest, there are a lot of influencers that I don’t know about because, with so many, how could we know about them all? But Nara has been coming up a lot. Some people believe she's a "tradwife," while others disagree. This has become a whole debate on Instagram. Is it petty when there is so much else going on in the world that deserves notice and conversation? Probably. But also, how we talk about women is always an important topic.
The basics:
Nara is 23 years old and has three children. She's been modeling professionally since she was 14 and is married to another model, Lucky Blue Smith. Lucky Blue Smith, folks!!! That name just exudes a certain... charm? Also Lucky Blue is freskishly handsome in a very particular way…..sort of like an AI generated cyborg of a man from Westworld. This GQ article about him is excellent.
Lucky Blue was raised Mormon, though both of them are often wishy-washy when reporters try to pin them down on their religious beliefs. Nara was raised in Germany by a German father and a South African mother.
Nara Smith is quite different from the typical "trad" influencers who are overwhelmingly white and blonde, often adopting a prairie chic or 1950s aesthetic. Nara, on the other hand, looks like a glamorous TikTok star, often seen in black sequined cocktail dresses while cooking from scratch. This is a significant departure from the likes of "Ballerina Farm," and its clones who adopt a "bootstrap, hard work" ethos. Nara’s content is more about luxury and cosmopolitan energy. Her popularity is undeniable with about 7.7 million followers on TikTok.
Nara’s videos are popular because she cooks regular every day grocery store items from scratch…Oreos, ketchup, cereal.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Or a focaccia sandwich from scratch while holding a very freshie baby.
You get the gist. And every time she does this, it sortof seems like she’s trolling us. AND SHE IS! Because that content gets gonzo eyeballs. The joke is on all of us. It also gets a ton of comments calling her a tradwife.
I don’t think that is quite accurate…you know, as an “expert” on such things.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Over the Influence to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.