The Nannies Vs Park Avenue
Sun Herald
Sunday May 5, 2002
It's only fiction, say the authors of a titillating satire about a nanny's ordeal with an overindulged high-society family. So why are New York's super-elite up in arms, asks George Epaminondas.
There are those who believe that nannies, like their charges, should be seen and not heard. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus are not among them. For five years these two spirited women toiled as childcare workers for New York's super-elite, flitting around the wealthy eyries of the Upper East Side, where Picassos can be found hanging in the same households as Babar prints, where problem consultants are called upon to reprimand the staff, and where children are frequently treated as just another accessory. Having survived to tell their tale, the pair have now written a fictional account of their experiences that gives the subservient nanny a voice. "There was such resounding silence on the experience," says McLaughlin. "And when nannying is discussed, it's always about how you can never get good help."
From Jane Eyre to Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music, the nanny has long had a place in films and fiction. But few have ruffled as many feathers as Nan, the central character of McLaughlin and Kraus's The Nanny Diaries. The axis of the book is a titillating satire of Park Avenue society, and in particular the type of woman who is neither stay-at-home nor working mum. Instead, the character referred to as Mrs X is a self-aggrandising, overly pampered madam who stores her underwear in labelled Ziplock bags, communicates to the help by means of passive-aggressive notes and invests most of her energy in her appearance. Mrs X lavishes every luxury on her four-year-old son except that which he so desperately craves: attention. This task is delegated to Nan, who observes the goings-on with a lacerating wit. Mr X, meanwhile, is too busy running a company and having an affair with a colleague to ever acknowledge his son.
Little wonder such tykes lash out at their caregivers. "Every playground has at least one nanny getting the shit kicked out of her by an angry child," the authors write. The Nanny Diaries has spurred an imbroglio bigger than Fran Drescher's hair. So realistic is their fictional tale that no-one, least of all the yummy-mummy set, wants to believe the authors simply imagined it. A disclaimer in the front of the book has only fanned the flames. Critics have voiced their concerns that somehow the authors, who worked for more than 30 families in the 1990s, betrayed their employers' confidence and exploited their positions.
It's a rather absurd suggestion, given that the segment of the population the authors anatomise is utterly deserving of being skewered; households where lavender water for the steam iron is deemed an essential. Many have wondered if Mrs X is based on a real-life identity, something the authors vigorously reject. "It truly is a novel! Scouts' honour," pleaded Kraus while being cross-examined by US Today show host Katie Couric. "There is no real Mrs X, it would be like trying to track the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus," she adds on the day we meet. An article in The New York Times went to great lengths speculating who Mrs X could be, naming one well-known candidate. "That was really inappropriate, and completely constructed out of thin air," says McLaughlin emphatically.
The two authors are installed in a cafe on Manhattan's Upper West Side on a recent afternoon. Intimates for seven years (they met at New York University while studying education and worked as nannies to supplement their income), Kraus, 27, and McLaughlin, 28, look so much like each other they could almost be siblings. They dress alike, complete each other's sentences and even order the same things, a slice of quiche lorraine and a coffee.
Released to critical acclaim in the US earlier this year, the book has turned its first-time authors into instant celebrities. "So much of this adventure was about writing the story for each other, and we really worked in a vacuum," says McLaughlin. She interrupts her narrative to address Kraus, who arrived minutes after her. "I have to just say your hair looks great."
Kraus, whose freshly cut locks do indeed look fetching, was mobbed by clients at the upmarket Frederic Fekkai salon. This is the type of reaction they engender as New York's latest Lit Girls. "I just got attacked. Everyone had the book and I did an impromptu signing," she says, the words tumbling out rapidly. "I had goop in my hair and a robe on. And they kept saying, 'So how long did you work for the family in the book?' And I said, 'There is no family in the book.' But people don't want to hear that. They want the dish and there is no dish."
Such excitable responses might well persist. Miramax Films has optioned The Nanny Diaries, Julia Roberts signed on to read the audio-tape version (a coup for the authors) and the pair are already penning their sequel. At the same time the book is being translated into several European languages, and a promotional tour takes them up to June. How are they coping with the sudden notoriety?
"Maybe we're not coping," says Kraus, giggling.
"We're really one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of girls, similar to Nan in that sense," adds McLaughlin, the more serious of the pair.
Detailed in the book are some of the ignominious tasks a nanny must perform, all for $US10 ($18) an hour. Among the most amusing is an escape from a play date where the deranged mother is high on cocaine. And there's the horror-inducing Halloween party where our heroine is forced by her employer to wear a Teletubby costume. "I was a teddy bear once," says Kraus.
There are occasions when you wish the suffering nanny would stand up to her dastardly employers, but she is too diplomatic. Much like the authors would have been, you imagine, when they were nannies. Their retaliation is far sweeter: literary accomplishment. On why the book has inspired such a fuss, Kraus chalks it up to its debunking of high society. "It's a world that's presented as so perfect, and finding out there are flaws in that community, at least how we envisaged them in the novel, is intriguing for people."
Not surprisingly the novel has some nanny agencies reaching for a pacifier. "They took those jobs to get material for their idea and then they ran with it," says Robin Kellner, executive director of the Robin Kellner Agency in Manhattan.
Other players have explained that nannies are often asked to sign confidentiality agreements, especially for high-profile families. (The authors never did.) Denyse Kapelus, founder of Professional Nannies Institute, finds the matter entirely frivolous. "This is a serious business and we are very careful about doing things in a cavalier fashion," she says.
Discretion is paramount. "As a serious nanny person I feel the book is like peeping through the keyhole." Has Kapelus read it? "No, I wasn't prepared to dignify it by buying it. I might take it off the library shelf at some point and I'm sure it's going to be in the $4.95 sale bin in no time at all."
No time soon, it seems.
At a reading in a Barnes & Noble bookshop, the authors are greeted by a boisterous crowd of 250. They do not disappoint their fans, women of all ages and a sprinkling of men, with their lively reading of the text. Kraus, it turns out, was an actor and it shows. When she reads the part of the imperious Mrs X, she enunciates theatrically. It's very funny. During question time, a man who has the impression the women were shackled in chains during their tenure as nannies asks if they were treated humanely. "We were the Hermes bags of nannies," says Kraus, by which she means that as white, middle-class and university-educated nannies they were able to avoid the seamier elements of
the industry.
Many nannies in the US are migrant workers, bereft of English skills and minimum wage legislation, and under the thumb of those who would exploit them. A recent series of articles in The Village Voice documents the flip side of the business and the growing movement of domestic workers who are demanding legal rights. On Amazon.com there are almost 80 reviews of the book, some from former caregivers for whom the novel resonated deeply.
"This book was right on," writes one. "After a short flight to Martha's Vineyard with the family on their tiny jet and a weekend filled with confusion, I vowed never to be a mommy's helper in Manhattan again." Says another nanny, "It felt like I was reading about myself."
Not all of the feedback is an endorsement of the book. "I found The Nanny Diaries a little too spiteful for my taste," writes a working mother who has hired nannies over the years. In other criticism, one wowser accused them of being the Candace Bushnells of the nanny world, but is it really so bad to be compared to the author of Sex And
The City? "No, we adore Candace Bushnell," says McLaughlin. The team were more alarmed by the write-up that equated a nanny taking notes to pedophilia. "It was so far off the Richter scale, it was so insanely offensive," says Kraus.
And anyway, they didn't take notes. "We were busting our asses," says McLaughlin. "We were full-time students, full-time nannies and frequently working more than one job at a time. Writing wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon."
Achingly aware of the disparity between nannies and the rarefied spheres they inhabit,
they had been nannying for almost six years before they agreed to write about their experiences.
Kraus was working as an actor and McLaughlin was a business consultant when the penny dropped to write the book. The Nanny Diaries functions as a power inversion for all the bad press nannies receive. Reality TV is littered with scandalous tales of nursemaids gone berserk with their small charges while being captured on secret camera. The Louise Woodward case also cast them in an acutely sinister light. Yet for the most part, it's the nanny who comes off second best. "There's so little dialogue in the media about childcare, period," says McLaughlin, who came up with the idea for a parody and lobbied Kraus to write it together. Both women say they could not imagine writing alone.
You might presume that given their former life with little people that they would lose interest in ever procreating. On the contrary, McLaughlin was married last year, Kraus is single, but both plan to have children ... and in New York, where kids might not have backyards but they do have access to the opera. What did they learn from the job? Says McLaughlin, "It's a cliche, but really the power of love, and the challenge of modern society to be present."
In the meantime they anxiously await the cinematic version of their first baby. Both nominate Kate Hudson as being an ideal Nan, and either Nicole Kidman or Julia Roberts as Mrs X. "Or Joan Allen," says Kraus. "Mrs X is so tightly wound it would be a challenge for one of the more charming, charismatic, relaxed actresses to play her."
The Nanny Diaries by Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin is published by Penguin, $21.
© 2002 Sun Herald