A Novel
A single, 35-year-old career nanny decides to have a baby of her own in this incandescent debut novel unsettling traditional narratives about motherhood, gender, class, domestic violence, and the politics and labor of care.
“In the midst of so many literary reconsiderations of motherhood, this book announces itself as an essential left-field addition to the contemporary canon . . . Nanny Nanny comes at you like an incendiary secret, a sweet and dangerous flame kindled in the dark.”
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
After years of caring full-time for the children of the rich and the famous, our narrator has been struck, finally, with baby fever. Over a drink with sympathetic friends, she lists all the reasons why she wants to have a baby, beginning with a story about the intoxicating, abusive relationship with an ex-wife that she barely survived. She ponders how to fill the gaping void left in the wake of such horrific domestic violence. What’s the next most violent thing a woman can do to herself? she asks. Have a baby.
Soon, her story opens other doors to the past—the seemingly idyllic childhood she spent under her father’s roof; the mentorship, and judgment, of female writers whose children she has reared; and the man, her first love, who now seems to be offering her a second chance. Each unraveling thread reveals the complex tangle of thrill and pain, tradition and progress that has led her to this moment, this calling. Is it time for her to become a mother?