Struggling to graduate from NYU and afford her microscopic studio apartment, Nanny takes a position caring for the only son of the wealthy X family. She rapidly learns the insane amount of juggling involved to ensure that a Park Avenue wife who doesn't work, cook, clean, or raise her own child has a smooth day. When the X's' marriage begins to disintegrate, Nanny ends up involved way beyond the bounds of human decency or good taste. Her tenure with the X family becomes a nearly impossible mission to maintain the mental health of their four-year-old, her own integrity and, most importantly, her sense of humor.
Over nine tense months, Mrs. X and Nanny perform the age-old dance of decorum and power as they test the limits of modern-day servitude. Written by two former nannies, The Nanny Diaries deftly punctures the glamour of Manhattan's upper class.
Comment: I had this book in the pile since who knows when. My physical copy in Portuguese still had the price sticker and by the price, of course I got it at a book fair. No idea why it languished so long, but... after finishing the books I had planned for March, I could add a few more until the end of the month and this was one of them.
Nan is a nanny, a young woman who is in need of extra money while finishing her studies, and she decides to accept the position of nanny at mrs X household. At first, the obvious over the top demands don't seem to be so bad and she genuinely cares for Grayer, the four year old she is supposed to take care of. However, the longer she works for the X family, the more she realizes things aren't as perfect as people who are rich and well in life seem to imply. Nan now needs to deal with Grayer and the complicated dance of meeting mrs X demands and even how to not be caught in the middle of what is, clearly, a dysfunctional house. What will she do when things get out of hand?
In this 2002 release, the authors offered a story in which they fictionalize situations and examples of what they had seen personally, as nannies themselves, and what is the expectation of certain behaviors from the families in the upper echelons of Manhattan. The families are well, money wise, but the "price" to pay seems to be the need to fit a pattern of behavior and social choices, which means the children are often means to an end in the status quo.
Nan is the narrator of the story and she is likable enough to me. Of course, not much about her is actually shared and I wonder if it hadn't been better to not make this a fictional story and focus on slices of life of what the narrators had lived through instead. Since this book is fiction, then, I must say Nan comes across as being a little too whiny and submissive to what is, after all, unfair expectations. Now, I have not been a nanny but I have worked for an elderly lady privately and while things are not the same, and I was never "exploited" as Nan here seems to be, I can say it isn't that easy to say no or to not accept certain things.
I've read many readers found Nan to be unrealistic but to me not that much... perhaps what could have helped was to have Nan interact more with other people so that we could see another side of her or have her just share random situations as if in a diary or something. There is a clear separation in the novel between Nan the character and Nan the nanny, and this could have been done better for certain.
Since the plot is focused on Nan's experiences while caring for Grayer, I expected a lot more on children rearing and so on, but the aim here is to portray how the rich families usually treat their children and not much on actual academic content. From the start Nan is seen as the person who will treat the boy well, who will pay attention to him and who will be there for him in a way his absent father and careless mother don't. The parents are characterized as people who don't have genuine love for their child, even if the mother disguises this with all the things that meet the necessary appearances needs, so that others can see how much she tries, such as the plat dates arrangement, the ridiculous amount of extra activities the little boy needs to attend so he can enter a prestigious school.
This dichotomy was what I really was interested in when I've decided to read the book. The fact the parents have a complicated relationship, which is undoubtedly dysfunctional and unfeeling also plays a part in how everything develops. I was reading and more than the specific glimpses of what challenges Nan faced, what really made me glued to the pages was to see when the obvious fall out would happen. The parents reach a point where it's impossible to maintain the balance and their poor child is the one who suffers the consequence. In this case, it did make me feel sorry for all those so-called "poor rich kids" who really didn't have the affection at least of their parents.
The end of the novel is predictable but there were still a few scenes I didn't imagine would happen that way. It's also frustrating that Nan never evolved from being a quiet and helpful nanny to someone who could impose herself when something didn't go right, but that's easier to defend then to do, if one is in need of money or can't simply quit for some reason.