K Chiucarello: Nanny Nanny w/ Jia Tolentino

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.

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?

K Chiucarello’s stunningly original debut novel explores the brutality of gendered violence, including the gossip that polices women’s choices and the conventions that determine which women have the right to tell their story, and how. With wit, candor, and unprecedented nuance, Nanny Nanny upends every expectation of a book about motherhood, queering the biological clock and subverting narrative bounds.