View our feature on Susan Davis' Searching for Mary Poppins.
From coast to coast, articles and commentary on the “new nanny culture” abound. Nanny novels have captured public imagination to bestselling results, and thousands of “how to hire a nanny” guides are purchased every year. But to date, no book has addressed the unique intimacy and intensity of the nanny-mother relationship through narrative, with the depth and sensitivity found in Searching for Mary Poppins.
Marisa de los Santos, Susan Cheever, Joyce Maynard , Daphne Merkin, Jacquelyn Mitchard , Roxana Robinson, Rebecca Walker, and Elizabeth Graver, along with seventeen other leading women writers, explore the "nanny conundrum," delving into the complex issues that today’s mothers experience when they turn the care of their children over to a stranger. Raising questions that reach beyond money, race, class, gender, immigration, and legality into the darkest areas of love and fear that a mother feels, they offer viewpoints both rivetingly disparate and hauntingly familiar.
Providing hope, solace, and welcome perspective on this one-of-a-kind relationship, Searching For Mary Poppins sheds light on why nannies make us think so hard about who we are and what we want.
