“If I messed up a phone call it was: ‘OK, I’d do better next time.’ But if you mess up with a child, if you hurt someone’s child, that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Nannies are not only denied the money and status their weighty responsibilities demand, they’re also working within the tiniest margins of error. With the minimum wage in New York City set at $15 (£11.20) an hour, “when you are looking for someone to take care of your child,” Reid continues, “you’re asking for love, but you’re only paying $16 an hour.”
Reid says she’s fascinated by emotional labour, citing Harry Harlow’s experiments in the 1950s and 60s with rhesus monkeys, which showed that baby monkeys preferred the comfort of a substitute mother made of terry cloth instead of wire, even if the wire mother dispensed milk. And that’s the essence of the transaction: to give love for money. When Alix comes back from a trip to New York City, she realises how much she has missed both her “chatty and nervous daughter”, Reid writes, “and the quiet, thoughtful person she paid to love her”. Alix is much more interested in why Emira doesn’t have an Instagram or who she’s dating, rather than her being an excellent caretaker.” “Childcare is not easy and Emira kills it – she’s good at it. “There’s no way it’s going to work unless someone is at home, taking care of the child.” There’s also an expectation that women will be cut out for it. On both sides of this divide, working women are making choices about childcare in a world designed by men, she continues.
The people Reid nannied for, like Alix, were rich – “all of them … If you ask them, they probably wouldn’t say that, but if you own a home in New York and can afford to hire a nanny, then you either have extreme income, or extreme wealth – or both.” A lot of Americans will often say: 'Well we’re all human, we all have the same experience,' when we don’t Growing up in a fairly wealthy family with parents who valued education, she’s conscious of her “very privileged place”, but when she started at college, she made her living from childcare, doing children’s birthday parties at an art studio and – just like Emira – working as a nanny: “That was my income for about six years.” Reid says she finds it funny when readers think they can hear her in Emira, explaining that if anything she has “more of a background like Alix”. Born in Los Angeles in 1987, Reid was raised in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to New York City to study acting at Marymount Manhattan College, followed by creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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