I began to write Nanny Dearest in the spring of 2019, yearning to create a story that was simple in its premise, but tense in its emotional volatility. I had previously written a manuscript that was action-packed, with a large cast of characters and excess plot twists. Even keeping up with my own narrative threads proved to be taxing and demanding work; I wanted to write something slower, a novel into which you sink, like a warm bath that you soon discover is filled with grimy, polluted water.

So, if I wanted to write a slow-burn, emotionally fraught novel, it had to be character-driven, and there had to be one relationship that was chief among the rest, that drove the plot forward. I’d read many similarly-minded, fantastic, domestic suspense novels about husbands and wives, sisters, even best friends. But I was keen on exploring a different kind of relationship.

The previous fall, I’d read Leila Slimani’s book The Perfect Nanny and was absolutely enraptured. I loved how Slimani gives us the perspective of the homicidal caregiver almost from the very first page, reminding us that we never really know whom we’re inviting into our homes, whom we are employing to care for our children.

Nannying itself is a fascinating profession; it’s dismissed as easy work (code for “‘women’s” work or “immigrants’’’ work). But the job requires keeping a child alive who is not your own, nurturing them, in some cases even teaching them. Considering our culture’s supposed obsession with children’s lives (QAnon’s maniacal proclamations about keeping children safe from sex-trafficking, blood slurping elite society, even anti-choice claims that abortion “kills” innocent babies), shouldn’t nannying be considered the most important job in the world, aside, perhaps, from parenting?

What’s more, babysitters and nannies become fixtures of the households in which they’re employed. Even a high school student hoping to get extra cash has a voyeuristic look into the lives of others, left alone in a house that can contain as many secrets as there are family members, sometimes more. A live-in nanny would have far more access to the dynamics, and the turbulence, of a family than anyone outside the home, even extended relatives or close friends. From a family’s perspective, it’s a lot of trust to put into one person! From a nanny’s perspective, it’s a lot of discretion, perhaps some moral compromises. And what about the bonds that form between small children and their babysitters? If we’re talking in Freudian terms, don’t those have a lasting impact on the psyche of any child?

Which brings me to the nanny-charge relationship and why it’s the perfect dynamic for a domestic thriller. Mother-child relationships come with their own baggage and are a prototype for creep, from Greek mythology to Psycho. A nanny is an almost-mother, an uncanny valley version of a mother to a young child, someone whom the child may love or loathe or fear, who can be the center of a young person’s world, the child in ignorant bliss that the nanny is merely a paid visitor, one who will, at the end of the day, move on to another family. The seeds for dysfunction are endless!

Needless to say, when I explored the concept, there was a lot to unpack, a lot to think about. So what better reason than to write a book about it!

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Flora Collins was born and raised in New York City and has never left, except for a four-year stint at Vassar College. When she’s not writing, she moonlights as a sales and social media executive at a tech start-up. NANNY DEAREST is her first novel and draws upon personal experiences from her own family history.