Duo didn’t take ‘Nanny Returns’ lightly

NEW YORK (AP) — When we last saw Nanny, she was screaming into a spy camera hidden in a teddy bear.

The put-upon heroine of 2002’s “The Nanny Diaries” had unleashed a stern rebuke to her pampered and clueless employers before marching out of their lives and restarting her own.

It was a cathartic end to a novel that would go on to sell more than 2 million copies, inspire a movie and launch the careers of its young co-authors, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus.

What happened to Nanny was a question that has gone unanswered for seven years. The writing duo penned three more books before deciding to finally revisit their best-loved heroine. It wasn’t something they did lightly.

“We were terrified,” McLaughlin says. “We’ve all loved books and then read a sequel to something that we loved and just wished the story had been left off where it had been. As consumers, as readers, we know what that is and I didn’t want to do that to someone else.”

The result is “Nanny Returns,” which picks up 12 years after the teddy bear incident. After years abroad, Nan is 33, back in Manhattan and married to Ryan (aka Harvard Hotie) when she gets a drunken, late-night visit from 16-year-old Grayer, her former charge.

“It was emotional — very emotional — to go back to them,” says McLaughlin, who says she cried when she co-wrote the opening passages. “We knew them.”

During a recent interview at a Midtown cafe, the authors, including a very pregnant Kraus, scarf down salads as they detail their sudden rise, how they write and why it took so long to find out what happened to Nanny.

The duo, who met at New York University and had worked as nannies for more than 30 New York City families, spent two years writing “The Nanny Diaries” and had few expectations when it came out.

“We thought our parents would buy it and we would go on to our lives,” McLaughlin says. Somewhat lost in the hubbub — including endless attempts to unmask the villain of the book, known only as Mrs. X, who was based on a composite — was what the authors were trying to do: expose a social system that outsources parenting to an ever-changing phalanx of caregivers, producing unhappy children.

“When we wrote ‘Nanny Diaries,’ there were many things that we considered red flags waving. That didn’t get through the hullabaloo about ‘Nanny.’ So we were like, ‘We need to go back and underscore that if you let these kids grow up like this, they will someday be in charge of your health care,’” McLaughlin says.

“And they won’t care,” adds Kraus.

Publishing houses had very specific visions for a sequel: either Nanny becomes a mother herself and hires her own nanny, only to learn how wrong she was to be so critical, or Nanny opens nanny agencies across the country and learns how wrong she was to be so critical. McLaughlin and Kraus, both now 35, rejected both approaches.

Instead, they went on to write about feminism in the workplace in “Citizen Girl,” a book their publisher, St. Martin’s Press, passed on because it wasn’t a Nanny sequel.

The writers then got a reported $2 million deal at Random House, but feeling uncomfortable there, paid it back and landed at Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, which published “Citizen Girl”; “Dedication,” a novel about a woman who must confront a high school love; and a young adult novel, “The Real Real.”

The economy hadn’t yet fully tanked when McLaughlin and Kraus began to think about a Nanny sequel. What, they thought, would happen when the affluent of the world they explored lost their money? They were also inspired after reading about the squabbles in one of the richest and best-known New York families after the death of society doyenne Brooke Astor.

“That got us thinking ahead in the story: What does become of these people? And what are the multigenerational ramifications of this kind of system which creates these mini-psychotics,” says McLaughlin. “I mean, if you can’t form attachments, there are problems.”

Kraus and her husband are already making sure they don’t suffer the same fate with their first child, a girl due in January. And yes, she is considering a nanny.

“We’re looking for day care centers in our neighborhood. If, for some reason, they don’t work out or she doesn’t like that, then we’d totally have a nanny if we could afford it,” she says. “We’re huge proponents that a private nanny can be awesome.”

One last question remains: Now that they’ve birthed a sequel to their best-known work and are enjoying advance praise for “Nanny Returns,” might they ever write about Nan again?

“We now don’t rule anything out,” says Kraus. “That doesn’t mean we have a vision for it, but I can conceive of the possibility that 10 years from now, we would suddenly see where these characters are at another time in our lives and want to revisit them again.”

« Living

Share