Nan: Your Mother’s Feminist? And Anderson

Nan is truly a woman making it on her own in the big city. She lives up to the Mary Tyler Moore ideal: she works, pays for her own apartment, is finishing school, has a man-friend, and deals with all of the crazy shit in her life

It’s Hump Day!

After I was finally able to move past the flat, boring character names in the Nanny Diaries, my thoughts moved to Mrs. X. What does she do all day that keeps her so busy she needs a nanny full-time, and is rarely home to talk to Nanny in person? Personal hygiene practices and beauty outings can not possibly take up all that time. Furthermore, why would someone want a child if she does not want to take part in his life?

Some mothers choose not to work so they can have an active role in their children’s lives, and some mothers hire domestic help so they can work and still have children. Mrs. X on the other hand, does not work and does not raise her child. In her seemingly commitment-less life, I wonder if she lives a privileged existence, or if she keeps herself so busy to divert her attention from her unhappiness. Mrs. X is clearly unhappy, and while I believe it is partly due to her empty life, this could be up for debate.

I also find it interesting that Mrs. X hires a someone to mother her child. Her relationship with Nanny is hostile at times and yet always very dependant. I hope to see more mother/outside caregiver relationships for which to compare to Nanny and Mrs. X.

It’s Tuesday!!!

Hey girlfriends!

So while reading Nanny Diaries, the one question that screamed at me throughout the entire book was, what is Nanny doing staying with this family?!?!?! On one hand, I appreciate the relationship Nanny formed with Grayer and her feeling of obligation to him, as she was the only healthy and loving relationship in his life, but I wonder if this is at all realistic. I felt I could identify with the details of Nanny’s character to a great extent. We are both seniors in college, both majoring in psychology and both in the process of writing a thesis whilst looking for jobs. That being said, I doubt that I would put my emotional health, self-respect and academic requirements in jeopardy for minimal compensation and the way she so willingly did.

Nanny at every occasion put the needs of Mrs. X before her own. She risks not finishing her thesis, she almost misses her thesis defense because Mrs. X shows up home late, she almost misses her graduation from NYU so that she can rush off to Nantucket, and furthermore the week she left for the X’s family vacation was the one week that her boyfriend, Harvard Hottie ,was home in the city before going away to Amsterdam for the entire summer. After spending the spring apart. Is it wrong of me to say that I would have definitely taken a stronger stance against Mrs. X and prioritized my life above her demands? I would want to see my man!

In all other aspects of her life it seems that Nanny is able to freely speak her mind. When she runs in to Harvard Hottie’s friends at the bar she goes on somewhat of a moral rampage, critiquing their lives and chastising H.H. for being friends with them. Automatically she puts them in a box of spoiled, rich, self-entitled d-bags. True or not, in this instance we see Nanny’s “I am not going to take shit from any man attitude.” Why then, in her interactions with Mrs. X is she so incredibly passive?

Monday….sort of

“Just how does an intelligent, adult woman become someone whose whole sterile kingdom has been reduced to alphabetized lingerie drawers and imported French dairy substitutes? Where is the child in this home? Where is the woman in this mother? And how, exactly, am I to fit in?-Nanny Diaries

My ‘area of interest’ in chick lit is in the genre’s portrayal of successful and independent women. The ladies of Nanny Diaries were an interesting departure from this. I wanted to like Mrs. X, or at least admire her-before she married Mr. X, she was a self-made woman. McLaughlin and Krauss described her as coming from a working class Connecticut family, and working her way up (the art world?) before sniping Mr. X from another woman and becoming a raging, entitled bitch.

I felt like her stiff formality (communicating via LETTERS?!) and the way she treated the people beneath her was a reflection of her insecurity. In marrying Mr. X, she became part of an elite world very different than the one that she was raised in, and I think she felt as though she had to compensate for that. I think this may be the reason that she didn’t have any friends that we know of- because she couldn’t really relate to them and probably felt inferior.

It seems like Nanny came from a somewhat similar background, and I think this is why Mrs. X was occasionally able to let her guard down around her. For example, when she was getting ready for her Valentine’s date, she seemed really eager to have Nanny’s opinion, and even offered her champagne. But as soon as her husband bailed, she was embarrassed, and turned right back into an ice queen.

I think what bothered me most about Nanny Diaries (and Mrs. X) was that she did ‘make it’ against the odds, but as soon as she found an appropriate man, she gave up her career. Which isn’t so bad, except she gave it up for nothing. She certainly wasn’t raising her child or doing anything useful with her time (besides shopping), and she is impossible to like. And the worst part about the whole thing is that the story ends happily for her-she may be insecure, but she’ll always get her way.

Lipstick Jungle + SEX

I started reading Lipstick Jungle last night and I noticed that all of the women in this book have a very strong sex drive, similar to the women in Sex and The City. I feel like this is something very rarely addressed in books about women written by men – maybe it’s because they feel uncomfortable writing such explicit desire in women? Or maybe it’s because they don’t really consider the female sex drive. Anyway, this openness of how the author addresses her characters’ desire seems very post-fem to me, and I think it even makes them seem more masculine as traditional book characters. Thoughts?

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