Twenty-five bestselling and award-winning female writers explore the emotional minefield of mother-nanny relationships

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 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.

Susan Cheever, Marisa de los Santos, 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.