I worked as a nanny for years while trying to make it as a writer. During the day I would change nappies, sing songs, wash and fold tiny clothes. When I got home in the evenings, I would open up my laptop and write and write. Eventually I began work on the bones of an idea that would become my debut novel, Hidden Lies.
My first novel was informed by my work in childcare. The protagonist, Georgina, is a mother. In my twenties and childfree, I couldn’t have written a novel from Georgina’s perspective if not for my day job. The details of domestic life that pepper my first book - the crayon scribbles, the clutter of toys, the small hand holding yours on the way home from school - were all drawn from my working life. I was very lucky with my first publishing experience: Hidden Lies went on to become an international success and an Irish Times bestseller, and I was able to focus on my writing full-time. When I sat down to work on my second novel, Someone You Trust, I chose to write from the point of view of a nanny.
The nanny trope is a common one in psychological thrillers, for obvious reasons. The sudden intimacy of having a stranger in your home is a set-up that’s rich for narrative exploitation. Sometimes it’s the nanny who goes rogue and commits murder, like in Leila Slimani’s Lullaby (this is not a spoiler - the murder in Lullaby happens on page one.) In other novels, like Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key, the nanny is the one who has good reason to be afraid, with the threat seeming to come from somewhere in the house - or from the house itself. Having worked in childcare for so long myself, I always knew that I would write a nanny novel one day. But I also knew that, in order to make it stand out from the pile, I needed to do something fresh and different with it.
Someone You Trust begins on a familiar beat. Our protagonist, Amy, goes to work as a nanny for a wealthy family who live in a big, beautiful house in rural Ireland and have two small children. She’s got a dark past she’s running from, and this opportunity seems like the perfect escape hatch. The first sign that sometime is wrong is when Amy learns there is a third child who wasn’t mentioned when she took the job - a teenage son who never leaves his room. She isn’t introduced to him, and is told she won’t have to interact with him much. This turns out to be true. He’s so reclusive that Amy doesn’t even know what he looks like. When things start to go bump in the night, she begins to wonder what her employers are hiding from her. All this is further complicated by the fact that Amy hasn’t been entirely truthful with her employers either. It’s starting to feel as if her past is closing in on her. So far, so familiar, right? It’s hard to write about this book without giving away the twists, but as the story unfolds, it turns out nothing is as it seems.
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I wanted to write a nanny story that felt classic and original at the same time. One that starts in a familiar way, then goes in unexpected directions. I wanted to be able to tell people ‘it’s not like any other nanny novel you’ve ever read.’
I also wanted to capture what it feels like to work in someone else’s home. It can be a strange feeling, doing an interview and suddenly finding yourself cooking in someone else’s kitchen, sweeping someone else’s floors, searching someone else’s house top to bottom for a missing and crucial stuffed animal. It was easy to write those parts of the story. Amy’s tentativeness and uncertainty as she tries to make herself comfortable in her employer’s house; her efforts to bond with their small children - all those details came naturally to me, because I’ve lived it.
Looking back, I think nannying was the perfect job for me in my mid-twenties. I feel grateful now that I didn’t have a desk job back then. It would have been difficult, I think, after sitting at a laptop eight hours a day, to come home and write in the evenings. But I was on my feet all day. I walked and walked and walked - from schools to crèches to playgrounds to ballet lessons. Childcare is a physical job, and often repetitive - you’re chopping, folding, sweeping, walking the same routes. This leaves the mind free to wander. These are the perfect conditions for the creative brain. Every evening, I felt ready to sit down at my computer and work on the ideas that had been simmering in the back of my mind all day.
Nannying wasn’t a glamorous job. I got headlice. I got impetigo. I got thrown up on. Financially, I just got by. But I’ll always look back on those days with fondness. I was happy, spending my days running round playgrounds and my evenings working on my writing. I enjoyed the immediacy of my day job: scratched knees need plasters, hungry kids need to be fed. It was a refreshing counterbalance to the enormous task of working on a novel. And I came to love the children I looked after. It’s privilege to play a helping hand in raising a child, even if you’re only around for a short chapter of their life, and I found the role fulfilling in a way I could never have predicted.
My own experiences as a nanny were mostly uneventful, largely positive, and would not make a very good novel. In Someone You Trust, Amy is rather less fortunate with the family she ends up working for. Luckily for me, I can honestly say that any resemblance to real life persons is entirely coincidental.
Someone You Trust by Rachel Ryan is published by Piatkus on July 6th
