Protected: My Wife Pays Me and I Pay the Nanny

Fiction is chock-full of terrible fathers. There are alcoholics (Pap Finn), egomaniacs (King Lear), and child molesters (Cholly Breedlove). In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard auctions off his wife and daughter after eating too much porridge. In the Book of Genesis, Abraham, the Father of Nations, comes within an inch of killing his actual son, Isaac. And don’t get me started on the stepdads: your Mr. Murdstones, your Humbert Humberts. As far as the literary canon is concerned, the best thing a dad can do is disappear, like Nick Shay’s in Underworld, stepping out for cigarettes and never coming back. 

Oliver Munday’s new story collection, Head of Household, is refreshing—subversive, even—in its refusal to reduce fathers. Munday’s old men aren’t monsters, but they aren’t white knights, either. (You won’t find any Atticus Finches here.) They are transitional figures in the history of fatherhood, patriarchs wary of the patriarchy, the first men in their families to change diapers and chaperone field trips. The child may be the father of the man, but Munday’s manchildren must also be fathers to themselves. 

In “Feeders,” a standout story from the collection, a father struggles to fire his daughter’s nanny. The father is white. The nanny is Black. He is rich, having married into money. She is not. Still, he feels a “strange kind of kinship” with the nanny. Technically, they’re both employed by his wife’s wealthy family. But is the feeling mutual? 

Like all the stories in Head of Household, “Feeders” is arresting and quietly profound, a fable of power, privilege, and parental surveillance. It’s also timely. According to national surveys, the face of domestic care work is changing. There are more working moms and more stay-at-home dads than at any point in modern American history. But surveys and statistics only get us so far in navigating this new landscape. We need fiction writers to tell us how it feels. Thank God—the Abrahamic one, I guess—that a writer as sensitive as Oliver Munday is doing just that.

– Andrew Ridker
Author of Hope