Protected: I Want to Have a Baby Because I Crave Violence

The narrator of K Chuicarello’s autofictional debut Nanny Nanny is a great storyteller. We meet them in their thirties when they are single but desperate to have a baby, working as a nanny to the rich and famous, and considering calling in a decades-old pact with an old flame to get married and get pregnant. The story begins in earnest on a winter’s night, when they take us to meet a couple of friends in a Hudson Valley bar. “I hear you’re a little jet-setter, traveling around the world with elite children,” one friend says. And like all great conversations in bars, what begins as playful work gossip unfurls into a saga about their marriage to an abusive heiress. We see them fall in love, the relationship turn controlling, then scary, then violently scary. 

The novel quickly becomes one about the insidiousness of intimate partner violence, the ethical burden of calling the police, psychological terrorism, and the devastating maw that separates the super wealthy and the rest of us. As I read, I wondered how a book about something so cruel happening to a character I like could be so entrancing. Perhaps because in a group of close friends, there is a certain deliciousness to discussing the awful details of a villain’s bad deeds.

Nanny-world, by contrast, is not explosively violent, but it is haunted by the ambient expectation that the nanny will anticipate needs before they are communicated. Pressure builds. It’s the pressure of having someone else’s children’s lives in your hands, of having an especially at-will livelihood, and of the weird, unspoken dynamic when two people are in a relationship that is based on love for one and work for the other. 

There is something gratifying (and sometimes stressful) about riding through someone else’s emotional aftermath. A great mental untangling runs through the story: of the excuses we make for the people we love and the way that complicity in our own suffering complicates our stories; of how to know whether you understand anything when, one time, you thought you knew everything and still got assaulted by your literal wife. 

If it sounds like I’m giving away the whole book, fret not. This is just a fraction of what you will find in the excerpt below along with humor and wit. 

Read this book if you’re interested in the ancient queer art of gossip, if you’re on the fence about having a child, if you’re on the fence about your friends being on the fence about having a child, if you have a nanny, are a nanny, or can’t afford a nanny. If you’ve ever loved someone a little too long and blamed yourself for it later.

– Rebecca Novack
Author of Murder Bimbo