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“If I know one thing, it is that the old saying rings true: Money can’t buy happiness. Though I can absolutely see why you’d be temped to believe that it can get you pretty darned close.��

This is a fast-paced memoir, written from the first person perspective of a nanny in NYC. Chapters switch between Kiser’s present day life as a nanny for the rich and famous and flashbacks to her (very different, traumatic) childhood. Sometimes a book can feel clunky when it switches back and forth, but that wasn’t the case here - I equally loved both story lines!

What I didn’t love:
Kiser flaunts political opinions (that read as facts) throughout the book. She dives into abortion and pro-choice (with her own traumatic abortion experience included*), to racism and Black Lives Matter, to democrat/republican stances (she paints all republicans as ignorant and uninformed), to stay at home moms/working moms (the latter is better), to religion. Sometimes it seemed like she was pulling from a non significant experience to expound her political/social stances.

*I greatly appreciated her honesty in her writing about having her own abortion and the aftermath of it. In writing about her mindset afterwards she says, “I claimed to want to do better than my family, but I’d just made the exact same mistake my parents had. Only, unlike them, I was a coward. I didn’t face my mistake. I just eliminated it.�� And goes on to question, “Was it my own mother who had stumbled through motherhood? Or was a bad mother the one too selfish to even give her child life?��

You’ll love this if you:
•want an inside scoop on being a nanny in NYC
•like rough & tumble memoirs, like The Glass Castle

TW: abortion, racism, mental health issues, attempted suicide

Thank you @netgalley for the ARC of this book. All opinions are my own 🙂