Monthly Archives: August 2026

Lullaby: Caring for Life and Happiness

Posted on by

We know from the very outset of Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2016) the conclusion of the story it tells: this is the tale of a nanny who murders the two children who are in her charge. The book is therefore in part an investigation into how such a tragic event could come to pass. How does a woman described as “this perfect nanny” (202; also the US title of the English translation) come so dramatically to turn from being the embodiment of care to being the agent of destruction and violence against two young innocents? But the book is equally–and perhaps even more–powerful as an exploration of the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between employer and employee in domestic service. The murder that caps this story merely plays out the worst fear of a relatively common condition, when well-meaning middle-class parents invite an unknown quantity into the heart of their familial arrangements.

The parents here, Paul and Myriam, are generous and full of good intentions. He is a music producer, and she is a lawyer. She is more interesting than he is, or at least the book is more interested in her, perhaps because she is the mother, traditionally expected to find fulfilment and satisfaction in nurturing her off-spring. Indeed, at first that is her intention: initially she gives up her high-powered job to commit to full-time motherhood but to her “secret shame” (8) she cannot stand the restrictions on her life that this entails. When she runs into her old boss, Pascal, and he hints that the firm would take her back, she becomes a child herself: “She had wanted to hang on to Pascal’s leg, to beg him to take her with him, to give her a chance” (11). This is an early sign of a theme that runs through the book: that everyone needs mothering, but there are just not enough mothers to go around. When Pascal does agree to take her on again, she and Paul decide to hire someone to mother their children, but who will also end up largely mothering them, too.

But the decision to take on paid help is fraught with guilt and uneasiness. Paul comes from a left-wing family–“His parents had raised him to detest money and power” (106); his mother is full of “stories about her youth, her past political commitments, her revolutionary comrades” and once “believed that a revolution led by both sexes would give birth to a very different world, where her grandchildren would grow up. A world where there would be time to live” (115). Myriam’s work as a lawyer focuses on legal aid cases, defending those who cannot afford to pay for representation, “sleazy dealers, halfwits, an exhibitionist, talentless robbers, alcoholics arrested at the wheel” (29). She even finds herself defending men accused of hate crimes or domestic abuse. This despite (or because of?) the fact that she herself, it is implied but not directly stated, is of North African origin. So she is alert to the endemic racism of the agency where she first looks for help, where initially the agent assumes that Myriam is looking to be a nanny, rather than to hire one.

Ironically, perhaps, though most nannies are women of color (later in the book we are given a glimpse to the way they “swarm” with their local charges in the park, murmuring “snatches of Baoule, Dyula, Arabic and Hindi, sweet nothings whispered in Filipino or Russian” [178]), Myriam is set against hiring a North African:

She fears that a tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between her and the nanny. That the woman would start speaking to her in Arabic. Telling Myriam her life story and, soon, asking her all sorts of favours in the name of their shared language and religion. She has always been wary of what she calls immigrant solidarity. (16)

From the outset it is important, in other words, for Myriam to be able to maintain her distance, to establish clear boundaries, to avoid thinking (or letting the nanny think) that she has much in common with the person they hire. She and Paul therefore end up picking one of the few white women on the market, a forty-year-old named Louise. But for all the assertions of distance, one of the first things we hear Paul saying to her is “Make yourself at home” (21). The ambiguous overlap between workplace and home is already built in. 

If anything, Louise starts off with a better sense of the contradictions and struggle inherent in her situation. Shown around Paul and Myriam’s home, “she observes each room with the self-assurance of a general standing before a territory he is about to conquer” (22). And it is not long before the “apartment is completely under her powder, like an enemy begging for forgiveness” (24). This is because she soon establishes her indispensability, as a “miracle worker” (22) who brings order to the chaos, and swiftly breaks down any initial resistance from the children, baby Adam and primary-school-age Mila. Louise can play games and tell stories; she can cook and clean and sew. It is not long before she is not so much commanding general as not-so-secret agent: “she has embedded herself so deeply in their lives that it now seems impossible to remove her” (159). A fellow nanny visiting the apartment one day, when Myriam and Paul are away, sees that they have on display a photo of Louise holding the children. “You’re part of the family,” she tells her (121). By this time, it seems that this has become Louise’s fantasy, too.

Myriam and Paul encourage this fatal confusion, because they do not want either to see themselves as employers or Louise as employee. So they invite her to be guest as well as cook for a dinner party with their friends. Here also we see similar denials of power relations when Myriam introduces Louise to “Pascal, my boss” only for him to reply “‘Your boss? Oh, give me a break! We work together. We’re colleagues” (51, 52). It seems to suite everybody to blur the hierarchies that divide them. Yet at the dinner Louise still feels “nervous as a foreigner, an exile who doesn’t understand the language being spoken around her” (52). It is easier for those who hold the upper hand to deny that fact that for those who are supposedly included within a relationship that goes beyond labour to feel that they truly belong. But at the dinner, fortified by the flowing wine, Paul goes a step further: “This year, we’re going to give ourselves a treat and take our nanny writh us on holiday! You have to enjoy life, right?” (54). To whom is he speaking? Who has to enjoy life here? Is this the nanny’s holiday, too?

The irony is that for many jobs, the requirements for being a good worker involve denying that you are indeed a worker. By refusing to recognize your exploitation by others, you also become willing to exploit yourself, going beyond your contractual duties, working late, thinking about work in your leisure hours, confusing work with life. It is after all precisely their investment in their careers, and their identification with their jobs, that has led Myriam and Paul to turn domestic care into paid labour. But they want and expect from their nanny a similar self-sacrifice, which indeed she provides, going above and beyond expectations at every turn. Myriam and Paul want Louise to care for their children in the double sense of not only performing a service for pay (something a hired baby-sitter begrudgingly does one weekend when Louise is ill), but also being emotionally attached, even perhaps loving them. But not too much, of course, because one day this service will no longer be required. When Adam and Mila no longer need her, Louise’s contract will be terminated.

This is the anxiety that starts to grip Louise: that she will become (literally and figuratively) redundant. She therefore hatches a plan, to encourage Paul and Myriam to have another child: “Her obsession with the child spins endlessly in her mind. She thinks of nothing else. This baby, which she will love madly, is the solution to all her problems. [. . .] It will protect Louise’s place in her kingdom.” The problem, however, is that Louise’s don’t see the need for a new child: after all, they have two already. The children they have block the arrival of the one who is to come, and in more ways than one: 

She feels sure that Paul and Myriam don’t have enough time to themselves. That Mila and Adam are an obstacle to the baby’s arrival. It’s the children’s fault if their parents are never alone together. Paul and Myriam are exhausted by their tantrums; Adam wakes up too often in the night, cutting short their lovemaking. If the children weren’t constantly under their feet––whining, demanding cuddles–Paul and Myriam would be able to forge ahead and make a child for Louise. Her desire for that baby is fanatical, violent, blindly possessive. She wants it in a way she has rarely wanted anything: so badly it hurts, to the point where she is capable of choking, burning, destroying anything that comes between her and the satisfaction of her desire. (183)

For a desperate woman, perhaps touched with madness (and we also get something of Louise’s context and backstory, to which her employers are almost entirely oblivious), all this is no doubt reason enough for the dramatic act of violence that has unfolded as the novel opens (and with which it ends). She kills the children because they can never be enough, because one day they will grow up and pass her on the street without recognizing her; she will become no more than the faintest of memories, like the “ghost” to which she is several times already compared (110, 155). She kills the children for the sake of new life, of continued life, and because “Someone has to die. Someone has to die for us to be happy” (193), although she never realizes that, whatever Myriam and Paul say (“Louise will be so happy” [55], they convince themselves as they invite her to work through their holiday), her happiness is the very least important factor in the labour contract that fleetingly binds her to this bourgeois existence.

The Days of Abandonment: Writing a New Story

Posted on by

Olga is a writer, a mother of two young children, living in Turin. Her husband, Mario, has just announced that he is leaving her. So begins Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002). What follows is an exploration of her response to her new situation, which veers from grief to anger, tragedy to something like comedy. Along the way, there is a fair amount of overlap with Annie Ernaux’s The Possession, which covers much the same territory. What distinguishes Ferrante is, first, the materiality of the world she describes, whose very thinginess at times seems to conspire against the novel’s protagonist. Second, the fact that Ferrante’s heroine has children (where Ernaux’s does not) changes almost everything. This is as much the portrait of a mother as it is of a wife. After all, as Olga discovers, the maternal bond has to endure even as the marital relationship breaks down.

At first, Mario offers little in the way of explanation. But soon enough it becomes clear (and despite his initial denials) that he has in fact taken up with another woman. To add insult to injury, it turns out that his new girlfriend, Carla, is significantly younger, the daughter of a woman who had once been the couple’s friend when the two of them had first moved to Turin. Indeed, at the time the young girl’s apparent infatuation with Mario already caused ructions within their marriage, and now Olga concludes that far from cutting off contact with Carla then, 

For almost five years he had secretly enjoyed that body, had cultivated that passion, had transformed it into love, had slept patiently with me abandoning himself to the memory of her, had waited until she became of age, more than of age, to tell me that he was taking her definitively, that he was leaving me. (70)

Olga realizes all of this only when, by mere accident, she comes across Mario and Carla out on the street. Any previous sympathy she may have had for her husband now vanishes. A woman enraged, she attacks him physically, shoving his face against a shop window. “Hold the commas, hold the periods,” she says to herself. “It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70). She wants to drag him with her to this unpunctuated experience in which the narratives providing sense and meaning to everyday life suddenly no longer hold. And yet, of course, in their own ways each of the two of them is playing out their part in one of the oldest stories in the book: the cheating husband; the betrayed wife.

There is then a double challenge here. Ferrante’s challenge is to tell this well-worn tale in a new way. And this then echoes or is echoed in Olga’s challenge to reconstruct her sense of self, and perhaps particularly her sense of self as a woman, without falling into familiar traps and stereotypes.

For Olga is now haunted by a story from her childhood, a story that at the time she perhaps did not understand but which now gains new meaning, of “a dark figure of my Neapolitan childhood,” a woman whose husband had abandoned her with her children and becomes the subject of cautionary gossip in the neighbourhood:

My mother talked about it with her workers [. . .] while I played under the table [. . .], repeating to myself what I heard, words between sorrow and warning, when you don’t know how to keep a man you lose everything, female stories of the end of love, what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved, are left with nothing. The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the “poverella,” that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her. The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man, and his perfidious green eyes. (15–16)

How to avoid becoming the poverella, who lost her name and her individuality, transformed into an archetype? And how, now for Ferrante, to avoid simply writing another poverella’s tale?

Of course, one way to avoid the same old story is to give the scorned woman voice, and this is fundamental to Ferrante’s novel. We may perhaps intuit or (from Olga’s point of view) fear what others may be saying, but here we still rigorously close to Olga’s own perspective, even if it may leave us in the dark about other aspects of the story. We know little to nothing substantial about Carla, for instance: she becomes simply the girlish seducer, childlike in her presumed infatuation. Her perspective will have to be left for others to tell. Olga by this point has no desire to be “fair,” and neither does Ferrante.

And perhaps another way to reiterate the same old tragedy of the helpless victim is to veer into comedy. At times I did wonder if this was intentional, but to me much in the novel approached a dark slapstick humor, especially as Olga comes to be betrayed not only by Mario, but by the physical world around her. Her telephone is broken, for instance. She has to replace the locks to her apartment, and even getting in and out becomes a struggle. Everyday, habitual acts become a mystery:

Maybe I was too tired to maintain the usual order of the world. I shouldn’t have gone out. What had I done? Had I put the coffeepot on the stove? Had I put in the coffee, filled it with water? Had I screwed it tight so that it wouldn’t explode? And the milk for the child? Were they actions that I had completed or had I only suggested to myself that I complete them? (95–96)

There is also a sex scene, in which Olga tries to seduce her downstairs neighbour, a musician she hardly knows, that is also surely funny in its spectacular failure as the musician comes too soon (here the object that betrays her is his penis). Dragging herself up the stairs afterwards, “Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the poverella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: “I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table” (87). But who is that phantom from the past to give Olga her advice?

The novel is entitled Days of Abandonment, though in fact it covers several months: it starts on “one April afternoon” (9) and continues until at least August, because we are told that “the hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment” is “Saturday August 4th” (88). Indeed, almost a third of the entire book (pages 88 to 151) is devoted to this single day, which proves to be a catalogue of disasters that range from a sick kid to a dead dog (possibly poisoned, she imagines), fights with her children (one of whom stabs her with a paper cutter), and Olga accidentally locking them all into the apartment. To cap it all, by the end her indignity is witnessed by her downstairs neighbour, who has come up with “a rose, a single long-stemmed rose, a ridiculous rose offered with a ridiculous gesture by a man not at his ease” (148). Again, it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

No wonder the children periodically add to Olga’s woes by suggesting they might be better off with their father. But she perseveres and by the end, when Mario asks her to take them more often because “Carla is exhausted, she has exams to take, she can’t take care of them, you’re they’re mother” (185), this is truly the last straw for Olga, the point at which she realizes “He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print made by a hand on the wall” (186). And it is about the same time that she also senses that she has somehow broken from the paths set for her by the stories she has read (Anna Karenina) or been told: “I had even buried somewhere the abandoned wife of my Neapolitan childhood, my heart no longer beat in her chest, the veins were broken. The poverella had become again an old photograph, the petrified past, without blood” (184). The present does not always have to repeat the past. 

She can even return to the site of her earlier embarrassment and clumsiness, looking for someone who “knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy” (188). The book ends with the acknowledgement that this is a fiction, but at least it is a new one, and she is prepared to pretend to believe it. She is writing herself into a new story.