Inspired By…

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Recently I watched a Netflix series called Maid. In the final credits, the audience is told the the story was “inspired” by a book of the same name by Stephanie Land. It raised a question: what exactly does it mean to be “inspired” by a story? To find out, I re-read the book to compare the two.

The series opens with Alex, played by Margaret Qualley, leaving her single-wide trailer under cover of night. She scoops up her small daughter, Maddie, and narrowly escapes her boyfriend, Sean. We see in flashbacks that he is an alcoholic and has punched his hand through the wall, just missing Alex.

Once safely gone, she is hit with the full force of the odds against her. Her social worker can’t find her temporary housing because she minimizes the abuse. After her daughter drops her mermaid doll out the window, they have a car accident that forces Alex to reach out to her born-again Christian father. Not wanting to lean on him, she opts instead to spend the night with Maddie in the ferry terminal.

Alex procures temporary housing at a DV shelter. She also finds a job, making $12 an hour as a maid for a wealthy lawyer on Fisher Island (a fictional place set in the Pacific Northwest; the series was filmed in Victoria, BC). She struggles with child care and legal problems with Sean. Her mother, Paula (played by Andie MacDowell, Qualley’s real-life mother) is in a manic stage, able to produce art but otherwise low-functional. Especially through this character and the well-meaning fuckup Sean, we see just how little of a safety net Alex and Maddie have.

The series is harrowing, showing the razor’s edge of subsistence living. I felt empathy for Alex and her daughter, as one mess after another endangered their stability. Her tense dynamics with her family were compelling. Alex was never really parented, and it makes her independent enough to survive.

I had less appreciation for Nate, a contrived nice guy character who wants to help Alex and Maddie. I found myself cringing a bit in their scenes. Any savvy viewer knows this is not meant to be a Cinderella story.

Overall, though, Maid is a good production worth seeing.

And the book? At the end of the series, we see Alex and Maddie making the 500-mile trek to Missoula, MT, where Alex has been accepted to a writing program. It’s no spoiler to say she has boffo success writing about her experiences. (How else would the series have come about?) The book was launched to great fanfare and picked by Barack Obama as one of his favorites of that year, in 2019. (What a thrill that must have been for the author.)

Reading it again recently gave me the sense of hearing the same story told by different people. In generality, it is the same but timelines and particularities differ. Maddie is called Mia in the book and is a few years younger when it begins (she takes her first steps at the homeless shelter, but is nearly three in the series.) Alex’s mother lives in France with a British husband, not locally in an Airstream with an Aussie, but the emotional tensions are the same. Sean is called Jamie and their relationship details are similar.

Some scenes are identical, such as one when the author expects her mother to pick up the check for a burger and she won’t do it. Others are omitted from the series, such as one in which she gets a windfall from a tax return.

Like the series, Maid the book is an engrossing story that feels both particular and relatable.

And as for the differences between TV and reading, I’ll give the final word to author Stephanie Land.

I had a chance to talk to the author on Twitter recently and here is what she had to say:

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