Do Try to Speak as We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair [Hardcover]

Marjorie Leet Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 2001

How can you not love Melissa? She's so charming and so real - worrying about her sweet tooth and her weight, blowing hot and cold about her fianc back in the States, trying her best to decipher her testy employer's language. (Directed to prepare a "cot" for the youngest of her charges, she is chastised disgustedly. The small bed she carefully made is NOT a cot!A cot is what the benighted Americans call a crib.)Melissa has fled her San Francisco home, an indefinitely postponed wedding and the loss of her job, taking a position as au pair to a Member of Parliament's family. A dreamer, she expects to float into a Merchant Ivory world.Instead, she floats into a continuing series of shocking surprises. She comments on it wisely, wittily and often ruefully, finding the understanding gap between the two countries far greater than she expected.She is amazed that a Member of Parliament should be paid so little, that she, Mummy and the children, share the same bathwater-one at a time, with Melissa last. Treated alternately as a guest (i.e. fellow aristocrat) and as a servant, she finds out about the class system from both sides. Melissa takes us from Granny Aitchee's freezing farmhouse in the hills of Scotland, where she sleeps with her coat on, to the Haig-Ereildoun's faded London townhouse in a fashionable neighborhood.Along the way, she is snubbed as "an American" in the island castle where the Haig-Ereildouns are houseguests, becomes firm friends with Mrs. H-E's aged Nanny, still resident at the country estate of the titled grandparents, and is more or less courted by a quirky English scientist in London.It is an unalloyed privilege to share Melissa's comments -- shrewd, often funny, frequently biting, sometimes almost sad.The au pair year is instructive in more than English upper-class mores and difficult definitions. It gives her a perspective she didn't have, helps her make some important decisions and reveals to her that very few people are either all good or all infuriating. This and much more Melissa has committed to her blue stationery, and we are the fortunate readers-over-her-shoulder, enchanted by this young woman's delightful outlook on our cousins across the sea -- and on ourselves.AUTHORBIO: Marjorie Leet Ford lives in San Francisco. She has worked as a broadcast producer and conceived the long-running national public radio series "Tell Me a Story," traveling around the world to record great writers reading their short stories: Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Alice Walker, and many more.She was also once an au pair in England. This is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Reading Ford's first foray into fiction feels like snooping through a friend's diary, alternately entertaining and ordinary. Set in London and in the coastal Scottish Hebrides, this is a classic fish-out-of-water tale a character is placed in unfamiliar surroundings and left to fend for herself. Suddenly losing her job because of corporate downsizing and deciding as well to postpone her wedding to overprotective artist Tedward, 20-something San Franciscan Melissa optimistically accepts a position as an au pair to an upper-middle-class English family, the Haig-Ereildouns. Mr. H-E is a member of Parliament, and Melissa envisions her six-month stay in the U.K. as a cross between a Mary Poppins adventure and a scene out of a Merchant-Ivory costume drama. Instead, she is greeted by three young terrors and assigned arduous chores s in a London flat with no central heating and prewar plumbing. Mrs. H-E is impossible to please, constantly criticizing Melissa's American English, and she secretly seduces Melissa's friend Simon. Treated as an outcast by the snobbish adults, Melissa is befriended by the family servants, like gossipy English spinster Nanny, and by Trevor, the H-E's nine-year-old son, who is obsessed with death. After an actual death occurs, Melissa acknowledges the personal problems that were the real reasons for her flight from America. Sumptuous details of upper-crust dinner banquets are perhaps the most tantalizing attribute of a bland book that fails to summon the verve that could truly animate the comical aspects of the cultural divide between the U.S. and England.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Reeling from a recent layoff and the possibly permanent postponement of marriage to her longtime love, Melissa takes a position as an au pair to an upper-middle-class English family. It seems like the perfect job. The children are well behaved, the wife sounds charming over the phone, and the husband is a member of Parliament. Melissa's visions of tea, lawn tennis, and elegant parties quickly dissolve upon her arrival in England, when she is handed the tasks of a scullery servant, impossible working hours, children forever on the brink of disaster, and a constant whirlwind of packing and unpacking as the family bounces between their home in London and their crumbling estate in rural Scotland. A faux pas lurks at every turn as Melissa strives to hone her British speech and manners and to overcome the polite but frigid anti-Americanism of the family's friends and relations. In addition to her other tasks, she must teach three-year-old Claire, who is deaf, to speak the Queen's English. Melissa describes all these trials and tribulations with wit and charm in her letters home. This first novel by the author of Cactus: A Prickly Portrait of a Desert Eccentric is delightful indeed; fans of Bridget Jones and the current spate of British TV sitcoms will love it. Highly recommended.DSusan Clifford Braun, Aerospace Corp., El Segundo, CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (March 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312268661
• ISBN-13: 978-0312268664
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,542,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging and a sheer delight!, April 6, 2001

By 

Lynn Adler - See all my reviews

This review is from: Do Try to Speak as We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair (Hardcover)

Could this have been a story about an American au pair in a country other than England and Scotland, say France or Italy? Yes, and it would have been a different story. For it is as much a story about the relationship of two countries, the myths, good and bad, the stories we tell about the other, the class system, old institutions versus self inventiveness. Cleverly woven into this theme, are many others, the principal being an education in life for a young 22-year-old American woman, who has lost her job back home and canceled her wedding. As Melissa sticks out a six month term as a nanny (because "a promise is a promise") under horrible working conditions, we chart her growth and the development of the overall theme.

The author walks a fine line that accurately presents but doesn't exaggerate the cultural mores, social attitudes, and behavior of the British upper classes. I think she is careful to provide a balanced view. Although I'm sure there will be those who disagree.

I was pleasantly surpised at the depth of the story, the introspection that is assigned to Melissa, her coming to terms with the differences of another culture that surprisingly doesn't speak the same language, even though it's English, with issues of child rearing, and the ability to experience true intimacy. Ultimately, the story is just a sheer delight to read. You will laugh and cry, be outraged and charmed even at the minutiae of Melissa's "diary". This is a story that never drags, never fails to delight.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book!, March 6, 2001

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Do Try to Speak as We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair (Hardcover)

What a great premise: Melissa has just been fired from her job as an ad agency copywriter, and her upcoming wedding has been indefinitely "postponed." In this moment of extreme vulnerability, she takes a job as a nanny in England, working for some tony Scots-Brits. The Haig-Ereildouns. Although the kids are sweet and Mr. H-E is a kindhearted soul, Mrs. H-E turns out to be the employer from hell, an Anglo Mommie Dearest. I was given this book as a gift because for most of my life I've been an Anglophile. After reading "Do Try to Speak as We Do," I'm not an anglophile any more. Melissa exposes an appalling WASPs' nest of snobbery among the Brits. But I definitely am a Melissa-phile. She's utterly charming. Her diary is alternately moving, biting, funny, sarcastic and sweet. Somehow she manages to unearth a bit of humanity even in the most unlikeable people. I was completely engrossed in Melissa's adventures working for the Employer from Hell, and would recommend this book to anyone who likes fines writing, beautifully drawn characters---and who thinks they like the English.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A funnny clash of cultures, March 2, 2001

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Do Try to Speak as We Do: The Diary of an American Au Pair (Hardcover)

The San Francisco ad agency let Melissa go. Feeling despondent, Melissa reconsiders her engagement and decides to end it. Thus, she feels as if she has failed in both her professional and personal lives.

Needing a change, Melissa accepts a job as an Au Pair to the family of a Scottish member of the English Parliament. Melissa knows she has three children to care for, ranging in age from three to eleven, but still expects to enjoy the social life of a parliamentarian. However, culture shock stuns Melissa especially as defined by her employer's wife, who demands no Americanization of her three children and rationing of hot water and even seemingly the sun. Will Melissa last six months or will this be strike three?

DO TRY TO SPEAK AS WE DO will surprise readers who give this debut novel a chance. The story line is often amusing and at times acrimonious as Melissa feels more like a downstairs drudge who envies Cinderella's pre-princess role. Readers observe the radical differences between the American and British cultures through Melissa's relative perceptions. Anyone who enjoys a contemporary humorous modern tale will find that Marjorie Leet Ford debuts with a triumphant social commentary.

Harriet Klausner