Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

As I read this book, I often wondered if the author was horribly hungry as she wrote. The food descriptions were so vivid - I could almost smell and taste them. This was a surprise, as I hadn't expected the focus on food to be so intense.

Food does play a part in the narrator's (Melissa - the American au pair) life. As for many of us, she uses food as a substitute for something she truly craves and needs.

Anyone who's done research on losing weight and eating right understands this food replacement theory. Understanding the problem is one thing; doing something about it is quite another.

Melissa must also deal with an overbearing boss, rambunctious children - one of which is deaf, a needy quasi-fiance back in the states and a possible new love interest in London.

The story is an entertaining read, but after so many of Mrs. H-E.'s blowups, I wondered when the heck Melissa was going to get a backbone and stand up for herself and start taking charge of her life.

The ending is somewhat predictable and not quite the complete path I'd have hoped for Melissa. But it's satisfying to know she'll head in the right direction.

The previous reviewers have done good work outlining the plot and premise of "Do Try to Speak...", so I'll just add my twopence worth in agreement that it was a bitter/sweet read; funny but disheartening (I'm also an Anglophile). Really, it's a coming of age story. Melissa's horrific experiences were undoubtedly the catalyst for her self-discovery. And not everyone's all bad! I positively adored Nanny, her stealthy eating habits and love for duck eggs! I enjoyed it but urge other Anglophiles to search out the sunnier masterpiece "I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith.

I must say, as an American recently married to a Brit, I could relate to so much in the book... the food differences, the way we talk vs the way "they" talk -- it was all quite accurate, humorous, and I could barely lay it down!

I read this engrossing story of an American advertising writer, escaping from San Francisco in the 1970's after being fired, cancelling a wedding, and losing her apartment, to the grey, cold skies of England and the Hebrides. There she attempted to be a perfect nanny to the three children of a Scottish parliamentarian and his very difficult wife, both of whom had read history at Oxford (he got the first; she demurred from unladylike zeal of receiving a first). So there's Melissa, American woman with a six-months' commitment, who quickly sees that this aristocratic family is a strange one: very tight money situation and a deaf child, to boot. I often thought Melissa could have just packed it in, but I understood how fear can hold someone back, especially a woman in a foreign country, afraid to return to the mess back home, therefore willing to stick to a mess of someone else's.

I remember that in 1982, I was fed up with San Francisco, too (but I am a native). I saved my money, took one semester of German at City College, then headed off for Germany through a one summer ( three-month) job commitment on a farm near Bielefeld. I fantasized living out in the countryside with a three-generation, happy bunch of Germans, four kids and so on. Boy, was I in for some very nasty surprises! The father wanted an American there, to cheer up the family, after the death of a daugher (8) from drowning the year before. The wife gave in, and got revenge of her husband by treating me badly. I was already 22, not fit for general kicking around, and it was a bad start and bad end. Luckily, I had been kicked around in jobs in SF, so I knew when to leave. Even sticking it out until the fifth week felt like the longest hell of all: but I took up my courage, my orange secondhand backpack, passport and money, told the father goodbye (mother was out of the house), and hit the road by hitchhiking. I got all the way to Greece, then Crete, and had a fantastic time, the best time of my life, for the next 1.5 years, bumming all around Europe and never working again, just living cheap or being peoples' guest. I kept wondering, reading about this Melissa, when she would do what I had done, admitted her fear but packed up and left to try to find something else. She even HAD money in the bank! Was it because she was attracted from the start to the father, the Scottish MP? The supposed fame of living with such a family? Her endless discussion of food, cooking, her weight gain and need for new clothes made the book a bit too girlish, but it illustrated her loneliness and lostness. I personally remember LOSING weight in GErmany, on that dreadful farm, because I was so unhappy, scared of the mother, that I had a stressed stomach and could not eat properly. I did not understand the language, either, and the food was odd to me at the time...got used to it later.

All in all, I found this a good read, simply because I too had known a situation like this. She might have made it clear that it happened in the past before Internet and modern phone systems, because it is confusing to a reader today, esp. a young one. On the other hand, I liked hearing the details of how it was difficult to place a long-distance call, etc. because that is how it was in the 1980's for me.

I did write a lot of letters by hand, and lots of postcards, too.

So thanks for the good read - you all can skim the more silly parts. You'll like the description of the parents and their habits, as well as the children's personalities. She has a sharp eye indeed for them!

An enjoyable novel about a young girl who, after losing her job as a San Francisco advertising copywriter, decides to postpone her impending wedding and take a chance at a nanny job in England. Supposedly this will give her an opportunity to travel and work at the same time, and since she has a great friend who has married an Englishman and lives in London, she is hooked up very quickly to two potential families who need an Au Pair.

Too bad Melissa chose the wrong family. The one thing I could simply not believe is how MEAN the employer character was (no way is any human being so entirely single-faceted), and the other was that since Melissa had such a good close friend nearby, why she simply didn't just up and quit, and head over to her friends' house after being treated so abominably by her employer. She was even told by her employer how the previous four or five nannies didn't last longer than a month (Uh, Danger! Danger! Will Robinson !!), and if that's not a warning sign I don't know what is.

Although I do recall how many self-doubts I had when starting out in the working world, I can't imagine I would be so spineless as to allow myself to be treated so meanly. No way. The "I promised to stick it out for six months" reason she gives for staying is feeble, and doesn't jive with the other strengths and smarts which Melissa has in abundance.

Other than this, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Other than Mrs. H-E, the rest of Leet Ford's characters are engaging, well depicted, and realistic. I think she does an excellent job highlighting fundamental personality differences between Brits and Americans, although I was a bit stunned at how much Brits seem to loathe Americans (which is also a bit curious: why would the Haid-Eruldson's settle for an American nanny if they despise the Yanks so much? Another surefire warning that she can't find anyone else dumb enough to take the job!). For some reason I never quite got that negative vibe from any of the many English folks I've met, either here in Canada, or in the U.S., or in England, or while on vacation elsewhere in the world. Perhaps Brits don't hold quite the same low opinions of Canadians, given that we were once part of the Commonwealth (or maybe we still are?), and we're still silly enough to pay their Queen "royalties" for having her all over our money!

I do recall a telling meeting with a young Brit while on vacation in Florida. He and his friends seemed desperate to speak to some intelligent young women, and were quite appalled when regaling a meeting with some American ladies the previous day. When one of the young women claimed she loved to hear them speak 'their language', he said [to me], "Don't we all speak the same language?" "No", I said, "you speak English, while they speak American. Quite a difference. We Canadians pride ourselves on speaking the Queen's English, but that's not really emphasized south of the 49th parallel."

I enjoyed Melissa's letter-writing prowess, her food obsessions, and completely related to her surprise at her increasing girth. It seems to happen to young women away from home, I've experienced it myself. I'm sure there's an appropriate psychological analysis of it all, but who really cares? The great thing is that Melissa has several enlightenments which all combine into a major resolution to change what she doesn't like about her life. Bravo! Melissa, and I feel that all readers would be rooting for her too.

Perfect reading just in time for New Years' Resolutions, although it's good any time.

The writing in this book was not bad, though it got off to a shaky start. I could sympathize with Melissa's confusion about some of the differences in English pronunciations and terms, having just spent three months overseas myself. However, there was one aspect of the book that seriously bothered me: the author's treatment of the three-year-old Deaf child, Claire. Now, I will allow that she hinted about the possibility of a mental problem with the girl due to her mother having rubella during the pregnancy, but that does not change her treatment of deafness as a mental disability instead of a physical one. She frequently stated through both Melissa (the au pair) and Mrs. H-E (the mother) the belief that teaching the girl sign language would *isolate* her from the rest of the world. This passage particularly disturbed me: "'A normal person spends a great deal of energy thinking. Children even more than adults. *Since Claire's ability to think is limited*, she has an excess of physical energy.'" [My emphasis.] And in the next paragraph: "'Children who don't have words tend to create a world of their own, in their heads.' Miss Gilbert pointed her index finger at her own head and buzzed it in circles-international sign language for `nuts.'" This from a supposed medical professional!

It's patently obvious Ford has never known Deaf people. She obviously made no attempt to learn anything about them before writing this book. She has no idea how wonderfully expressive they can be. Their ability to think is in no way *limited*; they simply think differently than most speaking people do. Rather than thinking in words, they think in pictures and ideas. My Deaf sign language was one of the kindest, smartest, most creative people I've ever met - and he was very outgoing with Deaf and speaking people alike. In America, at least, Deaf people have a very close-knit community and their own culture. However, this does not isolate them. If they are at all isolated, it's because of people like Ford who refuse to learn about them and their language, and then pass on their ignorance and misconceptions to other people.

Having been a nanny myself, I can appreciate just how true this story is. Parents take outrageous advantage of their nannies (I worked those 16-hour days without the promised days off.) Beyond that, I was not that entertained by this book. The datedness of the story really hampered my enjoyment of the book, and only because the author made vague attempts to update it! Why bother putting in a few disingenuous mentions of e-mail when one whole basis of the nanny's job is that weird pre-1975(?) idea that teaching sign language to hearing-impaired children was bad. Come on! A 22-year-old in the year 2001 would seek out the first internet cafe in London she could find on her first day off, not be sending long letters to her friends back home. The diary is supposedly written on blue airmail paper. I think the last time I saw blue airmail paper was in 1988. The story would have been much better if the author had either relented and set the story when it obviously really did happen (which, according to the author's bio, was when she was a nanny in the early 1970s), or had overhauled it and truly updated it to reflect that most modern 22-year-olds e-mail each other, don't think they're automatically going to stop working when they have children, have international phone cards instead of calling collect, etc. The story itself was ok. I read it all the way through out of a kind of morbid curiosity; well, that and I was stuck on a plane for several hours.