The viral book is now being turned into a movie starring Sydney Sweeney
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Hard up for a job after spending 10 years in prison, a young woman is hired by a seemingly perfect family to be their housemaid, only to learn that her boss, the mother, is a raging gaslighting lunatic.
About: This project just came together last week. It will star current Sydney Sweeney, Sydney Sweeney, former Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, and be directed by Paul Feig. It’s an adaptation of the enormous literary sensation that has garnered over 300,000 reviews on Amazon. It’s being adapted by The Boys staff writer, Rebecca Sonnenshine. Novelist Frieda McFadden generated her success all on her own, self-publishing her first book, The Devil Wears Scrubs, on Amazon a decade ago.
Writer: Rebecca Sonnenshine (based on the book by Freida McFadden).
Details: Roughly 330 pages
As the self-appointed leader of the Sydney Sweeney Global Fan Club, I consider it my God-given duty to track every project she signs up for. Well, except for that boxing movie where she looks like a man. As soon as I saw this project announced on Deadline, I clicked straight over to Amazon and downloaded that sizzling piece of digital magic onto my Kindle.
I was going to find me out what The Housemaid was about!
Word on the street was that it had the twist of all twists. And I loooooovvvvve a good twist. Little did I know, I was about to go on a journey that I would never be able to come back from, a journey so fraught with gaslighting that I just filled up my car on the book rather than from the 76 station down to the street.
But this gaslighting came with a special side of OMG. OMG good? OMG bad? You’ll have to read the book to find out. And if you’re worried about spoilers, I’ll alert you when they’re coming. Okay, time to synopsize the plot.
Millie, who’s in her late 20s, just got out of prison (for reasons we’ll never learn) and is therefore having a tough time finding even a minimum wage job. So she’s shocked when Nina, a well-off wife, hires her to be a live-in maid at her gorgeous upper middle class home with her perfect husband and psycho 9 year old daughter.
Everything seems fine when she shows up on her first day until Nina introduces Millie to her attic bedroom. Millie notices that the door locks FROM THE OUTSIDE as opposed to the inside. And don’t worry if you didn’t catch that detail. Because the author, Freida McFadden, is going to tell you 691 more times over the course of the story.
Almost immediately, Nina starts acting weird. She’ll tell Millie to go pick up her daughter, Cecelia, at school, then once Millie gets there and learns Cecilia is going to practice with her friends instead, she’ll call Nina and ask what happened and Nina says she never told Millie to go pick up her daughter. Huh?
This gaslighting happens frequently to the point where Millie starts to wonder if she’s going nuts. But Millie’s got other problems, dude. Like the fact that she’s falling HARD for Nina’s husband, Andrew. Millie finds Andrew very handsome by the way. How do I know that? Because McFadden tells you 14,722 times.
One night, when Nina has to unexpectedly leave town, Millie makes the unthinkable decision to go to the broadway play with Andrew that he and his wife were supposed to attend. After 792 more reminders that Andrew is handsome, stupid Millie sleeps with him!
Just a couple of days later, Nina finds the playbill of the Broadway show, which erupts into a home-destroying drag-out-all-night fight. Andrew does the unthinkable. He declares he wants to live with Millie instead of Nina and kicks Nina out! Nina is beside herself! Millie is over the moon! Until the next evening, when she goes to her attic bedroom to move everything downstairs, and she finds that she’s been LOCKED INSIDE.
(Big Spoilers Follow)
We then switch into Nina’s POV for the first time and we learn THE TRUTH. Which is that Nina is actually a really nice person. She married Andrew and found out he was a psychopath who would lock her in the attic to punish her. Andrew threatened hellfire if she ever left him so Nina concocted the whole “housemaid” plan as a way to get Andrew to fall in love with a younger hotter girl so that she could leave! But once she’s done so, she’s burdened with the guilt of leaving Millie out to dry. Will she come back and help her? Or let her suffer like she did?
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book as poorly written as this one.
This writing is so garbage, I could actually smell the stink coming off the page.
The level of writing here is SO BAD that you’ll often stop and stare at the page with your mouth open. There are a million examples of this but the biggest is how embarrassingly on-the-nose McFadden is throughout the book.
For example, there’s this handsome (yes, handsome!) Italian gardener (no, I’m not kidding, he’s Italian) who seems to warn Millie in Italian on her first day. Millie goes to look up the Italian words he said online and they translate to, “Danger!” McFadden then has 50 other scenes with Enzo where he KEEPS SAYING THE EXACT SAME THING. Danger. Danger. You’re in danger. Stranger danger. Leave, you’re in danger. Danger danger danger danger danger danger danger. I honestly thought it was a joke book at a certain point with how much she repeats everything.
There is zero subtlety to anything and I was previously under the assumption that being on the nose was a writing no-no. But with this book selling millions of copies, I’m starting to wonder if subtlety is dead. Because whatever she did definitely worked.
Okay, let’s get to the root of the question here, which is, why is this book so big? Why is it being turned into a movie with a major package of actors and director? If it’s as bad as I say it is, how can it be so successful?
I think I know.
Two reasons.
One, McFadden does something kinda genius here. You know romance novels, right? They used to sell like hotcakes and various versions of them still do today. McFadden did what I tell all of you to do. Take an established genre or established story and put a spin on it. McFadden took the romance novel and spun it into a thriller.
Cause this is, essentially, mommy porn. Wish-fulfillment central. Moms imagine themselves as younger Millie, working for a strong handsome (you guys can’t imagine how handsome this man is – I have no idea what his actual physical appearance is. But I know he’s handsome!) older man. The temptation of romance is in the air at every corner. I don’t know women that well but I know most of them love this sh*t.
So that’s number 1 for why the book was a success.
And number 2 is because the book’s twist *is* pretty good. It’s not going to rewrite the twist book or anything. But I could see most casual readers not seeing it coming. *I* knew something was up with Nina, of course. She was acting too weird for there to not be some secondary motivation. But that’s only because I’m trained to figure out character motivations after reading billions of scripts. The average reader will be duped for sure.
So that’s the reason for the book’s success. It’s not complicated. What it is is a writer who gets two very important areas of the story right. The wish-fulfillment aspect and the surprise ending. Those two things can definitely result in a breakout hit.
This isn’t my jam. It’s too silly. And the writing – oh my god you guys, the writing is SO BAD. But I understand why it’s become successful. Not to mention, it’s a very simple story, like I always tell you guys to write. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Check how many times your favored words are used. A quick search for the word “Handsome” would’ve alerted McFadden that she had used the word way too many times. It’s often not until you see a number next to your favorite words that you realize just how excessively you’ve used it. I use the word “just” a lot in my writing, for example. Do a quick search for the word, find out you used it 300 times in your script, be shocked, and get to work erasing most of them.
What I learned 2: I mean, you really don’t have an excuse not to find time to write after you learn about Freida McFadden’s story. She was a doctor RAISING 2 KIDS when she wrote her first novel. Imagine how easy it would’ve been to say, “Eh, I’m too tired to write today.” Yet she always found time. Now, according to the New York Times, she’s the “fastest-selling thriller writer in the United States.” Stop making excuses! Pick up that pen! It ain’t going to write itself!
