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

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.Read More