Nita Prose
© Dhalia Katz
Prose only
Longtime editor talks about her debut novel, The Maid
by Howard Calvert
Scribbling an idea for a bestselling book on a napkin is a cliché you see in movies and works of fiction, but occasionally it happens in real life and leads to an unpublished author landing a headline-making book deal.
For Nita Prose, whose debut novel, The Maid, is this issue’s book buyer’s pick, that is exactly what happened.
“I was staying at a hotel in London in 2019 and came back to my room and startled the maid,” says Prose. “The truly embarrassing part was that she was untangling my tracksuit bottoms. I remember thinking it’s such an invisible and intimate job. By cleaning my room she knew so much about me, yet I knew nothing about her.”
This sparked an idea that revealed itself on the plane back to Canada, where Prose lives. “Molly’s voice—my protagonist—came to me, and it was clear, succinct and precise. I wasn’t planning on writing a novel and didn’t have any paper, so I grabbed a napkin and wrote the prologue in a single burst. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was when my debut novel began.”
She completed the first draft in four months while working around her day job as vice president of Simon & Schuster Canada. “When you’re an editor, you have this picture [of the novel] from above, but when you’re an author, there’s a blindness,” she says. “You’re going through a labyrinth and you don’t know what’s ahead. And I experienced the other side of that when writing this.”
The Maid is a tightly plotted whodunit, yet it reads like few other novels in the murder-mystery category due to the offbeat narrator, Molly the maid. “I knew there was going to be a murder early on and that it was going to feature a maid who’s invisible but exists in plain sight,” Prose tells the Connection. “It was important for me to situate the reader with very little information—to just open the book and encounter Molly. My hope was that by discovering her unique perspective, to live as her, would be to love her.”
Prose says that she worked on The Maid in complete secrecy. “Not a soul on the planet knew what I was doing, not even my partner. As I work in the publishing industry, I’d replay this nightmare scenario in my head where I’d present my work to agents and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, we read your work and it’s lovely,’ which is a very slicing rejection.” In reality, the feedback was beyond anything she could have imagined: “I got a wonderful response, which made me realize I’d achieved what I’d hoped to achieve.”
Prose also hopes that readers come away from her book with a better understanding of people who do jobs that are cloaked in invisibility, yet they make the world run. “We’re discovering that we need to think more about those workers and how undervalued they are,” she concludes. “But also, I hope people enjoy the mystery aspect and the fact it can only be solved through connection to the human heart.”
Howard Calvert is a freelance journalist and author based in Hampshire, England.
The Maid is Nita Prose’s debut novel. It tells the story of Molly, an eccentric maid who sets out to uncover who killed one of the guests at the hotel where she works. Molly, who has been alone since her gran died and who struggles with social skills, is used to being overlooked. It’s that quality that gives her an advantage in solving the mystery.
Molly is a delightful character, and this novel is full of heart while also serving as a reminder that we’re never as alone as we think we are.
The Maid (Item 1708086; 1/3) is available in most Costco warehouses.