For long time editor and ghostwriter Nita Prose, the leap to writing a novel of her own was more intimidating than you might expect.
Nita jokes that her debut novel has been released while she is the “not so tender age of 49! Clearly, I took my time to write my debut!” An editor with Simon & Schuster Canada, she has always had a passion for storytelling, “whether that’s helping others tell stories or doing it myself, it feels like a continuation of what I’ve always done.”
Stepping into the spotlight
“I love my job, but by necessity, it means I stay in the background and push my authors into the light. After I finished the first draft of The Maid, I was a little more than panicked about sharing my work, because all of my colleagues would know about it.
“I kept running through scenarios where I’d receive horrible rejections from agents and publishers who, always polite, would call my work “lovely” and then “regrettably decline” while eye-rolling internally.”
Nita credits her “storytelling gene” to her mother, Jackie, “who was a wildly imaginative storyteller. So many times in my life, I accused her of fabricating tales, but as it turns out, some of her wildest stories were actually true. She once claimed that as a child she travelled to school not by foot or by bus but by pig. Apparently, her family had raised a pig named Eugette that she rode to school each day.
“When my mother died a few years ago, I asked my very reliable aunt about this ridiculous anecdote, fully expecting my aunt to roll her eyes, but to my surprise she replied, “The pig story is true. Eugette was popular with the school children, but not so much with the teachers.”
Fact or fiction?
“So many of my mother’s outrageous stories are not verifiable. But I no longer find the blurred line between fact and fiction troubling. I consider this one of my mother’s greatest gifts to me.”
In The Maid, Nita examines the role of Molly: “A room maid who exists in plain sight but is so often treated as though she’s invisible. I think that after the last two years, we’ve come to see how people in the service industry are so essential to the functioning of society, but their work is often diminished or just plain invisible.
“The hotel in my book is a classist microcosm with an upstairs-downstairs sensibility to it. The guests live in luxury while the workers toil in relative obscurity, unseen, largely unacknowledged. I wanted readers of The Maid to live Molly’s experience, to see from behind her eyes and inside her skin. I hoped that to live as her was to understand the experience of the unseen worker … and to love her.”
Hope springs eternal
Despite her fears, Nita was delighted to secure representation from literary agent Madeleine Milburn who worked with Gail Honeyman on Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. “She understood my novel as a story driven by a life-affirming spirit of hope. And that’s what I wanted with The Maid – to create a locked-room mystery that could only be solved through connection to the human heart. I wanted hope to be what readers carry away with them once the last page is turned. And I suppose it was hope, too, that made me get over my own fears in the first place!”
One of the key challenges in Nita’s journey from editing to writing has been choosing the right path for her characters to follow. “When I started The Maid, I knew a few things – I could envision certain twists and turns in the novel, but I didn’t know which path to take to get to the end, and for sure I didn’t know if I could make it all the way there. I have a newfound appreciation for the courage it takes to write and for just how disorienting the process can be.”
Looking ahead, Nita is delighted to report that Universal Pictures has optioned The Maid for film, and she is; “excited to have readers encounter Molly in the book. I’m working away on other novels but, true to theme, I’ll leave the details a bit of a mystery!”
The Maid by Nita Prose is out now, HarperCollins, £14.99.
