On what she learned from writing Sam and Elisabeth And so I kind of was wondering, well, what does it feel like to be the worker in the dining hall who has to be someone's personal epiphany every three years. You know, in my research, I found that probably every year or two there's a big kerfuffle at an American university where a student kind of realizes, or a group of students realizes, you know, this isn't fair, and they will appeal to the college, and they will write letters and stage protests. And you know, what she does, basically, is she has this realization as an undergrad, a very well-meaning undergrad, that the women who work in the dining hall and housekeeping and her college are not well-compensated. You know, Sam thinks she's doing what's best for her friends, but really she isn't. Where actually it's these systems of power and wealth that are very much stacked against the average person. You know, there's a real pushback in the book from Elisabeth's father-in-law, George, that, you know, this country has been emphasizing now for so long the individual, and if you've done something wrong, if you've lost your business - as George has in the book - you must have done something wrong. So I feel like I couldn't have written anything else in this particular moment, really. I don't know that it was uncomfortable because it is so much a part of our culture right now, and it's something we're all thinking about and talking about and trying to do better with. On whether it was uncomfortable to write about class and privilege And certainly also the notion that privilege takes many forms. In many ways, this is a book about the gig economy, the shrinking safety net, the sort of weight of student loan debt and other forms of economic hardship on young people.
A novelist friend suggested she turn that story into a book, Sullivan says, "and it wasn't until several years later when I was pregnant with my first child, that I started thinking I might want to write it, because suddenly I had been both women, the mother and the babysitter." Ten years later, Sullivan crossed paths with the woman again - and realized she didn't remember their relationship at all. And her mother and I grew very close," Sullivan says. "I was a babysitter and I, my senior year of college in particular, I took care of a little baby whose family had just moved to western Massachusetts from New York City. She says the idea for the book came from her own experiences. Courtney Sullivan's new novel, Friends and Strangers. And that's the relationship at the heart of author J. I'm talking about the relationship between a mother and her child's caregiver. It is one of the most intimate and complicated relationships around, and for many women - and yes it's mostly women - an all-important one.
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