Maid on Netflix: The Real Story Behind the Show
ByAlivia PaulOctober 12, 2021 0
Netflix's Maid has captured everyone's attention. It focuses on a single mother struggling every day to meet her and her daughter's needs. With its heartwarming storyline and amazing cast, the ten-episode limited series from Netflix has taken it to another level.
Maid, inspired by Stephanie Land's memoir "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will To Survive", has become the best-selling novel of its time. Stephanie Land's memoir is a mother's unapologetic memoir that shows what real poverty is like.
Real Story behind Netflix's Maid
Stephanie Land is a young lady who wants to cut chase with her hometown and wants to go to college to become a writer. But every plan gets disrupted when a summer fling turns into an unexpected pregnancy. This summer fling does not last long, when Jamie, her boyfriend, starts abusing her verbally and even smashing glasses. That's the end of her tolerance when she feels she can't even protect her daughter.
#MAIDNetflix has me going through old photos from the time both the series and my memoir (that inspired the series) took place. Here's one of me and Story with the "M" in the background, a few months after we arrived in Missoula. pic.twitter.com/EdzIWuFY52
— Stephanie Land (@stepville) October 3, 2021
Following that, she moves to a welfare shelter, but little did she know her real struggles would start now. It's hard to be a single mother, especially when she is poor or has no type of income. Stephanie's memoir became a bestseller because it was too realistic. It focused on her journey as a single poor mother, working her way out through intricate and arbitrary government programs, suffering social isolation and shame for being poor, finding marginal, low-paying jobs that strained her body and the soul, leaving a child in substandard care, living in a small apartment with environmental problems and suffering from unkind remarks about welfare.
It also explores and highlights the upper-middle class of America, and its reality what it likes to be working on it, "I'd become a nameless ghost."
The contrast between Stephanie Land's memoir and the on-screen depiction of Netflix's Maid
As Alex, Margaret Qualley has done justice to the protagonist of Maid. The series has been faithful to the author's experience as just like the book, the Netflix show also highlights the poverty in America.
Stephanie Land's memoir started with, "My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter." However, in Margaret Qualley's series, that never took place as she moved to a shelter when her daughter was 2 years old. The most significant change of the series and the memoir was that Land never named her parents. They are not that significant, but on the other hand, Paula and Hank played a major role on Netflix's Maid, which even molded her character.
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Molly Smith Metzler, the creator of the series Maid, tells Elle, "When I started thinking about how to adapt, I clung to the effect the memoir had on me. The memoir is riveting to read, but it is an extremely lonely experience for Stephanie Land. She doesn't talk to anybody. I wanted to capture how isolating her experience is, but it's not amazing TV for a character to not interact with anybody, so our first challenge was to populate the world and also to make sure she felt very alone."
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