The Eerie Horrors of <i>The Perfect Nanny</i>
In late 2012, news broke around the world that a nanny on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was accused of two young children in her care. the perpetrator of this “inexplicable” act “”—the nanny of horror. As the children bled in the bathtub, reports said, the nanny—who was so close with her well-to-do employers that they had earlier that year spent several days visiting her relatives in the Dominican Republic—slashed her own throat. (She survived, and has pleaded not guilty to killing the children.) To most parents, the headlines were a chilling reminder of the vulnerability of children and the cruelty of which their adult caregivers are capable. To the French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, who had a toddler of her own, the tragedy was the perfect creative catalyst. She knew she wanted to write about a nanny; now she had
