{"id":41417,"date":"2021-11-30T16:04:31","date_gmt":"2021-11-30T16:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&p=41417"},"modified":"2021-11-30T16:04:31","modified_gmt":"2021-11-30T16:04:31","slug":"flora-collins-author","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/flora-collins-author\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Nanny Dearest’ Author Flora Collins on Her Thrilling Debut"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Flora
Flora Collins’ novel ‘Nanny Dearest’ is out now (photo: Marc Baptiste \/ courtesy of author)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I watched novelist Flora Collins grow up. Her mother Amy Fine Collins is a former colleague of mine at Vanity Fair<\/i>, and a friend.\u00a0<\/span>I always thought of Flora as Eloise. Indeed, her mother\u2014long, lean, lovely, deeply stylish, deeply talented Amy who is not only a writer herself but also an official arbiter of the International Best Dressed List\u2014is a kind of combination of fashion editor, Halston confidant and Best-Dressed-Listed D.D. Ryan and the long, lean, lovely, deeply stylish, deeply talented Kay Thompson who wrote the Eloise<\/i> books after Ryan “godmothered” them into being by introducing Thompson to the illustrator Hilary Knight. There is a direct line in my own narrative mind from Ryan to Thompson to Knight to Fine Collins to Flora.\u00a0<\/span>The 28-year-old novelist not only has a talent all her own but also a very specific kind of sophisticated New York lineage which has never been about genealogy alone, but also the congeniality of likeminded souls blending themselves into a treasured tribe of marvelously fabulous misfits who, in turn, fit into designer clothes in ways that they didn\u2019t fit into earlier tribes that didn\u2019t deign them worthy of inclusion during their childhoods. Such members of such an indigenous New York tribe reconfigure such childhoods into adulthoods filled with velvet ropes and the right restaurants and the kind of transactional gallantry and ladylike learnedness found at art galleries and ballet galas.<\/p>\n

Flora\u2019s father, Bradley Collins, Jr., teaches art history at Parsons\u2014more sophisticated New York lineage\u2014so I was bit surprised that her first book wasn\u2019t a biography of an artist or a fashion designer but a psychological thriller titled Nanny Dearest<\/i><\/a>, a title, one presumes, used to evoke both the lurid movie Mommie Dearest<\/i> as well as the social satire The Nanny Diaries<\/i>, the New York Times<\/i> bestseller that skewered Upper East Side privilege, the very kind that cosseted Collins during her school days at Chapin before she headed north to attend Vassar. Flora\u2019s writing is subtle\u2014there is a sentence-by-sentence sensuality to it that never turns purple or vulgar. She never strains for the right word or phrase.\u00a0<\/span>The struggle is there in the psychological tug-of-war going on between to the two main characters, but never in the writing itself.\u00a0<\/span>It is a balance that even more seasoned suspense writers often go wobbly about when trying to strike it.\u00a0<\/span>Flora never wobbles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Julia Roberts read the audio book of The Nanny Diaries<\/i> and\u00a0 <\/span>I could, in fact, envision Roberts playing the role of the ex-nanny in Collins\u2019s book if it were made into a Netflix series, which I hope happens. The plot of Nanny Dearest\u2014<\/i>which alternates chapter-by-chapter with the present giving way to the past before heading back to the present again\u2014revolves around the ex-nanny reentering her earlier charge\u2019s life after the young woman\u2019s father dies suddenly leaving her a twenty-something orphan since her mother had died of cancer while the nanny was still obsessively looking after her, a rekindled obsession that the newly orphaned young adult mistakes for the maternal love she has yearned for all her life. But why did Flora choose to write fiction\u2014and a thriller at that\u2014and not nonfiction? She\u2019s even turned in her second novel to Mira Books, an imprint at HarperCollins, where she signed a two-book deal.<\/p>\n

“I\u2019ve always been a fiction gal,\u201d she tells me when she Zoom calls me from her apartment in Brooklyn Heights.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cEven from the age of 3, I always told childhood stories to my parents. Not lies. But imaginative stories with a beginning and middle and end with made-up characters.\u00a0<\/span>If you look back at my old report cards when I was at elementary school, they all\u00a0 <\/span>mentioned that Flora really loves to read and has a skill and talent for storytelling.\u00a0<\/span>It has been this prolonged thing. But because my mom is my mom she was very supportive of me pursuing that, being a teller of stories.\u00a0<\/span>It was sort of expected that I would have this artistic endeavor. My dad, too.<\/p>\n

“I was a huge Lois Duncan fan as a kid,\u201d she continues, citing the Young Adult fiction writer who pioneered horror and suspense and thriller books in that genre.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cI also loved R.L. Stine. All these dark horror people. Duncan was writing in the 1970s for teenagers, but all of her stories are very dark. She was a big influence. Sara Shepard as well. She had a huge thriller influence on me,\u201d she says, mentioning the author of Pretty Little Liars. <\/i>\u201cThey are all character-driven books. I personally prefer character-driven books.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Her own lead character Sue in Nanny Dearest<\/i> is longing for maternal love. Was she projecting in some way about her own mother?\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cObviously it\u2019s fiction.\u00a0<\/span>I was not basing anyone on anyone I know. But I am very intrigued by mother-daughter relationships. I think they are so chockfull of material. The book\u2019s title is obviously a derivative of Mommie Deares<\/i>t.\u00a0 <\/span>That\u2019s already impressed upon you before you start reading. I just think there are so many emotional layers that you can excavate with mother\/daughter relationships. Part of what informs that for me is that I do have this larger-than-life mom who is great and with whom I\u2019m close.\u00a0<\/span>But I am in the shadow of Amy Fine Collins for, you know, my whole life. But I am not resentful of the shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFind comfort in the shade of it,\u201d I suggest.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes. Exactly. Thank you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mira Books’ press release states that the plot of the book is based on real-life events in Collins\u2019s life.\u00a0<\/span>Were the most traumatic narrative turns in the book specific to her own story growing up?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a wacky babysitter,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cIt\u2019s loosely inspired on that.\u00a0<\/span>I want to emphasize this.\u00a0<\/span>I don\u2019t want people thinking I was kidnapped by my nanny.\u00a0<\/span>It was loosely inspired by this babysitter that I had who was a pathological liar.\u00a0 <\/span>She kind of escalated in her lies and it was this unsettling experience because, of course, you want the person who is taking care of your child to be truthful.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I was reading the book\u2014it\u2019s a can\u2019t-put-it-down thriller when the plot really kicks in\u2014I kept thinking the character of the nanny was a classic disordered malignant narcissist based on the seductive behavior Collins so brilliantly conjures, then the lying, then the gaslighting, then the turning against the person who recognizes they are being gaslighted.\u00a0<\/span>It was rather textbook. I wondered if Collins had researched such mental illness before embarking on the writing of the book – or was it all just instinctual on her part.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s funny that you say that because I actually gave it to my therapist to read and asked what mental illness would you give the nanny? What would you diagnose her with?\u00a0<\/span>And one of the diagnoses she came up was malignant narcissism. So you\u2019re right on the nose, Kevin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another thing I was curious about was the music Collins listens to, and if she listens to any when she writes as a kind of soundtrack to the narrative she\u2019s creating.\u00a0<\/span>In the book, Odetta\u2019s music makes an entrance.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t really listen to music when I write because I can\u2019t focus on my own writing if I have words in my ear,\u201d she says. \u201cMy favorite artist right now is FKA twigs. She\u2019s British.\u00a0<\/span>She\u2019s also really good at eliciting emotionality.\u00a0<\/span>I\u2019m more a bit stiff-upper-lip. I\u2019m not a super emotional person. But she is someone who can really get me in my feelings<\/i>. But I wouldn\u2019t listen to her while writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another writer who attended Vassar, Collins\u2019s alma mater, is poet Elizabeth Bishop who wrote one of my favorite poems, One Art<\/i>, which is about the art of losing and it being no disaster. It is a poem about loss and Flora Collins\u2019s book, although a thriller, is also a meditation on loss and grief and how it can cause real disaster\u2014sorry, Elizabeth Bishop\u2014and trauma in one\u2019s life. At the end of Bishop\u2019s poem, she writes: “It\u2019<\/span>s evident\/the art of losing\u2019<\/span>s not too hard to master\/though it may look like (Write<\/i> it!) like disaster.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>I read Flora the whole poem at the end of our Zoom conversation and told her those last lines could even be a kind of mission statement regarding Nanny Dearest<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span>Let\u2019s add Elizabeth Bishop to Flora Collins\u2019s artistic lineage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29575,"featured_media":41418,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[2563,38,16,3914],"yoast_head":"\nFlora Collins' Debut Thriller 'Nanny Dearest'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The novelist talks about her new thriller 'Nanny Dearest,' growing up as the daughter of fashion and style icon Amy Fine Collins, and how much she loves FKA twigs\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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