The popular Netflix series Maid is based on the true story of author Stephanie Land, who wrote the memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Created by Molly Smith Metzler, who is known for Shameless and Orange Is the New Black, was inspired by Land’s memoir about being a young mother who escapes an abusive relationship with only a couple of hundred dollars to her name. She simply couldn’t find work in America’s depressed economy, and because she couldn’t find work, a grant for childcare was also not available to a survivor of domestic abuse. Released in 2019, Land’s memoir is the basis for the critically-acclaimed Netflix miniseries Maid, starring Margaret Qualley as the struggling mother who is running away from her abusive boyfriend.
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The Netflix series is based on the bestselling memoir by Land, chronicling her life in her 20s and 30s as a poor mom, domestic abuse survivor, and nomad taking odd jobs cleaning homes like the “Porn House,” “Sad House,” and “Cigarette Lady’s House,” just to earn ends meet. Before catching the attention of Netflix, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive caught the attention of some of America’s top policymakers – former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris – because it highlighted some current gaps in social services impacting the ability of domestic abuse survivors to safely remove themselves from unsafe environments. In Land’s memoir, she calls this population of low-paid service workers, who are often single mothers and survivors of abuse, that clean the homes of the affluent “invisible.”
Maid Premieres to Critical Acclaim
Photo: Stephanie Land Self-Portrait
Since the series was released, Land has received an outpouring of support from other women who have experienced similar hardships and related to the Netflix series. The author has opened up even more about her personal struggles, and about raising Story, who uses they/them pronouns. Land told TODAY that it was difficult to leave the abusive situation, and she often found herself wondering if people would believe her without physical marks and bruises on her body. She added that some of these fears were proven true because of allegations of verbal and emotional abuse were not taken seriously by the family court system.
“I would go to the post office in town, and people would stop me and say, ‘I can’t believe you’re taking this child away from their dad, like, how horrible can you be?’” she recalled to TODAY. “Even in the court system, I mean, I was told a reasonable person wouldn’t feel threatened by his actions.”
Land added that no one took her seriously, not even her family, until things were no longer physically safe in her home (i.e., until it was too late):
“When he finally punched out the window in the door, it was like I finally had physical evidence and something that I could show somebody. It was like a certificate that I wasn’t crazy, because before that, he had convinced even my family that I was just desperate for him to love me, and was doing everything that I could including having a whole entire human to stay with him in some way.”
The miniseries Maid premiered on October 1, 2021, to critical acclaim. The miniseries was also popular with viewers for telling a story that hasn’t been told since Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reporting a 94% approval rating, based on 48 critic reviews. On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the Netflix series was assigned a score of 82 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating “universal acclaim.”
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Rebecca Kaplan
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