According to Netflix, Maid is on track to be watched by 67 million households, indicating that many viewers connect with Alex’s challenges as she claws through poverty, domestic abuse and piles of systemic red tape. The moving, 10-episode drama also stars Andie MacDowell as Alex’s mother, Paula; Nick Robinson as Sean, the father of Alex’s daughter; Anika Noni Rose as Alex’s client, Regina; Tracy Vilar as Alex’s boss, Yolanda; and Billy Burke as Alex’s father, Hank. Here are answers to some of our biggest questions after finishing Maid.
Is Maid based on a true story?
As stated in the closing credits of the show, Maid is inspired by the book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land, which is in turn based on the period in Land’s life when she was a single mother working as a housecleaner to support herself and her young daughter. While the characters in Maid don’t share names with the real people in Land’s life, and the specifics of the scenarios Alex finds herself in are fictionalized, the basic premise of the series draws heavily from Land’s real-life experiences. Born in 1978, Land grew up in Washington and Alaska, and although her years spent working as a maid found her living below the poverty line, she told Parade in a 2019 interview that she didn’t grow up in systemic poverty, which she believes definitely influenced her worldview and experiences. “A lot of that was because of my privilege,” she said, explaining why she never really considered herself impoverished, despite her low income. Land believed that even though she struggled, she was granted many opportunities others might not get, due to “my upbringing, because I am white, because I didn’t have a lot of major setbacks to keep me from getting a job.” In January 2008, Land escaped an abusive relationship with her then-9-month-old daughter (who is depicted as slightly older in the show). Land and her daughter moved into a homeless shelter, she writes on her website, and she soon began working as a maid, one of the only jobs she could do without office skills or a college degree. For several years, she worked without benefits or time off, and relied on government assistance programs such as child care grants, food stamps, Medicaid, utility assistance and gas vouchers to meet her and her daughter’s needs. While working as a maid, Land used the money she earned, along with student loans, scholarships, and grants, to put herself through community college in Skagit County, WA, and then the University of Montana in Missoula. She graduated in 2014 with a B.A. in English and creative writing and now works as a writing fellow with the Center for Community Change. During this time, Land married a man who turned out to be abusive, and eventually filed for divorce. Elements of Land’s marriage are woven into Maid, through Alex’s friend Danielle (Aimee Carrero), a woman she meets at the domestic violence shelter. Danielle eventually returns to her abusive partner, even though he’d tried to strangle her, which parallels a story Land told in a 2018 essay about her ex-husband published by The Guardian. In 2018, Land met Tim Faust on the dating website Bumble. In an Instagram post three years later, Land wrote about their relationship, “We were both full-time single parents looking for a hookup and nothing serious. Then we met each other in person and that changed very quickly.” The couple got married in 2019, blending their two families together to co-parent their collective four children. In an interview with Vox, Land said that one of the biggest frustrations she dealt with during her own time as a maid was trying to meet the requirements for child care grants, which she needed in order to work. “It’s terrifying,” Land said, “because I can’t work without child care, and that was the most important thing that I had.” Maid portrays a similar issue in its first episode, when Alex has trouble finding a job because she doesn’t have childcare, but can’t qualify for government-subsidized child care without a job. Land also said that Alex’s experiences trying to keep track of her expenses and stretch her minimal budget as far as it will go were also true to her own. “I remember very specifically standing in the grocery store aisle,” Land told Vox. “I really needed to buy a sponge, and I was trying to think, ‘How much money do I have on my credit card balance?’ Because usually I would pay the minimum payment on my credit card, and that was the money that I had to purchase all of those things like toothpaste and shampoo and diapers if I needed them.” Maid depicts this experience by showing Alex’s mental tallies on screen as numbers that go up or down depending on the money that she’s earning or spending. That said, Maid is not overly concerned with sticking to the specifics of Land’s life, and that’s exactly how Land wanted it. When meeting with representatives from various production companies about adapting her story for film or television, “A lot of them wanted to do a movie and to keep it very tightly focused on the book and make it a true adaptation and that just didn’t sound great to me,” Land told The Seattle Times. She explained that a fictionalized version allowed the story more freedom to pull back from her personal experience and focus on some other characters, particularly characters of color. “I really wanted that because it’s not a white person’s story,” Land said, “[since] 90% of domestic workers are people of color.” But even though the show isn’t strictly beholden to Land’s personal experience, she thinks they got the most important stuff right. “There are so many ways to present poverty that perpetuates stigmas and you can do it wrong so easily,” Land told The Seattle Times. “I didn’t think they were going to be able to visibly show what it’s like to have two bucks in your pocket and fear and trauma and insecurity of losing everything and they did it so well. They also showed that relationships you can fall into can be incredibly toxic and abusive but don’t leave any physical evidence and how traumatizing it can be.” There’s also at least one other way that Maid reflects real life outside of Land’s narrative: MacDowell is Qualley’s real-life mom! “I’ve always wanted to work with my mom,” Qualley told Mashable. “I had the idea to beg her to do this, essentially… Within a couple of days, my mom got the offer. And then I just had to cross my fingers and hope that she would actually want to do it and then she was stuck with me for nine months so it was great.”
How does Maid end?
(Warning: Maid Season 1 spoilers ahead.) After fighting Sean for custody of their daughter Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) for most of the series, Maid’s final episode sees Alex fearing she could lose Maddie for good when she can’t get her father, Hank, to testify in court about Sean’s abuse. And with Sean still holding partial custody of Maddy in Washington, Alex fears she won’t be able to move to Montana in order to start her first semester of college. However, Sean finally has a change of heart after losing his temper with Maddy, realizing that he can’t be trusted to be around her. He signs over full custody to Alex, who in turn tells him that he can visit them in Montana anytime he wants, as long as he’s sober. Earlier, Alex asked Paula to join them in Montana, and she willingly agreed. But by the end of the episode, Paula had sadly—yet unsurprisingly—decided to renege on the arrangement, choosing instead to stay in Washington with her new boyfriend. Alex is disappointed, but still heads off to begin her new life with Maddy undeterred.
Is Maid a memoir?
Stephenie Land’s memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, was a long-form elaboration on her 2015 Vox essay titled, “I Spent 2 Years Cleaning Houses. What I Saw Makes Me Never Want to Be Rich.” In the essay, Land wrote about her experiences as a housekeeper for wealthy clients, including what she learned about their habits and secrets in her role as the unseen individual responsible for keeping their homes looking like a million bucks. According to Land’s website, the short piece was intriguing enough to catch the eye of literary agent Jeff Kleinman, who quickly spun it into a book deal with Hachette Books. Maid the book was released in January 2019 to instant success. It debuted at No. 3 on The New York Times nonfiction best seller list, where it remained for five weeks, and received heaps of critical acclaim, including from President Barack Obama. In his 2019 summer reading post, Obama described Maid as “a single mother‘s personal, unflinching look at America’s class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work.” Netflix’s adaptation of Maid depicts the period of Land’s life when she lived below the poverty line and relied on government welfare programs to provide for herself and her daughter, while also jumping through legal hoops to get out of her emotionally abusive relationship. In an essay for TIME, which Land published immediately prior to the series’ release, Land said that when she sold her memoir, a Netflix adaptation was the last thing on her mind. She wrote, “I was a single mom with a 2-year-old and a 9-year-old, living in low-income housing, and because of a late paycheck, I hadn’t eaten much for a few weeks, subsisting on pizza I paid for with a check I knew would bounce.” Now that a fictionalized version of her story is not just a limited series, but an immensely popular one, Land says she has complex feelings about it. “After my now 14-year-old and I watched the first two episodes of the Netflix series,” Land wrote in her essay, “they turned to me with tears in their eyes and said, ‘We made it out, but so many didn’t.’” A little further down, in a quote Land attributes to a Facebook post by her friend Rene Denfeld, she shares, “We live in a world that embraces the success story only because we are O.K. with the majority suffering.” So while Land is glad that a version of her story is reaching a wider audience, she stresses the importance of acknowledging that her story of escaping systemic poverty and abuse is not the norm, and it’s important to continue to advocate and fight for those still trapped inside.
Will there be a Season 2 of Maid?
While Land’s real-life story continues, Alex Russell’s reached a satisfying conclusion at the end of Maid’s 10-episode season, with her heading to Montana to pursue her college education. Assuming Alex’s future parallels Land’s past, it will hold a degree, more children, a happy marriage (and an unhappy failed marriage) and a book deal. While showrunner Molly Smith Metzler says that she loves Alex and “could write [her] for the rest of my life,” she thinks that her story—at least the part that needs to be a Netflix series—is complete. However, considering how well Maid has done on Netflix, Metzler isn’t ruling out a second season; she just doesn’t think that Alex is the most obvious choice for the main character. “I do think there’s a lot of maids out there, there’s a lot of domestic workers who are experiencing stories that are as bad, if not worse than, Stephanie Land’s,” Metzler told Decider. “I think it would be very exciting and a dream world to get to see a different maid’s story in another season. Someone from a totally different geographic with totally different life experience and who probably is a mom.” In that case, perhaps Maid will prove to be more of an anthology series than a traditional one, with each season following a new central character in a different area, yet exploring similar themes of poverty, domestic work, and parenthood. Next, check out 9 Fan-Favorite Books Getting the Hollywood Treatment on Film and TV in 2021.
