Girls in a whirl

Obstacles after 'Nanny Diaries' rock author's cradle

Erika Gonzalez, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 3, 2004 at midnight

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Two friends blessed with sharp tongues and experience in high-class childcare pen a snarky satire that slams the mothering skills of New York's wealthy and shallow.

Then the real scandal begins.

The book sells two million copies and sends Upper East Side mothers into a frenzy. The authors sell the movie rights to the book. In ensuing years, they land and lose a seven-figure deal with a literary powerhouse for their next two novels. They switch publishers three times in two years, dismissing agents along the way like Donald Trump firing contestants on The Apprentice. Before long, gossip mongers begin to suggest that the writers have gone from modest first timers to divas gone wild.

It's a story that authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the women behind the breakthrough best-seller, The Nanny Diaries, have read one too many times lately.

"It's worthy of its own satire," contended McLaughlin of the rumors that have been written about her and Kraus. "But the truth is, nice people don't sell newspapers. They make great heroines in novels, but they don't generally sell newspapers."

McLaughlin and Kraus, however, aren't likely to step out of the spotlight soon. The release of their sophomore effort, Citizen Girl, has earned the 30-year-old writers more ink, and not much of it has been good. Entertainment Weekly gave the novel a D. The Chicago Sun-Times said the follow-up was neither as moving or believable as the authors' debut. And USA Today called the book "a major disappointment." (The Rocky Mountain News critic is more appreciative of the book. See review on 26D.)

The authors stopped in Denver earlier this week to promote (and perhaps defend) the book and set the record straight about their publishing careers.

"A lot of the reporting on us and our publishing journey is frequently made out to be infinitely more dramatic than it is," said Kraus, who added that switching agents and publishers is par for the course in the industry. "It's so much more common than gets reported."

"I think Nanny just invited much more scrutiny than most people get," noted Kraus.

It also created huge expectations for Citizen Girl, which chronicles a twentysomething's struggle to maintain her feminist beliefs in the modern workplace.

"We set out to write something we had not come across," explained McLaughlin. "And we had not come across a book that takes a young woman through a professional odyssey, where the odyssey is 99 percent of the experience and her sex life is 1 percent of it."

It's a life that McLaughlin and Kraus were more than familiar with before hitting it big with Nanny. Though the two met in a New York University theater class, they didn't collaborate on the book until a few years after graduation.

At the time, McLaughlin was pursuing a master's degree at Columbia, and Kraus was auditioning for acting roles. The success of Nanny, which they sold to St. Martin's Press for reportedly small advance of $25,000, took them both completely by surprise.

"We never thought it would be read beyond our family foisting it on their friends," recalled Kraus. "It was unbelievable to us. I don't think we ever wrapped our heads around it."

But the pair were savvy enough to strike again while the iron was hot. Less than six months after publishing Nanny, the writers already were shopping around a second novel. They offered the book to St. Martin's first, but McLaughlin said the company passed because they wanted a Nanny sequel.

"They didn't want it. They didn't get it," remembered McLaughlin. "It just wasn't for them."

Armed with a new agent, the duo found a buyer in Random House, whose president, Ann Godoff offered the authors a $2 million two-book deal.

The size of the contract raised eyebrows in industry circles. Suddenly reports began circulating about the authors acting like the demanding Upper East Side socialites they skewered in Nanny.

One press account overstated their deal with Random House by $1 million. Another claimed that while plugging Nanny, the duo demanded hair and makeup services for all promotional appearances - a charge McLaughlin and Kraus say was greatly exaggerated.("The word demand is just a lie," said McLaughlin.)

When Godoff was fired by Random House, some publicly speculated it was because she spent too much to secure the Nanny authors. But McLaughlin and Kraus stayed with the company for nearly a year after Godoff's departure.

"Ann was fired about 10 days after we signed our deal," Kraus said.

"And having, as far as we know, nothing to do with us," noted McLaughlin.

Still Godoff's absence put the pair in a tough spot with the new regime, which didn't embrace the manuscript.

"We tried very hard to make it work," McLaughlin said. "But it was like a blind date - or really, an arranged marriage."

In the end, the authors say they hit an editorial impasse with the publisher. The duo can't comment on their contract, but they say severing the relationship wasn't as expensive a proposition as some would suggest.

"Our contract was one million allocated for each book. But we'd get it in very tiny increments parceled out," Kraus explained. So, thankfully, we had received only a fraction of that at the point we had to pay it back. It was not cataclysmic."

Down but not out, McLaughlin and Kraus eventually landed at Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, reportedly receiving a more humble advance of $200,000 to $250,000.

"They were really innovative and really passionate about the issues we were writing about in Girl," McLaughlin said. "They're trying to get fresh voices and ideas out into the marketplace."

Because they were trying to escape the Nanny mold, McLaughlin and Kraus say writing Citizen Girl was almost like starting from scratch.

"We had to show people that we are in fact writers and that we are able to write about different topics," Kraus said. "Hopefully, we succeeded in that. We had a great time trying."

For what its worth, Kraus and McLaughlin don't seem terribly surprised or shaken by the the tome's tepid reviews. Like their protagonists, the pair are bright and attractive, but a bit wiser.

They say they've been ducking doubts about their writing since Nanny, when interviewers - many aspiring authors themselves - would often gawk at their credentials.

"I think it's a very strange experience because musicians aren't music critics for the most part and actors don't review movies, yet novelists do review other novelists and so it's impossible to gauge how much schadenfreude played a part," said Kraus.

Though Citizen Girl may not be winning critics' hearts, its faring better with fans. The book holds the 24th spot on the New York Times Fiction Best-Seller List and the duo say they're encouraged by the reaction they've received at book-signings.

"The first night we read there was a woman in her 70s, who had clearly spent the whole day in the bookstore because she had finished the book," said Kraus. "People were like, 'you're paying her or you're related to her.' But this story - she just felt incredibly passionate about."

When the tour is done, the two will resume their work on a screenplay for a romantic comedy. They also plan to start a new book next year, though they're keeping the subject secret.

Their silence is understandable, given the scrutiny they've encountered. They've come to view their novels as children, and the need to protect their offspring is great.

"It's terrifying to let her out into the world. To let her go," confided McLaughlin. "You just want to have given her everything you can."

Proving their humor is still intact, Kraus adds with a laugh: "You worry that no one's going to invite her to the prom."

gonzaleze@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5350

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