‘Maid’ Author Stephanie Land Says She Always Wanted Her Daughter Mia

Oct. 2 2021, Published 6:00 p.m. ET

Get in a position to listen to a lot more about Maid, considering the new Netflix series is wowing critics. The 10-episode series centers on a single mom who escapes abuse and pushes through poverty to offer a better life for herself and her young daughter.

Maid is named after and inspired via Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, but it surely’s now not an actual retelling of Stephanie’s life. The central personality in the sequence, played via Margaret Qualley, is named Alex, for example, and showrunner Molly Smith Metzler instructed Decider recently that the sequence is “emotionally very true to the memoir.”

So taking into consideration the sequence is partially fictional, right here’s additional info on Stephanie’s true life story to this point.

Stephanie Land’s mother’s revel in informed her motherhood journey.

As Stephanie details in her book, her college-era dreams of becoming a author were postponed when she had an unplanned being pregnant with an abusive spouse. She left that spouse and was a unmarried mother, running low-paying jobs and dwelling in a homeless shelter.

Stephanie defined on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2019 that she knew that she sought after to proceed with the being pregnant. “Some backstory to that was once that my mom had advised me that she was very close to aborting me,” she mentioned. “She stated she sat in the automobile parking space and simply couldn’t go through with it. And she informed me that when I used to be, like, 13, and it in point of fact affected me. It made me really feel roughly less sought after. So I can in truth say that I all the time sought after Mia. I simply wasn’t positive if it used to be the best state of affairs for her.”

Stephanie also drew upon her father’s advice. “I take into account one conversation particularly with my dad, who was 20 when I was born,” she mentioned. “He mentioned, 'You know, your mother and I were roughly in the similar state of affairs, but, you realize, we grew to become out wonderful; and also you’re nice and your brother’s fine; and it was once all excellent in any case.' So I roughly went into it with that perspective. Like, OK, this would possibly in all probability be in point of fact laborious, but it’ll be tremendous in the end.”

Stephanie Land and her husband have 4 children.

According to her website, Stephanie eventually got a Pell Grant that helped her attend the University of Montana in Missoula, where she got her B.A. in English and Creative Writing. She later became a freelancer, and a viral Vox essay of hers caught the attention of a literary agent, who helped her land her book deal for Maid. She additionally turned into a writing fellow with the Center for Community Change and the Economic Hardship Program.

These days, Stephanie is married to Tim Faust, and they are a mixed family, as she wrote on Twitter, with four kids and two canine, according to Oprah Daily.

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