The Maid's Diary

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to rape, assault, stalking, coerced abortion, and infanticide.

The Maid’s Diary contains many false narratives and makes multiple deliberate references to the creation of these and their relation to ideas of personal identity. Through Kit, the novel shows how false narratives and personas can be a way to explore, process, and reclaim a coherent sense of identity. By creating multiple perspectives around the main characters, the novel poses questions about truth, individual experience, and deception, especially important for the plot’s focus on contradictory accounts and gaslighting. These ambiguities of narrative and identity also provide much of the novel’s intrigue and mystery, essential to the thriller genre.

The novel’s most important narrative is Kit’s unreliable self-narration, in the form of her diary. In the first pages of the novel, Kit states what she believes about deceptive appearances: “Perfection is deception. An illusion. It’s a carefully curated but false narrative.” (9). Her words not only set up her own external projection but emphasize that her job reveals the intimate lives of the wealthy patrons who hire her. The “illusion” also foreshadows the “perfect” life of Jon and Daisy, based on mutual deception but propped up by wealth, power, and social status.