Kaylin, Lucy

PERSONAL:

Married; children: two.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Marie Claire, 300 W. 57th St., 34th Fl., New York, NY 10019-1497.

CAREER:

Writer and editor. Marie Claire magazine, New York, NY, executive editor; GQ magazine, New York, NY, senior writer.

WRITINGS:

For the Love of God: The Faith and Future of the American Nun, W. Morrow (New York, NY), 2000.

The Perfect Stranger: The Truth about Mothers and Nannies, Bloomsbury USA (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author Lucy Kaylin is an executive editor at Marie Claire magazine and has served as a senior writer for GQ magazine. Kaylin's first book, For the Love of God: The Faith and Future of the American Nun, explores the little-understood world of the devout Catholic nun, all the while wondering if this form of religious calling still has validity in the modern world, and if it can sustain itself in face of contemporary changes in society and religious life. "Using her strong narrative skills, Kaylin takes us inside the altruistic world of nuns," noted BookMooch Web site reviewer Gail Hudson. Kaylin notes that the population of nuns in America has long been in decline. There were, for example, approximately 185,000 nuns in America in 1965. By 1975, that number had dropped more than twenty-five percent, to 135,000. The population of nuns dropped even more dramatically over the next quarter-century, leaving only 84,000. Of those, the median age is seventy years old, and a great number of these women are not active members of convents, but are permanent members of what amount to convent-based nursing homes. "Kaylin suggests that the greatest challenge facing most communities today is coping with an overwhelmingly geriatric population and attracting new members to an institution seen as moribund," observed William C. Graham in the National Catholic Reporter.

To help understand why the numbers of American nuns have fallen so drastically, Kaylin delves into their world and offers profiles of several practicing nuns. She explores the concepts of service that are so important to the life of a nun, contrasting difficult assignments in tough inner-city neighborhoods with physically demanding work by nuns in rural areas. She encourages her subjects to explore the meaning of their vows and why they chose to undertake the admittedly restrictive life of a nun. "She asks why someone would now or did some years ago choose the life of a nun, what is essential in their experience and what would be lost with their disappearance," Graham reported. In other parts of the book, Kaylin considers issues such as sexuality, vocation, dress, and religious observance in the daily life of a nun. Although her book is favorable toward the lives and vows of the nuns she profiles, Kaylin's "approach is remarkably balanced," and she presents an "opinionated but warm investigation into the changing fortunes of the American convent," reported a writer in Publishers Weekly. In considering the life of the nun as Kaylin reports it, "author and reader are edified by such witnesses to selfless service in a flawed world," commented Library Journal contributor Anna M. Donnelly.

A busy New York City professional as well as the mother of two children, Kaylin has experienced the frustration of balancing work and family life in an environment where child care is often quite expensive or simply not available, and where working parents find themselves facing the economic necessity of turning a large part of their child's rearing over to a hired caregiver. She takes up that topic in her next book, The Perfect Stranger: The Truth about Mothers and Nannies. "Separation anxiety, race and class, our very identities as women and parents: This is precisely the bumpy terrain that Lucy Kaylin explores in her new book," commented interviewer Lynn Harris on Salon.com. Kaylin draws on her own experiences as a mother who engaged the services of a nanny. She also relates the results of interviews conducted with several other women in New York and elsewhere, and of conversations with practicing nannies. She discusses several important issues, such as distinctions of class, race, and income, and how nannies that come from poorer countries are often faced with the dilemma of helping raise someone else's children while their own are forced to get by without their mother at home. Kaylin looks at the several layers and types of emotions that develop in the wake of hiring a nanny, including distrust, fear, dependence, and sometimes a struggle for power between mother and nanny. She ponders the influence that nannies have over children, the loss of contact between parent and child, and the issues of parental responsibility that emerge from hiring a caregiver. In worse-case scenarios, she describes what some mothers have discovered about their nannies through hidden video recorders and "nanny-cams."

Harris mused on Kaylin's desire to do well by her children and concluded that "taken as a whole, her book is more well-crafted collage than polemic—a portrait of the uneasy symbiosis between less-than-loaded two-income families and the ‘unprecedented influx of women from economically unstable places,’ of villageless mothers doing their best to raise a child." In the Salon.com interview with Harris, Kaylin emphasized that women who employ nannies are not neglecting or abandoning their children to the care of an unfeeling stranger. The economic realities of modern America drive home the necessity of two-income families arriving at a compromise with themselves and their offspring. Otherwise, either children or necessary jobs would be impossible. "We're really on our own out here, a lot of us, in the cities of America, working these demanding jobs in careers that we may or may not like, because we have to have two salaries," Kaylin remarked to Harris. "And women should not have to apologize for the fact that they want to work in the first place," she continued. "It's all about striking compromises and minimizing the times and the ways that you disappoint the various people in your life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Entertainment Weekly, November 30, 2001, review of For the Love of God: The Faith and Future of the American Nun, p. 84.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, April, 2001, review of For the Love of God, p. 60.

Library Journal, October 1, 2000, Anna M. Donnelly, review of For the Love of God, p. 109.

Maclean's, June 4, 2007, Annie Kingston, "‘One Woman Landed a Swedish Nanny. She'd Crow about It. It Was Akin to Telling Cute Anecdotes about Your Weekend Place.’ Lucy Kaylin Talks with Anne Kingston about Nannies and Race, Mothers' Delusions and Boundaries," interview with Lucy Kaylin, p. 18.

Marie Claire, June, 2007, Colleen Oakley, "Q & A: At Work with Lucy Kaylin, Author of the New Book the Perfect Stranger," p. 113.

National Catholic Reporter, March 9, 2001, William C. Graham, review of For the Love of God, p. 13.

New York, May 28, 2007, "Nanny Gloat: A User's Guide to the Person You Hire to Bring Up Your Kids While You Work," interview with Lucy Kaylin, p. 20.

New York Times Book Review, May 27, 2007, Liesl Schillinger, "A Nanny Nightmare? Living without One," review of The Perfect Stranger: The Truth about Mothers and Nannies,

O, the Oprah Magazine, June, 2007, "Nanny Makes Three: A Bold Look at the Intensely Complicated Relationship between Mothers and Their Children's Caregivers," review of The Perfect Stranger, p. 158.

Publishers Weekly, October 30, 2000, review of For the Love of God, p. 67; April 30, 2007, review of The Perfect Stranger, p. 151.

Redbook, July, 2007, Marisa Cohen, "The Other Woman in Your Child's Life," review of The Perfect Stranger, p. 203.

Time Canada, December 11, 2000, review of For the Love of God, p. 76.

ONLINE

Bloomsbury USA Web site,http://www.bloomsburyusa.com/ (January 8, 2008), biography of Lucy Kaylin.

BookMooch,http://fr.bookmooch.com/ (January 8, 2008), review of For the Love of God.

Freshfiction.com,http://freshfiction.com/ (January 8, 2008), review of The Perfect Stranger.

iVillage,http://parenting.ivillage.com/ (January 8, 2008), Genevieve Thiers, "Breaking Down the Nanny-Parent Relationship," review of The Perfect Stranger.

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (June 13, 2007), Lynn Harris, "The Other Mothers," interview with Lucy Kaylin.

OTHER

All Things Considered, July 11, 2007, Michelle Norris, "Mommies and Nannies Face Off in Perfect Stranger," transcript of radio interview with Lucy Kaylin.