'Maid', the book on which 'The Assistant' was based, hooks the same or more than the Netflix series

Netflix has snagged two historic post-holiday premieres. September 2021 will forever be the month of 'The Squid Game', the k-drama that in a few weeks became the most watched series in the history of the platform. But in October another enormous success arrived, 'The assistant', whose figures are turning it into another of the most watched series on the entire planet and which has also been in the top 3 for a long time.

'La asistenta' is a series that has wreaked havoc on the public. There are spectators who have described it as repetitive and boring and who have left it halfway, but it has been part of the national conversation about the need to have a good social system that avoids risks to women victims of gender violence, people at risk of poverty, single mothers...

The series, starring Margaret Qualley as Alex, Nick Robinson as her ex-partner Sean, Rylea Nevaeh Whittet as their daughter Maddy and Andie McDowell as Paula, mother of Alex (the 'Four Weddings' actress and a Funeral' – one of the best wedding movies ever – is Qualley's mother in real life) is a true celebration of a mother's resilience in the face of life's most difficult situations. Perhaps that is why she has touched so many people so much, including myself.

'The Housekeeper' tells the true story of Stephanie Land, a woman who is now 43 years old but became pregnant at 28 on a summer fling. His book was published in 2019 under the title 'Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive' and became a true New York Times bestseller, recommended by the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, in his summer readings.

And we're in luck, because 'Criada. Hard work, low wages and a mother's will to survive', the Spanish version of Land's work, published by Captain Swing (19 euros) and that will excite and engage you even more than the Netflix series. A book of 336 pages that are not read, are devoured.

As the series recounts, one of Stephanie Land's great salvations in her 'desert crossing' was to write down in a diary all the adventures she was going through. Thus, 'Maid' starkly presents us with the loneliness of single mothers within the American social system.

"I'm trying to learn how to freeze bell peppers, leave me alone" okay dad

— Liv Lena 💟 Fri Aug 08 17:34:28 +0000 2014

The pregnancy cut short her plans to go to university like the rest of the girls her age. But she was not intimidated, because to raise her daughter she worked by day cleaning houses, she studied online at night and, in her spare time? he wrote tirelessly about his own experiences.

Thus, in the pages we learn of tremendous injustices already exposed in the series, such as the overload of work in low-paid employees, food stamps, government programs that supposedly provide houses but that you can also end up losing or how officials called her 'lucky' for receiving public aid.

There are tremendously bleak paragraphs: "I don't know how long cleaning would last: I would leave the kitchen clean and tidy one afternoon and the next day she would find the countertops and counter littered with pots and dishes with traces of dried red sauce. I hoped her family was satisfied and she could feel more serene until the arrival of her baby. But most of all I was glad it was over," writes Stephanie Land . And it is not easy to be an assistant to the upper middle class: "I became a nameless ghost," she adds.

This is a journalism work that at times becomes a horror story but, above all, a huge denunciation against injustice, violence, precariousness and poverty. In Spain it has been published with a foreword by fellow writer and social activist Barbara Ehrenreich ('Por cuatro duros') and a preface by Rafaela Pimentel Lara, from the Territorio domestico collective.

Some of the criticism received by 'Criada'

'Criada' has been magnificently received by practically all the media and literature lovers; These are some of the criticisms received, which make us read the essay with much more enthusiasm: