November 2025 Featured Artist
The Writer's Writer
An Interview with Nicola Kraus
Nicola Kraus
Photo Courtesy: Nicola Kraus |
Nicola Kraus is a New York City-based author and entrepreneur with 25 years’ experience in the publishing and entertainment industries and over six million copies of her books in print. She published her first novel, The Nanny Diaries, written with her then-creative partner, Emma McLaughlin, in 2002. In 2007, it was made into a movie with Scarlett Johansson, Paul Giamatti, and Laura Linney. In 2015, Nicola established The Finished Thought, a consultancy that helps to shepherd aspiring authors through the writing and publication process.
Her most recent novel, The Best We Could Hope For was published in May 2025 and is excerpted in Sanctuary this month. On The Best We Could Hope For: “An anguished investigation of the way memories can warp lives." ~ Kirkus Reviews |
Nicola is currently at work on a new book, but she took time to talk about her life and work with Sanctuary’s Associate Editor, Carol Lippert Gray.
Did you always want to be a writer?
No. I desperately wanted to be an actress. From a very early age, I thought that was going to be my path. My grandfather had been an actor in Vienna before [World War II]. I thought I was going to follow in his footsteps.
I was always writing though. I had my first piece published in our literary magazine in third grade. When I graduated from college and started acting professionally, I would occasionally sob hysterically – as anyone attached to that profession will. My parents kept saying to me, ‘You should be a writer.’ I would say to them, ‘That’s not at all helpful. You’re supposed to give me practical suggestions.’ But they were totally correct.
My father is a rare-book dealer, and my mother was a librarian. So I was raised in an all-book household. Books were our religion. I held writing in such high esteem that I never imagined I could do it professionally. To me, acting seemed far more attainable than [the thought] that I could ever write a book. It was really intimidation that kept me from imagining that.
No. I desperately wanted to be an actress. From a very early age, I thought that was going to be my path. My grandfather had been an actor in Vienna before [World War II]. I thought I was going to follow in his footsteps.
I was always writing though. I had my first piece published in our literary magazine in third grade. When I graduated from college and started acting professionally, I would occasionally sob hysterically – as anyone attached to that profession will. My parents kept saying to me, ‘You should be a writer.’ I would say to them, ‘That’s not at all helpful. You’re supposed to give me practical suggestions.’ But they were totally correct.
My father is a rare-book dealer, and my mother was a librarian. So I was raised in an all-book household. Books were our religion. I held writing in such high esteem that I never imagined I could do it professionally. To me, acting seemed far more attainable than [the thought] that I could ever write a book. It was really intimidation that kept me from imagining that.
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You had tremendous success right out of the gate with The Nanny Diaries.
It was wild. Emma and I met at New York University (NYU). We were both nannying and filling in our schooling around the demands of the job, which you could do at NYU because you could set your schedule up so you only had two full days of classes a week. It lent itself to having all sorts of incredible jobs off campus. There were people working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Vogue, at MTV. And we were chasing children. Five years later, Emma asked me if I wanted to write The Nanny Diaries because I had increased my dissatisfaction with acting. I had written a play and invited her to a reading of it. She sent me an email the next day and asked if I’d be interested in collaborating with her on a book based on our experience, and the shift that had happened in the subsequent years. This was the end of the 1990s, money was falling from the sky in New York City, and there were articles in The New York Times [and elsewhere] about how hard it was for these newly wealthy families to find good help. We really wanted to pose a counterargument, which is, 'You are terrible to work for.' That was the impetus. Also, I had grown up here. So as a nanny, I had gone to school with the older half-siblings from earlier marriages. I wasn’t that puzzled by anything I was seeing because I had been in and out of these kinds of apartments my whole life. It was wild to me to finally have full understanding on why some of the mean kids I’d grown up alongside had been so angry. To realize that the neglect I saw when we became teenagers really started when these children were very small. I was also studying child psychology at the time, so the two things dovetailed well – for my benefit, but horribly for these children. It was quite a heartbreaking job. It certainly wasn’t anything I imagined I’d turn into the foundation of my career. |
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When Emma and I started writing together, we found a lot of humor in what we lived through. We really did create a fictional family to pour all our insights into.
And then the book became a movie. What’s it like to have famous faces speak your words up on screen?
And then the book became a movie. What’s it like to have famous faces speak your words up on screen?
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It is wild. It’s like being told that someone is going to be acting out the dream you had last night. It’s that surreal. Even today, if I see the poster somewhere out in the wild, I still can’t wrap my brain around the fact that it actually happened.
But it was a very long process, because we sold the rights to Harvey Weinstein at Miramax a year before publication. By the time publication arrived, he was in a divorce battle with Disney for many, many years. The Nanny Diaries was the property they were fighting over. In the interim, The Devil Wears Prada is written, The Devil Wears Prada is published, the movie comes out, and we’re still in this holding pattern. Finally, he wrests control of the title back from Disney. By that time, Scarlett Johansson’s schedule had miraculously freed up and the next thing we knew, our dream cast was going to come together. Harvey Weinstein was not in a good place by the time the film was made. It was the beginning of the death spiral for Weinstein. He was horrible to everyone on set. He was horrible to the cast and crew. He made a lot of decisions in post-production that hurt the film. It was painful because we didn’t know exactly what was happening. We weren’t privy to the decisions, and we weren’t on the email chain, so we were sort of sensing all this happening from a distance. It wasn’t until later, when we became close friends with people who made the film and later got to know the head of public relations for Miramax, that we got the full story. It was a bummer. But the movie has gone on to have this wonderful life. It’s the sleepover choice. It’s still something 12-year-olds can’t believe: that I wrote the book. It’s wonderful. We’re incredibly grateful and Scarlett Johansson remains one of our heroes. |
And you and Emma continued to write together.
Our second book, Citizen Girl, was inspired partly by Emma’s lived experience as the head of human resources for a dot-com. She was hired to hire everyone, and she was kept on to fire everyone. This was all happening during the height of what was being called third-wave feminism. It was the moment when Hooters had an airline, when we were just getting into the Iraq war, and there was a real for-the-boys feeling. Sheryl Crow was naked on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Our second book, Citizen Girl, was inspired partly by Emma’s lived experience as the head of human resources for a dot-com. She was hired to hire everyone, and she was kept on to fire everyone. This was all happening during the height of what was being called third-wave feminism. It was the moment when Hooters had an airline, when we were just getting into the Iraq war, and there was a real for-the-boys feeling. Sheryl Crow was naked on the cover of Rolling Stone.
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"It felt like feminism was being rolled back and sexism was being repackaged as feminism because suddenly it was thought empowering to be naked. You were in control of it; therefore, it was not at all against your larger goals of achieving equality. It all seemed very problematic to us." ~ Nicola Kraus |
It felt like feminism was being rolled back and sexism was being repackaged as feminism because suddenly it was thought empowering to be naked. You were in control of it; therefore, it was not at all against your larger goals of achieving equality. It all seemed very problematic to us.
We had an extraordinary experience years later where we met a young woman who now works for the CIA in human trafficking. She said she went into that field because of our book. So we felt that if we sold only one copy just to her, it was a worthwhile endeavor.
Then we did a book called Dedication. It was inspired by something Emma and I have long been fascinated by, which is being a muse. Not being the artist but being the woman who inspires the art. Would it be the greatest thing that ever happened to you, or would it be the worst thing that ever happened to you? The book is about a woman whose high-school boyfriend disappears. He becomes the largest pop star on the planet. Every song is about her and their high-school relationship. At 30, she shows up to tell him to knock it off and that he’s a terrible person. That was our first sort of love story. Usually we focused on the professional; the personal was secondary. |
Then we wrote two young adult novels I still love so deeply, one about a teen break-up coach who can get any girl over any guy in four weeks or less because women have no time to waste, and the other about a girl who is part of the year-round population on the east end of Long Island. MTV comes to her high school to film a reality special. They dangle a $50,000 Doritos scholarship to college. The next thing she knows, she’s on MTV along with everyone in school she hates. I think that line between what’s public and what’s private is something Emma and I were consistently fascinated by.
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Of the last three books we did together, one was inspired by Brittany Spears. The title is Between You and Me. Years and years before anyone else was talking about it, and I really would like credit for that, we learned her father had been brought up on physical abuse charges in their tiny town. Now he was the person who was legally in charge of her. To us, it seemed, ‘Well that explains everything.’ How was no one looking more closely at this? And of course, years later, that would be the cover of the Arts & Leisure section [of The New York Times]. Everyone talks about how horrific it was and what a miscarriage of justice it was that her father got legal control of her and a six-figure monthly allowance for doing it, and it essentially broke her.
That idea became the foundation of several books: I’m broken because you broke me. We were at a moment of blaming and victim-shaming, not looking at the larger societal structures women, especially young women, were operating within.
Our next book, The First Affair, was inspired by Monica Lewinski. Now she has a podcast and everyone has apologized. When we were working on the book, none of that had happened yet. We had to explain why it was we thought she had gotten a raw deal. When we would say to people, ‘She was only 19, and he was the President of the United States,’ it was far enough along that people would go, ‘Oh, right.’ People had thought maybe she was 26. There was an enormous amount of blame and shame placed on her shoulders. Now it would be seen as clear predation. The third one was inspired by John Edwards and the strange, strange story where he had taken his mistress and placed her in his assistant’s house, then tried to distance himself from it. It imploded their lives. Looking also at how power corrupts, whether it’s political power, celebrity power, or financial power. How do we find our way to behave ethically and empathetically? These questions are no less urgent all these years later than they were when we published the books. |
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You formerly wrote with a partner and now you write solo, so the writing process must be very different.
Yes. It takes a lot longer. But I still share everything with her. I just sent her the first 42 pages of my next book. At this moment, a lot of people are looking at the ethical non-monogamy movement and opening their marriages, and a second sexual revolution, the #MeToo movement and the legacy of sexual abuse and sexual assault. I think right now these two things are happening in silos. No one’s looked at, in a woman’s lived experience, how do you reconcile these two things? I get very interested in big topics.
Yes. It takes a lot longer. But I still share everything with her. I just sent her the first 42 pages of my next book. At this moment, a lot of people are looking at the ethical non-monogamy movement and opening their marriages, and a second sexual revolution, the #MeToo movement and the legacy of sexual abuse and sexual assault. I think right now these two things are happening in silos. No one’s looked at, in a woman’s lived experience, how do you reconcile these two things? I get very interested in big topics.
Click Book Cover to find an Excerpt in Sanctuary
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You also run a large writing consultancy. How do you do it all?
I just shifted to a six-day week. I do four days a week with my clients and two full days of me thinking just about my novel. I realized for right now, if I try to do both things every day, my brain is too fragmented. This seems to be working very well. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? I recently was on a panel and was asked about what makes someone a writer. I said, ‘Writing.’ I think we have this idea that until you’re published, you’re not a real writer. Someone else on the panel took umbrage at that. They said, ‘You really have to have been published to be a writer.’ I said, ‘Was Frank McCourt any less a great writer while he was writing Angela’s Ashes and teaching high school than he was later, after the book was published? Same person. Same brain. Same artistic sensibility. Same dedication to the process.’ I think ‘do it’ is my advice. If you’re called to tell a story, tell the story. The rest is actually not your purview — the way it’s received or the way the marketplace receives it. The important thing is the doing. That’s my belief. Do you have a family? I have a 15-year-old daughter who only just read The Nanny Diaries this summer because I bribed her with 20 bucks. I said, ‘If you can find your name in this book, I’ll give you $20.’ Even after she found her name, she kept reading. |
Where do you find sanctuary?
My lovely little office is my sanctuary. This is where I retreat from the world to live in my life of the mind. When I’m done with staring at the screen for the day, I love to read books. I also love to watch TV. I love storytelling in all forms. I love to listen to audiobooks. I love to go to the theater. It’s important for me to be engaged with the performing arts. When I’m going through a long stretch where I don’t get that recharge, I do feel depleted.
My lovely little office is my sanctuary. This is where I retreat from the world to live in my life of the mind. When I’m done with staring at the screen for the day, I love to read books. I also love to watch TV. I love storytelling in all forms. I love to listen to audiobooks. I love to go to the theater. It’s important for me to be engaged with the performing arts. When I’m going through a long stretch where I don’t get that recharge, I do feel depleted.
