Heartbreaking Netflix series ‘Maid’ is based on the true story of this single mom

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Stephanie Land worked as a maid walking the tightrope of poverty and homelessness for years chasing the American dream. Then, she wrote the memoir “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.”

The bestselling book, which caught the attention of esteemed leaders like former President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris, highlights the reality of people who live off of low-paid service work — a population in America that Land refers to as “invisible.”

Released in 2019, Land’s memoir has since been adapted into the critically-acclaimed, unflinching Netflix miniseries “Maid,” starring actor Margaret Qualley. Despite the title of both the book and series, each has proven to be about much more than a female protagonist tasked with cleaning the homes of the affluent.

“I wanted the book to be more about domestic violence and, and kind of the estrangement from family and then making it to college,” Land said in an exclusive interview with TODAY.

Living in poverty

The autobiography chronicles Land in her 20’s and 30’s as a financially-strained single mom, a survivor of domestic abuse and nomad, taking odd jobs such as cleaning bathrooms at the homes of friends and working in landscaping. She explained that she did it all to provide for her child, who now goes by their middle name “Story” and uses they/them pronouns.

While documenting her time as a maid, Land wrote about the various peculiarities in the homes she cleaned. She named most of the homes after their anomalies — titles like “Porn House,” “Sad House,” “Farm House,” and the “Cigarette Lady’s House.”

She said that throughout the years, naming homes for their obscurities became her only creative outlet.

Land explained that she worked as a maid to put dinner on the table and to provide some sort of structure for her child who went to daycare during the hours she cleaned.

“I think a lot of my determination was making their life as best as possible,” she said. “Kids kind of keep you structured in some way because they need structure really bad.”

Land said that after a string of domestic abuse incidents initiated by Story’s father, Jamie, she took Story and moved into a homeless shelter with only $100 in her pocket.

“However temporary, I had done my best to make the cabin a home for my daughter,” Land wrote in her memoir. “I’d placed a yellow sheet over the love seat not only to warm the looming white walls and gray floors, but to offer something bright and cheerful during a dark time.”

No matter how capable Land tried to appear for her child, she noted in her memoir that she didn’t always feel secure in her usual optimism. She even would occasionally pretend that her life were different.

“If I focused on the portrait of the family I wanted to be, I could pretend the bad parts weren’t real; like this life was a temporary state of being, not a new existence,” Land wrote.

She said that she lived in a constant state of fear that she would one day be “forced to hand over” her child to a man she said she knew “was dangerous.”

Jamie’s frequent outbursts quickly turned into emotionally violent threats. And though the abuse that she suffered was reality, Land revealed to TODAY that she would oftentimes find herself thinking that no one would believe her pain if she lacked marks and bruises.

“I would go to the post office in town, and people would stop me and say, ‘I can’t believe you’re taking this child away from their dad, like, how horrible can you be?’” she recalled. “Even in the court system, I mean, I was told a reasonable person wouldn’t feel threatened by his actions.”

When Jamie’s threats turned into physical blows, Land said that she took careful note of his actions so she could tell the court.

“When he finally punched out the window in the door, it was like I finally had physical evidence and something that I could show somebody,” she said. “It was like a certificate that I wasn’t crazy, because before that, he had convinced even my family that I was just desperate for him to love me, and was doing everything that I could including having a whole entire human to stay with him in some way.”