It is after Stack moves to India and hires two new women — Pooja and Mary — to help cook, clean and raise Stack’s growing family that the account of her domestic life starts to feel limited. Her prose is beautiful as she shines light on the contradictions of her position. With respect to supporting a family, she writes: “There is a lingering expectation that men will pay in money. But when it comes to time, it is almost always the woman who pays. And money is one thing, but time is life, and life is more.”

In India, however, the gulf between her situation and those of the women in her household begins to feel too vast, the poverty surrounding her too extreme. It becomes increasingly clear that the problems facing the women who work for her extend far beyond this particular domestic setting — and beyond Stack’s ability to access and understand them fully.

It is late in the book when Stack announces her plans to her friends — that she will write about the compromises of her domestic life and the lives of her employees. This, she says, almost always went badly: “As if the simple exercise of placing myself alongside the nannies was already an affront.”

Stack’s relationships with these women, however, make writing about them difficult. Xiao Li has little interest in letting her former employer in on the details of her own life. In India, she follows Pooja to her home village, where we get a glimpse of the forces that have been at work in Pooja’s life (poverty, casual rape, domestic violence and a tenuous local political situation), but the visit feels truncated, Pooja’s life available to us only in outline. We never get a sense of how she spends her days, the details that make a person seem real. In the book’s conclusion, Stack tells us: “The answer is the men. They have to do the work.” It’s hard not to wonder whether, for Xiao Li or for Pooja, a more egalitarian domestic sphere would be enough; they share some of Stack’s problems, but not all.

In that same speech at Amherst, Audre Lorde was offering a way forward for the women’s movement in the 1980s. “It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences,” she told her audience. “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.” At its best moments, Stack’s book is a sharply observed, evocative reckoning with the ways her struggles intersect and diverge with those of the women she employs. As it progresses, however, her own narrative overshadows those of the women she wishes to reveal. She shows us how we have ignored these women and exploited them. She names the difference, but as readers we do not get to travel across it.