The Housemaid (spoilers and ending explained) | Freida McFadden
Though Freida McFadden had been gaining some traction online (and had already self-published several books), The Housemaid is arguably the book that skyrocketed her to the juggernaut she is today. I’d say McFadden is one of the most controversial popular authors currently. There’s a psychological thriller facebook group that gets multiple fan (crossing into stan) posts every single day about Freida. The author herself comments on them. The tides turned when a contingent got tired of that being one of the only authors recommended, and now the group sees posts also calling out that her books are juvenile. Where do I fall? Let’s circle back to that later. I’ll start with a summary recapping the book then we’ll get deeper into the story. When you’re done, check out my thoughts on the sequel, The Housemaid’s Secret and the conclusion to the trilogy, The Housemaid is Watching.
What is The Housemaid about?
Below is a detailed summary of The Housemaid. If you already read it and are just looking to have the ending explained and unpack everything (including similarities to another popular book), click here to jump to the discussion.
Part I
The first part is narrated by Millie—a young, beautiful woman who is down on her luck. She recently was released from prison after being incarcerated for 10 years and is struggling to find legitimate work. When she interviews for a job as a housemaid at a large, stately mansion, Millie finally believes things are working in her favor. The job comes with a tiny attic room, which is still an improvement over living in her car. Even if it does have the strange feature of the lock being on the outside of the door…
Andrew Winchester is handsome, rich, and kind to Millie. His wife Nina is a different story. While Millie does the shopping, cleaning, picks up their daughter Cecelia from school, and cooks them dinner, Nina finds fault in everything she does. She’s temperamental, controlling, and inconsistent—one moment telling Millie to do something then berating her for doing it. She lies, she confuses what she has told Millie to do, and she is messy. Cecelia is a difficult child who seems to share her mother’s joy in tormenting Millie.
Nina has put on weight over the years and continues to do so. Everyone around her—including her friends—find Nina to be unhinged. Millie learns that Nina was previously admitted to a psychiatric facility after an incident where she tried to drown Cecelia. All of this compares to Andrew who is polished, handsome, kind, and seems to adore his wife despite her faults.
When Nina and Andrew visit a fertility clinic and learn Nina can no longer have children, Andrew is devastated. Nina becomes more erratic; she asks Millie to purchase expensive Broadway tickets and a room at the Plaza hotel. Nina is upset that Millie booked it the wrong weekend and she can’t attend because she is bring Cecelia to camp. While Nina is gone, Andrew takes Millie to the show instead. The two enjoy it and go back to the Plaza, where they sleep together. Millie is ecstatic and honestly doesn’t feel guilty about it. When they drive back to the house, the landscaper Enzo spots them.
A few days later, Nina brings up that Millie used to be in prison. Millie doesn’t know how Nina found out, but she can’t deny it. When she goes up to her room, Millie sees that someone left the playbill for the Broadway show that she had in her purse on her nightstand. A few days later, Nina confronts Andrew about the affair and he kicks Nina out of the house. Andrew fires the landscaper Enzo. On his way out, Enzo warns Millie that she is in danger.
Millie is at the store and she runs into a friend of Nina’s who mentions that Nina installed an app on Millie’s phone to know where she is. Millie realizes Nina already knew about the affair. That night she tells Andrew she wants to move downstairs and he agrees. They have sex in Millie’s attic room, though, and fall asleep on her cot. In the morning, Millie wakes up to go to the bathroom and finds that Andrew is gone. When she tries the door, she discovers she is locked in.
Part II
The second part is told from Nina’s perspective. She’s in a hotel after Andrew kicked her out. She checks her tracking app to find Millie, but the location is off. Nina burns a photo of Andrew, elated to be free from him. Then she recounts how everything really happened in a story she calls “How to Get Rid of Your Sadistic, Evil Husband”.
Nina was working at a receptionist office after she got pregnant and was forced to drop out of her PhD program. After seeing her get berated by her boss, a young associate at the firm named Andrew Winchester takes her out for lunch and asks her on a proper date. After a brief courtship, Andrew and Nina marry. They are happy until three months into their marriage, Andrew locks her into the attic room for two days after getting upset with her for not touching up her roots. To be let out, Andrew forces her to pull out 100 strands of hair and put them in an envelope. When she gets out, she passes out and awakens to find her baby Cecelia in the tub rapidly filling with water. She goes to pull her out but the police are there and accuse her of drugging her baby and trying to kill her.
Nina is put into a psychiatric facility for eight months, where she is convinced that she hallucinated being locked in the attic and that she did actually try to murder her child. After returning home, her therapist encourages to visit the attic room and see that it’s merely storage, not a torture closet. However, when she goes up there, the room is pitch black. Andrew turns on the light and it’s been replaced with an intense bulb making it hard to see. He shuts her in again, and she realizes everything she thought happened was real. Andrew now has full control over her, threatening to take Cecelia from her if she tries to leave him.
Every few weeks Andrew punishes Nina by locking her in the room again. This continues for seven years and Nina never tells anyone, knowing they will think she is suffering from hallucinations again. Over the years, Nina tried to confide in close friends, but soon found out that Andrew would tell them at the beginning about her history of mental illness so they never believe her. The landscaper Enzo believes her, though. He helps her to get passports and new identities so she and Cecelia can leave, but before she can, Andrew finds them and confronts her.
Nina realizes the only way to leave her marriage with Cecelia is to offer Andrew an attractive alternative. This is where Millie comes in. Millie is young, attractive, and desperate. Nina makes herself as unattractive as possible while helping Millie become even more attractive. She treats Millie horribly, even though she doesn’t want to. Eventually, she arranges for Millie and Andrew to be alone the weekend she takes Cecelia to camp. When she sees on her tracking app that Millie is in the city, she knows she’s won. Not long after, Andrew kicks her out and divorces her. Nina goes to a hotel where she meets up with Enzo. They sleep together, but before he leaves he tells her it isn’t right to leave Millie with Andrew to suffer the same fate.
Part III
In the third part, Millie is locked in the attic room and sees that Andrew took her phone. He demands she balance three books on her stomach before he will let her out. She tries to resist, but when she runs out of water, she has no choice. The exercise is painful, and Andrew is watching her on a camera he has hidden in the room. She realizes what Andrew is truly like when he threatens to call the parole board on her if she tries to flee. When she gets out of the room, she confronts him about what he did. He takes glee in her misery, and she reaches into her pocket. Millie found a bottle of pepper spray hidden in the bucket (we can assume Nina did that after her last punishment where Andrew forced her to pepper spray herself), and she took it with her.
Nina narrates more details about how she planned everything. When she discovered that Millie had been arrested for murder after she walked in on a man assaulting her friend, Nina knows she is the perfect person. Nina didn’t hire Millie so that Millie could take her husband from her and free Nina. She hired Millie so she could kill her husband. Nina left Millie the pepper spray and a copy of the key to the room. Millie sprays Andrew in the face and locks him inside the attic. She then forces him to do the same tasks he made her do.
Enzo convinces Nina that they need to help Millie after he sees that she hasn’t left the house in days. When she arrives, she finds Andrew in the attic dead. Millie enters behind her and realizes that she is at risk of going back to prison now that she sees the enormity of what she has done. Nina tells Millie to go and never admit she was there. She calls the police and it looks like Nina will be arrested for Andrew’s murder, until the cop admits that his daughter used to be engaged to Andrew. She never said why she left, but she changed her name and hasn’t dated since. He makes sure that Nina won’t get charged with Andrew’s murder. They agree he must have “locked himself” in the attic without her knowing he was home.
Nina decides to move to California. She invites Enzo to come but he declines. There are too many bad memories. At Andrew’s funeral, his mother confronts Nina about the unexplained evidence in the police report, including the missing tooth. Rather than turn Nina in, she says that she always told Andrew he needed better dental hygiene. She pulled one of his teeth out as a child to teach him. She’s glad Nina continued the lesson.
In the epilogue, Millie is interviewing for a new job as a housemaid with a woman named Lisa. Millie is doing well in the interview but notices a bruise on the woman. Lisa tells her she was recommended by Nina Winchester and asks if she can help her. Millie says she can.
So, how do you explain that ending?
There is a lot to unpack in The Housemaid. First, the big twist that is revealed just past halfway is that everything we thought about the Winchesters is wrong. Andrew seemed good, caring, and soft. Nina seemed hard, crazy, and mean. In reality, Andrew was the monster the whole time and Nina was setting Millie up to be her replacement so she could leave. This is a big shocker in the story! But that isn’t the last twist.
While Millie is experiencing the torture that Nina spent nearly a decade experiencing, Nina is recounting her plan and how she set it up. Her goal wasn’t to leave Millie with an abusive husband, it was to trigger that quality in Millie where she will murder if pushed too far. Nina wanted Millie to kill Andrew, and she set it up perfectly. She left her the pepper spray in the room and provided her with a key to the attic. She predicted (accurately) that when Andrew let Millie out, she’d pepper spray him and lock him in. Eventually, she leaves him in the room to die.
Nina redeems herself by helping Millie escape and never telling what Millie did. It’s the least she can do, if we are being honest. She did set Millie up. That said, Millie is the truly unhinged one. Setting aside how horrible Andrew was (and the other man she killed), Millie is a murderer to her core. She’s a murder who kills for revenge and for vengeance. Nina letting Millie leave was kind, but not expected. I felt there was a world where both could have left, but I suppose by that point Suzanna had seen Nina re-enter her house.
Another delicious little twist comes when Nina learns that the cop investigating Andrew’s death was the father of the first woman he was engaged to. This engagement was mentioned briefly, but it was forgettable in the moment. Convenient her father is the one on the scene—he is the only person who won’t take money from this family and who will cover up evidence this was a murder. Which he does.
What about that little tidbit from Andrew’s mother at the funeral? We can safely infer that Andrew was tortured in a similar way as he inflicts onto Nina and Millie as a child. His own mother forced him to self-punish, exactly as he does to them. This didn’t redeem Andrew. It did make my stomach turn. Delete this entire family off the face of the earth if you ask me!
The epilogue reveals that Nina has referred Millie to help a friend who is being abused. When she shows her bruise and asks Millie if she can help, Millie agrees. She knows if Nina referred her, it was so that she could help murder this woman’s abusive husband. This is a quite a career path, if you ask me!
What about the comparisons to that Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club pick?
At face value, this is an entertaining book. The thing about Freida McFadden is that her plotting and writing aren’t exactly in the upper echelon of writers. I’d say her books are written at an eighth grade reading level. Maybe ninth grade. However, I also don’t think her books need to be written better. They’re entertaining for exactly what they are, and there are a lot of people who are looking for easy, shocking reads exactly like this. It’s why Freida McFadden has become social media famous.
Now, I mention that her plotting isn’t exactly great. Normally that is true! See my review of The Teacher, for instance. Riddled with plot holes and cheap twists! That isn’t totally true in the case of The Housemaid. Overall, I thought it was well-constructed. The twist midway when it switches to Nina’s perspective is a shocker. The subsequent twists packed a punch as well. There weren’t any gigantic plot holes.
However, that is where it must be pointed out that many reviewers have observed the similarity in plot structure and twists between The Housemaid and The Last Mrs. Parrish. I’ve read both books and they are strikingly similar. There are differences too—Millie is not nearly as horrible as Amber is. She didn’t come to the Winchesters intending to steal Andrew. That said, the two books are so analogous that I often kept typing Jackson when I meant to type Andrew. The two husbands are nearly identical characters.
In addition, the twist that the wife was actually setting the young convict up to take her husband intentionally so that she can leave an abusive marriage is… identical. As were lots of moments along the way. The Broadway show that the wife “can’t attend” and so the young lady and the handsome husband go and this is the official start of their affair. The difficulty the wife has with getting pregnant, prompting the husband to want a more fertile, younger replacement. The way the wife helps the other woman become as attractive to her husband’s tastes as possible. The way the husband uses a fake mental health incident to force a record of psychiatric issues on his wife so that she can’t leave without losing her children. Even the move to California by the wife at the end once she is free—that’s the same in both books.
Point after point are so similar, it’s hard not to see it once you notice it. Now that being said, there are differences. In addition to Millie not being as horrible as Amber is, Nina is not as pure as Daphne was. The addition of the Enzo character is new. The element of torture differs between the two books, with Andrew’s torture in The Housemaid being taken to different—though no less horrifying—extremes than Jackson’s. Nina sets everything in motion by treating Millie terribly, while Daphne treats her with kindness and as a trusted confidante. In addition, Amber is the one who works for Jackson in The Last Mrs. Parrish, while Nina is the original receptionist for Andrew in The Housemaid. McFadden also added the twist at the end where Nina referred Millie to execute her vigilante justice to help another abused wife.
Which book is better?
Both books are entertaining. The Housemaid takes the story to the extremes more than The Last Mrs. Parrish. It was also written years later so there isn’t much question about who inspired who. There are enough differences to make both books worth reading. I personally liked The Last Mrs. Parrish more—I found it clever and elegantly-crafted. I also thought it was written better and it felt more realistic.
That said, The Housemaid packs a few extra punches at the ending that will delight fans of high-shock-value twists. McFadden delivers that in spades. I think it is hard to say an idea was plagiarized, especially in literature where there is so much nuance to every single word and plot element. That said, these are too close for comfort, in my opinion. If it was the broader twist, I might have noticed it but would have thought it may be a coincidence. As it stands, there are too many point-by-point similarities in the plot structure to be coincidence. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as they say.
I was curious after finishing this and noting the similar source material how I would do with the sequel. I’ll be posting spoilers for The Housemaid’s Secret soon, where we will see how McFadden does being forced to break out from the original inspiration! Then let’s catch up to see how she brought this trilogy home in The Housemaid is Watching. In the meantime, note the ickiness of copying someone else’s ideas, but don’t necessarily let that deter you from reading both. There are enough differences in the last 20% to make it veer in a different direction. And McFadden certainly packed in a few extra twists!
