Allison Pearson*****I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT*****(Softcover) INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

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Meet Kate Reddy, fund manager and mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour. A victim of time famine, Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. As she hurtles between appointments, through her head spools the crazy tape-loop of the working mother's life: must remember client reports, bouncy castles, transatlantic phone call, nativity play, check Dow Jones, cancel hygienist, squeeze sagging pelvic floor, make time for sex.

Factor in a manipulative nanny, an Australian boss who looks at Kate's breasts as if they're on special offer, a long suffering husband, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy children and an e-mail lover, and you have a woman juggling so many balls that some day soon something's going to hit the ground.

In an uproariously funny and achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working mothers, the self-recriminations, comic deceptions, forgeries, giddy exhaustion and despair as no other writer has ever done. With fierce irony and a sparkling style, she brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the 21st century.

 

Prizes:

Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize,2003,S

 

Review

Allison Pearson has developed her columns in the Daily Telegraph about the struggles of working mum Kate Reddy into a full-length novel, with astounding success. Scathing, poignant and wickedly funny, this is a tale for our times, as Kate faces up to the impossibility of keeping her boss, her children and her husband happy, let alone finding some time for herself. Kate Reddy has a high-flying job in a City firm, a precocious Disney-besotted five-year-old and an adorable mother-fixated toddler.

Her husband's laissez-faire attitude drives her to distraction, she's fiendishly jealous of the nanny and she knows she's an object of scorn to the local non-working mothers known as the 'Muffia'. The novel opens as Kate is busily 'distressing' Sainsbury's mince pies for the school Nativity play in a desperate attempt to make them look homemade. During the following pages she contends with chauvinistic work colleagues, critical parents-in-law, multi-million dollar presentations and a burgeoning love affair conducted almost exclusively by e-mail.

Starved of the time to spend with her family, she suffers agonies of guilt when she lets them down for the umpteenth time as she jets off to Frankfurt or New York with memos about bouncy castles, hamsters and schools for Emily hammering away inside her head. Allison Pearson perfectly captures the guilty freneticism of many working mothers; there are touches of pure comedy when Kate's frantic attempts to remember everything come embarrassingly unstuck, and she seems to be watching herself going out of control with a detached, fascinated horror.

Juggling all these balls in the air is becoming increasingly tricky - before long, something is going to come crashing down. Many women will laugh hollowly as they see their own experiences reflected in Kate's demented race against time, as she feels duty-bound to do everything and please everyone, and Pearson makes several biting comments about the real difference between the sexes, in terms of expectations and their roles as parents. A truly compulsive read. (Kirkus UK)