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Delightfully smart and heartbreakingly poignant, Allison Pearson’s smash debut novel has exploded onto bestseller lists as “The national anthem for working mothers.” Hedge-fund manager, wife, and mother of two, Kate Reddy manages to juggle nine currencies in five time zones and keep in step with the Teletubbies. But when she finds herself awake at 1:37 a.m. in a panic over the need to give rise to a homemade pie for her daughter’s school, she has to confess her life has become unrecognizable. With panache, wisdom, and uproarious wit, I Don’t Know How She Does It brilliantly dramatizes the dilemma of each working mom.
ReviewAllison Pearson’s debut novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, is a rare and gorgeous hybrid: a devastatingly amusive novel that’s also a compelling fictional world. You want to climb inside this book and populate it. However, you might find it beauteous messy once you’re in there. Narrator Kate Reddy is the manager of a hedge fund and mother of two little children. The book opens with an emblematic scene as Kate “distresses” a store-bought mince pie to make it appear homemade. Her days are measured in increments of minutes and even seconds; her fund stays coordinated but her house and family are falling apart. The book is a pearly string of outstanding lines. Here’s Kate on lack of sleep: “They’re right to call it a broken night…. You creep back to bed and you lie there attempting to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the pieces missing.” On baby boys: “A mother of a one-year-old son is a movie star in a world without critics.” On subtle office dynamics:
The women in the offices of EMF [Kate's firm] don’t tend to display pictures of their kids. The higher they go up the ladder, the less the photographs. If a man has pictures of kids on his desk, it enhances his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases hers. Why? Because he’s not supposed to be home with the children; she is.
There’s inherent drama here: Kate is wildly appealing, and we want things to work out for her. In the end, the book isn’t a just collection of clever lines on the theme of working motherhood; it’s a real, rich novel with regards to a reputation we come to cherish. –Claire Dederer
From Publishers WeeklyThis scintillating initial novel has already taken it is author’s native England by storm, and in the tradition of Bridget Jones, to which it is likely to be compared, will almost surely do the same here. The Bridget comparison has only fixed validity, however: both books have a winning female protagonist speaking in a diary-like original person, and both have quirkily formulaic chapter endings. But Kate is notably brighter, wittier and competent of infinitely deeper shadings of sentiment than the flighty Bridget, and her book cuts deeper. She is the mother of a five-year-old girl and a year-old boy, living in a trendy North London house with her lower-earning architect husband, and is a star at her work in an aggressive City of London brokerage firm. She is intoxicated by her jet-setting, high-profile job, but also is desperately conscious of what it takes out of her life as a mother and wife, and scrutinizes, with high intelligence and humor, just how far women have genuinely come in the work world. If that makes the book sound polemical, it is anything but. It is delightfully fast moving and breathlessly readable, with dozens of laugh-aloud moments and some tenderly touching ones-and, for once in a book of this kind, there are a good deal of admirable men as well as a great deal of bounders. Toward the end-to which a reader is reluctant to come-it becomes a little plot-bound, and everything is rounded off a shade too neatly. But as a hilarious and once in a while poignant update on contemporary women in the workplace, it’s the book to beat.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalCross Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Nanny Diaries, and you get this basi novel. Londoner Kate has it all-an unbelievable occupation in the financial sector, a loving and supportive husband, two gorgeous children, and a wondrous nanny. But having it all doesn’t mean that she has time to take delight in it all, and, in fact, she doesn’t. Plagued by guilt, she keeps a “must remember” list longer than her arm, shows up for important meetings with baby spit-up on her Armani jacket, and defaces supermarket bakery items so that they will look homemade at her daughter’s bake sale. With it is chronicle format, lists, and emails, this work is similar to the droves of snappy contemporary novels pouring out of the United Kingdom-but it’s more substantial. Pearson has a lot to say regarding the expectations, internal as well as external, placed on today’s working moms. Funny yet heartbreakingly sad, it’s a thoughtful read that could lead working mothers to consider life changes. For most fiction collections.
–Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful client reviews
51 of 55 persons found the following review helpful.
 A Guilty Pleasure
By A
As a working mom logging in over 2,000 billable hours a year outside the home — I couldn’t put the book down. Obviously this book “spoke” to me on a very personal level. It was such a guilty pleasure to read — when, like Kate, I had Holdiay cards to send, cookies to bake for the school Christmas party and matters of the family to attend to all after coming home from work at 10 pm. But, I’m not sure I would “get” this book or take pleasure in it much if I hadn’t already walked a mile in Kate Reddy’s shoes.
Of course this book is over the top — doesn’t it have to be to be entertaining? Even I found myself saying “I don’t recognise how she does it.” But there are numerous thoughts in the book that are right-on and thought provoking. Take for example Kate Reddy’s observation that fathers that leave work early or schedule business around their family commitments are lauded as “involved fathers” when mothers doing the same are suspected of not being consecrated to their work or are seen as undependable or unaccessible. Whether you are a mom working full-time outside the home or not, this and a great deal of other perceptivities in the book spotlight interesting social issues.
I would be mesmerized to know whether this book appeals to stay-at-home moms. I suspect not based on the fact that a heap of of my own stay-at-home friends have little interest in what my life is like and oftentimes think that a mother who works full-time outside the home is akin to a mother who eats her young.
As for mothers working full-time outside the home, this book is sure to be a winner and a welcomed comic relief. As for myself, I plan to give this book to my mother for Christmas to support her understand the dilemmas of being a professional and a mother of young children and the difficultness of “having it all”.
42 of 45 persons found the following review helpful.
Has Allison Pearson been spying on me??
By Nancy U. Jacobs
I just devoured this book on a guilt-ridden business trip and identified so strongly with the reputation of Kate. It was the firstborn time I have heard the working mom’s voice articulated so clearly. I laughed out piercing repeatedly on the plane and at last felt a little better regarding the conclusions I have made in my life. A must-read.
55 of 61 people found the following review helpful.
 mixed sensations …
By A
Although I was wholly engrossed in this novel, and thought that Kate was a very real and oftentimes sympathetic character, I ended up with very mixed sensations when it comes to this book. I am a mother who has temporarily given up a career I loved to stay at home with my kids. This wasn’t an easy decision for me, and I would never criticize those who made a dissimilar decision (or who have no choice in the matter). I was shocked at the venomous remarks with regards to stay-at-home mothers from Kate and from other reviewers of this book. While I am sure that there are a great deal of stay-at-home mothers who take pleasure in making working mothers feel bad (they are in all probability the ones who are at-home because they feel like they will have to be, rather than because they want to be, and are miserable themselves), I believe that most of us have alot of sympathy for the sacrifices and trade-offs that working mothers are forced to make. And, frankly, most of us are too busy getting through our own days to worry when it comes to what others are doing. The descriptions of stay-at-home moms as spending all of their time at the gym, having manicures, writing notes for playdates, was just ludicrous. I have two toddlers and I feel fabulously lucky when I have the time to shower in the morning or get out for an hour by myself to go shopping. Being a stay-at-home mother isn’t easy, neither is being a working mom, and I find it fabulously sad when we have to insult each other in order to feel better in regards to our own choices.
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