Product Description

A victim of time famine, thirty-five-year-old Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. As she runs between appointments, through her head spools the crazy tape-loop of every high-flying mother's life: client reports, bouncy castles, Bob The Builder, transatlantic phone calls, dental appointments, pelvic floor exercises, flights to New York, sex (too knackered), and stress-busting massages she always has to cancel (too busy). Factor in a controlling nanny, a chauvinist Australian boss, a long-suffering husband, two demanding 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. Pearson brings her sharp wit and compassionate intelligence to this hilarious and, at times, piercingly sad study of the human cost of trying to Have It All. Women everywhere are already talking about the Kate Reddy column which appears weekly in the "Daily Telegraph", and recommending it to their sisters, mothers, friends and even their bewildered partners.This fictional debut by one of Britain's most gifted journalists is the subject of a movie deal with Miramax rumoured to be for almost $ 1 million and has sold around the world, sparking bidding wars in Spain, Germany and Japan. Everyone is getting Reddy for Kate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38443 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
For some considerable time, Allison Pearson's journalism and television punditry have represented an oasis of wit and intelligence in an era of dumbing-down. Her speciality is the perfectly judged observation: the devastatingly spot-on anatomising of the foibles of human behaviour--always unsparing, but always full of good humour. It’s hardly surprising, then, that I Don't Know How She Does It: Kate Reddy is crammed full of those same qualities: this beguiling and sharply observed novel is based on her weekly Daily Telegraph column. The publishers tell us that this is "a comedy about failure, a tragedy about success", and that gets it about right; at the centre of this utterly readable tale is the beleaguered Kate Reddy.

Pearson's heroine spends her life dealing with nagging guilt and the impossible demands of an over-busy life. Yes, we're talking about the crushing demands put on modern women--and Kate is a classic case of just how difficult it is to "have it all". Career, relationships, marriage--as many women know, managing them all is a Herculean task. And as Kate's juggling act carries her closer and closer to disaster, Allison Pearson herself pulls off a particularly jaw-dropping juggling act herself: certainly, I Don't Know How She Does It is a delightful comedy of manners with a beautifully observed heroine (with whom it's very easy to identify), but there are some razor-sharp points made under the surface here about women in the new century. But this is never at the expense of an unputdownable read--Pearson is much too canny a writer to forget the fact that we want to be entertained first and foremost, whatever else an author may freight in to their narrative. No wonder all those Hollywood film studios are already putting up millions for the screen rights. --Barry Forshaw

Tony Parsons, author of Man and Boy
...'a grown-up novel that is hilarious, heartbreaking and brimming with the bitter-sweet tang of all our lives.'

Maureen Freely, The Times
'A book that made me howl with laughter.'

Customer Reviews

Great fun, but not much substance
This is a perfectly judged piece of marketing - it's like Bridget Jones for the older woman, and it has exactly the same virtues and exactly the same faults. The virtues first - it's laugh-out-loud funny, readable, and not very taxing. The flaws; it's soooo light that it might blow away if you took it to the beach (as is no doubt intended). It does have moments of real poignancy, but they don't strike very deep. And the ending is so contrived it leaves Mills and Boon looking natural.

Two things really got to me, though, and made it hard for me to accept this book for what it is. First, the children - ostensibly the focus of the heroine's thoughts - are so poorly characterised that they might be anyone's. I know it's idiotic to compare this to Tolstoy, but Anna Karenin does show that it's possible to write about a mother's dilemma without erasing the child altogether.

The second thing is the heroine's extreme wealth. Of course some working mothers do have jobs in the city, but it's pitifully unrepresentative of working mothers as a whole, most of whom cannot afford Paula and Juanita (the nanny and the cleaner). And even though Kate doesn't get her bonus, she never seems overdrawn, or over the limit on her credit cards. She never worries about money, dialling up limos like there's no tomorrow. This extreme solvency seems to me a sign that this book is actually fantasy, not reality. If you are looking for a romance of Working Motherhood, this is for you. If it's truth-telling you want, try Helen Simpson's Hey Yeah Right Get A Life.

Very entertaining, but.....
This is a fun, read-in-three-days kind of novel, but pretty much forgettable. The major problem I had with this book was that I loathed Kate - partly for her snobbishness, but mainly for her stupidity. I mean, how can she really think that she can have it all? I had no sympathy for her at all and I really wanted Richard not to come back to her. She says that her family are the most important thing to her and that her family are suffering because she is nearly always at work, but it takes three quarters of the book for her to do something about it.

I also thought that Allison Pearson was trying to have it both ways, in that she perhaps was trying to paint an accurate picture of working women's lives in modern society, but the fact that Kate is such an incredibly high earner - not being representative of most working mothers after all - really undermines her argument.

Something missing
Allison Pearson can, as we already know, write. Her forte is wonderful observations, pithily put. The resonance of what she writes about (I have two children; my wife and I both work) made me laugh and cry several times.

You should read the book if the above sounds good to you. If you want to read a story, however, be warned. The story doesn't start until page 288. Before that, you'll be embroiled in the hectic life of Kate Reddy, forever wondering if the plot possibilities she tees up will ever come to pass. Once you get to page 288, when Kate Reddy is confronted by events that require her to start making choices, you'll find major events dealt with very sketchily or barely mentioned in passing; the author skims over the few elements of real story that exist in the book. At times, it seems the author 'chokes' when faced with exploring how her heroine might develop when not merely coping with working motherhood.

I like a good storyline in novels. Maybe Ms Pearson was just too busy to put one in.