I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother [Hardcover]

Allison Pearson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

For every woman trying to strike that impossible balance between work and home-and pretending that she has-and for every woman who has wanted to hurl the acquaintance who coos admiringly, "Honestly, I just don't know how you do it," out a window, here's a novel to make you cringe with recognition and laugh out loud. With fierce, unsentimental irony, Allison Pearson's novel brilliantly dramatizes the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the twenty-first century.

Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-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. In Kate's life, Everything Goes Perfectly as long as Everything Goes Perfectly. She lies to her own mother about how much time she spends with her kids; practices pelvic floor squeezes in the boardroom; applies tips from Toddler Taming to soothe her irascible boss; uses her cell phone in the office bathroom to procure a hamster for her daughter's birthday ("Any working mother who says she doesn't bribe her kids can add Liar to her résumé"); and cries into the laundry hamper when she misses her children's bedtime.

In a novel that is at once uproariously funny and achingly sad, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working women-the self-recrimination, the comic deceptions, the giddy exhaustion, the despair-as no other writer has. Kate Reddy's conflict --How are we meant to pass our days? How are we to reconcile the two passions, work and motherhood, that divide our lives? --gets at the private absurdities of working motherhood as only a novel could: with humor, drama, and bracing wisdom.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Allison Pearson's debut novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, is a rare and beautiful hybrid: a devastatingly funny novel that's also a compelling fictional world. You want to climb inside this book and inhabit it. However, you might find it pretty messy once you're in there. Narrator Kate Reddy is the manager of a hedge fund and mother of two small 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 organized but her house and family are falling apart. The book is a pearly string of great lines. Here's Kate on lack of sleep: "They're right to call it a broken night.... You crawl back to bed and you lie there trying 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 fewer 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 about a character we come to cherish. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

This scintillating first novel has already taken its author's native England by storm, and in the tradition of Bridget Jones, to which it is likely to be compared, will almost certainly do the same here. The Bridget comparison has only limited validity, however: both books have a winning female protagonist speaking in a diary-like first person, and both have quirkily formulaic chapter endings. But Kate is notably brighter, wittier and capable of infinitely deeper shadings of feeling 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 aware 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 really 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 many tenderly touching ones-and, for once in a book of this kind, there are some admirable men as well as plenty 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 sometimes poignant update on contemporary women in the workplace, it's the book to beat.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414053
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414053
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (348 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #566,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Has Allison Pearson been spying on me??, October 7, 2002

By 

Nancy U. Jacobs (L.A., CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother (Hardcover)

I just devoured this book on a guilt-ridden business trip and identified so strongly with the character of Kate. It was the first time I have heard the working mom's voice articulated so clearly. I laughed out loud repeatedly on the plane and ultimately felt a little better about the decisions I have made in my life. A must-read.

57 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Guilty Pleasure, December 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother (Hardcover)

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 enjoy 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 know how she does it." But there are many 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 committed to their work or are seen as unreliable or unaccessible. Whether you are a mom working full-time outside the home or not, this and many other insights in the book highlight interesting social issues.

I would be interested to know whether this book appeals to stay-at-home moms. I suspect not based on the fact that many of my own stay-at-home friends have little interest in what my life is like and often 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 help her understand the dilemmas of being a professional and a mother of young children and the difficulty of "having it all".

72 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars mixed feelings ..., November 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother (Hardcover)

Although I was totally engrossed in this novel, and thought that Kate was a very real and often sympathetic character, I ended up with very mixed feelings about 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 different decision (or who have no choice in the matter). I was shocked at the venomous comments about stay-at-home mothers from Kate and from other reviewers of this book. While I am sure that there are some stay-at-home mothers who take pleasure in making working mothers feel bad (they are probably the ones who are at-home because they feel like they should 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 about 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 incredibly 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 incredibly sad when we have to insult each other in order to feel better about our own choices.