I Don’t Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother
by Allison Pearson
Knopf. 352 pp. $23.00
The idea that women can “have it all” has seen better days. Each season seems to bring forth some new and ominous study, pointing to the deficiencies of daycare or the alarming incidence of childlessness among women in the top ranks of business and the professions. Making matters worse, several high-profile role models—presidential adviser Karen Hughes, ABC News commentator Cokie Roberts, Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift—have lately thrown in the professional towel, declaring (as Roberts put it), “I want a life.”
Allison Pearson’s best-selling novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, is yet another contribution to the deflation of career mothers, but of a decidedly different sort. An award-winning columnist for London’s Evening Standard, Pearson has written a sympathetic send-up, or what reviewers, alluding to another recent comic import from Britain, have described as a Bridget Jones’s Diary for grown-ups. Both books share a hyperactive, pastiche style, their pages festooned with e-mails, to-do lists, diary entries, and sentence fragments too frenzied to mention their subjects. But Pearson has given us something deeper than the meditations of the self-consciously single Bridget Jones, and her book’s popularity, I suspect, has to do with more than its obvious pleasures as entertainment.
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Pearson’s heroine, Kate Reddy, is a type easily recognizable to Americans. A graduate of an elite university, where she studied hard and went on the usual protest marches, she is now a hedge-fund manager and the mother of two young children. She and her husband Rich—an “ethical architect” whose generosity and sense of humor make him an ideal partner in “shared parenting”—live in an old house in an upscale neighborhood of London, alongside other young couples preoccupied with such things as getting their children into big-name nursery schools and renovating their kitchens.
When we first meet Kate, it is 1:37 A.M. on a Monday, she has just returned from a business trip to the U.S., and she is gamely trying to give a “distressed” look to some packaged mince pies, hoping they will pass for homemade at the school Christmas party of her five-year-old daughter. Staggering through her days in a “lead suit of sleeplessness,” Kate knows that she is more hostage than boss to her children’s nanny, the tyrannical and overpaid Paula (or, as she sometimes thinks of her, “Pol Pot”). Even with the help of Paula and the ever-patient Rich, our heroine’s mind is an exhausting clutter of mommy trivia: hamsters, Tele-tubby birthday cakes, Christmas presents for the in-laws, the endless baby gear for vacationing with her one-year-old (“Louis XIV traveled lighter than Ben”).
Where Kate shines brightest is in her position as a hedge-fund manager at Edwin Morgan Forester, one of London’s “oldest and most distinguished institutions.” Her bosses depend on her to travel on a moment’s notice to Stockholm or New York to seduce prestigious clients with her command of the Asian markets and, she realizes full well, her shapely legs. EMF has a supercharged, macho climate—its meetings are like the “gorilla grooming sessions you see on wildlife programs”—and Pearson peoples it with a host of familiar types: Chris Bunce, the drugged-out “bastard in residence” who once spiked with vodka a bottle of Kate’s breast milk stored in the company’s refrigerator; Rod Task, her hyperaggressive Australian boss; and Candy, the tough-as-nails, miniskirted American who shares with Kate the X-rated details of her love life.
Pearson exploits the clash of Kate’s two worlds to considerable comic effect, often managing at the same time to be quite touching. Kate’s computer password at work is a reminder to buy diapers (“Ben Pampers”); in the middle of a pitch for a $300-million deal in New York, she looks down to see that she still has “bouncy tent” written across her knuckles, the contraption she had planned to book for her daughter’s birthday party; at home, while checking stock prices on the Teletext, she reads to her son from a saccharine storybook called “Guess How Much I Love You?”
Kate is the first to recognize her own failures. She is, she confesses, a “double agent” who has to “lie for a living”—to her boss about why she is late during a nanny crisis, to her children about whether she will be home that evening, and to her own mother, who believes her daughter has found bliss in working motherhood. Kate feigns sleep in order to avoid her amorous husband, knowing that it will save her from having to take the time to shower in the morning. She hides in the downstairs bathroom to steer clear of her breakfast-plastered toddler, worried that he will mess up her work clothes. And she knows little about how her daughter passes her days.
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With its stock characters and predictable plot twists, I Don’t Know How She Does It often has the canned feel of something written with Hollywood in mind (Pearson has already turned the novel into a screenplay for a $2-million advance). Pearson’s wit and eye for detail compensate somewhat for this weakness, but her prose at times too closely resembles the ramblings of her protagonist: manic, overly ambitious, crammed with a forced humor that screams “Please like me!”
Worse, the novel has clearly been designed to flatter the elite women likely to be its readers. Though Kate’s life is undoubtedly a mess, her intelligence and earthiness carry her through. She is rich but reassuringly self-conscious about it, neglectful of her children but wracked with guilt, decked out in Armani and high-tech business gear but unimpressed by it all. The combination is at once very appealing and deeply improbable, especially for a woman in Kate’s high-powered job.
What redeems I Don’t Know How She Does It, and makes it of more than passing interest, is Pearson’s candor in presenting the very real tensions in Kate’s life. Pearson was inspired to create her protagonist, she has said, by a survey showing that women today believe they have it tougher than their own mothers. “Why,” she wondered, “has this great experiment come at such a cost?”
On the evidence of her novel, Pearson seems to believe that today’s working mothers are afflicted not only by guilt but by the unsatisfied impulses of maternal love, a longing whose sensuousness and emotional intensity she deftly captures. Coming home too late to see her children, Kate smells their clothes in the hamper; weekends with them, she says, are like an illicit love affair crammed into two days, filled with “passion kisses, bitter tears, I love you, don’t leave me, you like him more than me, take me to bed.” Nor does she have any illusions about how her young daughter views her career. “Unfortunately, the case for equal opportunities [for women], long established in Western societies, cuts no ice in the fundamentalist regime of the five-year-old. There is no God but Mummy and Daddy is her prophet,” Kate quips, but she cannot protect herself from the reality of her daughter’s pain.
In short, Kate struggles with the challenge of love and finds herself wanting. Pearson does not go easy on men in her novel—the guys in Kate’s office are brutes and her husband Rich, for all his virtues, is a bit passive-aggressive—but in the end she cannot bring herself to blame them for her protagonist’s unhappiness. Kate and her children long for each other because Kate is never with them, and she is never with them because she has chosen not to be.
Pearson describes primal feelings that for many years have been off limits in polite company and certainly were not to be spoken of in the presence of our newly “empowered” daughters. This is not to say that I Don’t Know How She Does It is a brief for stay-at-home moms; one of the concluding chapters is titled “No Easy Answers,” and it is clear that Kate is too restless and competitive to keep out of the fray for very long. But the novel is a firm rejection of the idea that motherhood is nothing more, as some would have it, than a patriarchal “social construct.” As Kate sighs at one point, “Women carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do.”
You will not find much about this in the reviews of I Don’t Know How She Does It, which for the most part have simply praised it as a witty depiction of the life of one stressed-out working woman. But Pearson’s insight undoubtedly helps to explain the novel’s success. Even if American women do not like the idea of the relentless pull of maternal love, they do seem, finally, to be buying it.
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