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Author |
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Allison Pearson, named Critic of the Year and Interviewer of the Year in
the British Press Awards, is a weekly columnist in the London Evening
Standard and a member of the BBC's Newsnight Review panel. She lives in
London with her husband, the New Yorker writer Anthony Lane, and
their two children. |
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Note... |
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 Reading Group
Guide - Some discussion questions:
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When Kate arrives late
for work, she needs to come up with what her friend Debra calls "a
Man's Excuse" [p. 15]—something that does not have to do with sick
children or an absent nanny, preferably something involving car
repairs or traffic. Is Pearson accurate in describing a business world
that has little patience for the out-of-office responsibilities of
working mothers?
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Kate has two good
friends, Debra and Candy, with whom she exchanges comical e-mail
messages. What do these messages convey about the ways women console,
support, and entertain one another? What do they convey about the
subculture of office life?
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A recent newspaper
article noted that of Fortune magazine's fifty most powerful
women, one-third have husbands who stay at home with the children.
Would Kate's problems be solved if her husband left his failing
architecture firm to become a stay-home father? Does the novel suggest
that Kate needs to let him reassume the primary economic role if their
marriage is to survive? Does Pearson suggest that people are still
offended by the idea of a woman who makes more money than her husband?
Why?
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Current Selection
- Jan-Feb 2003
I Don't Know How She Does It:
The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother
$23.00 Hardback
From the book jacket:
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.
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