I Don't Know How She Does it

Author(s): Allison Pearson

Feel Good Fiction | Light/Humorous Fiction

Meet Kate Reddy, 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. A victim of time famine, Kate counts seconds like other women count calories. As she hurtles between appointments, through her head spools the crazy tape-loop of the working mother's life: must remember client reports, bouncy castles, transatlantic phone call, nativity play, check Dow Jones, cancel hygienist, squeeze sagging pelvic floor, make time for sex. Factor in a manipulative nanny, an Australian boss who looks at Kate's breasts as if they're on special offer, a long suffering husband, her quietly aghast in-laws, two needy 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. In an uproariously funny and achingly sad novel, Allison Pearson captures the guilty secret lives of working mothers, the self-recriminations, comic deceptions, forgeries, giddy exhaustion and despair as no other writer has ever done. With fierce irony and a sparkling style, she brilliantly dramatises the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the 21st century.

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S 2003 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize

Shortlisted for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2003.

"I love Kate Reddy...her tale made me cry twice and laugh often" Independent on Sunday "If you could buy stock in a book, I would stake all my savings on the success of I Don't Know How She Does It. Here at last is the definitive social comedy of working motherhood" Washington Post "Refreshingly engaging" Vogue "Funny, fast and full of nail-on-the-head observations" Daily Telegraph "A book that made me howl with laughter" The Times "Searing comedy" New Statesman "Painfully funny" Heat "Pearson...never hides her intelligence or apologises for her seriousness of purpose" The Times "A funny, heartbreaking mirror of the daily lives of mothers" Telegraph Magazine "Pearson writes with gratifying elegance and endearing self-mockery" New York Times

Allison Pearson is an award-winning journalist who has weekly columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard. A founder member of BBC 2's 'Late Review', she broadcasts regularly on TV and radio. She lives in London with the New Yorker writer Anthony Lane and their two Small children.

General Fields

  • : 9780099428381
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Vintage
  • : 0.251
  • : April 2003
  • : 198mm X 129mm X 23mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 368
  • : 823.92
  • : English
  • : New edition
  • : Paperback
  • : Allison Pearson