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I Don't Know How She Does It

The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother

by Allison Pearson

Summary

Kate Reddy is an executive in the financial world whose doomed attempt to micromanage her children and their nanny is only one of the picky little problems that dominate her life. However, things are soon spinning out of control. A friend dies of cancer, Kate's husband leaves, she contemplates an affair, and she gets stoned with a cab driver-all indications that, from now on, things will be different. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

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Media Reviews

"The clever cattiness of the early chapters gives way to an earnest, endearing introspection that makes it possible for Kate to strike a more satisfying, if almost too-perfect-to-believe balance between family and work. From the upper echelons of working mothers, a fictional answer to THE NANNY DIARIES...."

   -- Kirkus

"Like Bridget Jones, Kate Reddy originated as a character in a newspaper column, and those origins show. Famously adorable and sometimes brittle with self-regard, she has been given a set of friends and situations, then eased into a routine, unsurprising narrative....Ms. Pearson writes with gratifying elegance and endearing self-mockery much of the time. She is lethally funny about domestic details...and can be fearlessly honest....Still, her portrait of Kate is essentially a performance and its charm can be frayed."    -- Janet Maslin

   -- New York Times

"[T]he lesson is that you can't have it all, as it inevitably must be in a book about making choices. And this is where I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT is, paradoxically, both disappointing and refreshingly authentic. Part of the allure of a book like Pearson's is that it offers the possibility of escape from certain hard truths. You root for Kate the whole length of her roller coaster ride. What working woman wouldn't want her to have a Hollywood ending? If it's a letdown when things don't turn out that way, it's nonetheless true to life. While there are times when Pearson's quippy sloganeering can ring hollow..., I have to admit that I fell for them, as I fell for this rambling romp through the quandaries of the working mother."    -- Kate Betts

   -- New York Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 2002
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.5 x 9.5 inches
Weight: 1.45 pounds
Pages: 337

Publisher's Notes

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.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Random House Inc (2002) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reprint - Random House Inc (2003) - from $1.00

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