I Dont Know How She Does It, Allison Pearson
I Dont Know How She Does It, Allison Pearson
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I Don't Know How She Does It
The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother

Author: Allison Pearson

Narrator: Josephine Bailey

Unabridged: 11 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/05/2002


Synopsis

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.

About The Author

Allison Pearson, aan award-winning journalist and author, is a staff writer for the London Daily Telegraph. Her first novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, became an international bestseller and was translated into thirty-two languages. It was a major motion picture, adapted by Aline Brosh McKenna and starred Sarah Jessica Parker. Her most recent novel, I Think I Love You, is set to become a stage musical. She is a patron of Camfed, a charity that supports the education of more than a million African girls (www.camfed.org). She lives in London with her husband, the New Yorker writer Anthony Lane, and their two children.Josephine Bailey, a native of London, is a seasoned performer who has won ten AudioFile Earphones Awards and a prestigious Audie Award. Publishers Weekly named her Best Female Narrator in 2002. She has narrated the audiobooks Jane Eyre, Year of Wonders, and A Great and Terrible Beauty, among many others.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mette on December 30, 2007

I think about this book almost on a daily basis. Can you really be a successfull hedgefund manager at a prestigious company (thinly vailed as Morgan Stanley), be a good mother (= raise two kids and participate in all their school acitivities) and be a loving wife. All in the same life at the same ti......more

Goodreads review by Emily on May 17, 2012

I bought "I Don't Know How She Does It" for 50 cents off the library sale cart one day, fully expecting to hate it, but intrigued enough to hand over a small donation for the pleasure of hating it in my own time. When the book came out, there was a media firestorm that took advantage of the presumed......more

Goodreads review by annelies on January 23, 2009

It wouldn't be a lie to say I wanted to read this book for years. I passed it on the bookstore shelf, I don't know how many times. Well, maybe my intuition was telling me something. I found the main character Kate to be a lousy mum, sorry if that insults any working moms, but she really was just cra......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth on July 07, 2012

So I just read I Don’t Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother, and I want you to read it too. It has some beautiful sentences—some that startled me into laughter, others that made me sigh oh my, yes—Allison Pearson is a writer. But the main reason I loved this book is that it t......more

Goodreads review by Mona on January 18, 2013

I think I read this within a year after it first came out, circa 2003, when I was still working in the financial district full-time, and had two little ones, ages 5 and two, was commuting to Manhattan by train and could lose myself in a book for about 45 minutes each way. I found myself laughing out......more


Quotes

“Fast . . . funny . . . heartbreaking. . . . You root for Kate the whole length of her roller coaster ride.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The national anthem for working mothers.” —Oprah Winfrey

“A comic wonder: wildly hilarious, achingly sad, perfectly observed.” —The Miami Herald

“The book every working woman is likely to devour. . . . A hysterical look—in both the laughing and crying senses of the word—at the life of Supermom.” —The New York Times

“Think of Kate Reddy as Bridget Jones’ older, harried, married working-mother-of-two sister. . . . Hilarious.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Perfectly captures the driven days and frequently sleep-deprived nights of that modern mammal, the working mother . . . with acute humor, piercing insight and more than a touch of tenderness.” —New York Daily News

“The definitive social comedy of working motherhood.” —The Washington Post