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- Hardcover: 352 pages ; Dimensions (in
inches): 1.17 x 9.59 x 6.62
- Publisher: Knopf; ISBN: 0375414053; (October
1, 2002)
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Allison Pearson's debut novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, is
a rare and beautiful hybrid: a devastatingly funny novel that's also a
compelling fictional world.
You want to climb inside
this book and inhabit it.
However, you might
find it pretty messy once you're in there. Narrator Kate Reddy is the
manager of a hedge fund and mother of two small children. The book opens
with an emblematic scene as Kate "distresses" a store-bought mince pie
to make it appear homemade.
Her days are measured
in increments of minutes and even seconds; her fund stays organized but
her house and family are falling apart. The book is a pearly string of
great lines.
Here's Kate on lack
of sleep: "They're right to call it a broken night.... You crawl back
to bed and you lie there trying to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the
pieces missing." On baby boys: "A mother of a one-year-old son is a movie
star in a world without critics." On subtle office dynamics:
The women in the offices of EMF [Kate's firm] don't tend to display
pictures of their kids. The higher they go up the ladder, the fewer
the photographs. If a man has pictures of kids on his desk, it enhances
his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases hers. Why? Because he's
not supposed to be home with the children; she is.
There's inherent drama here: Kate is wildly appealing, and we want
things to work out for here. In the end, the book isn't a just collection
of clever lines on the theme of working motherhood; it's a real, rich
novel about a character we come to cherish. --Claire Dederer
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