Book Review: I don’t know how she does it

 

How appropriate that I read a book on juggling a career, home and relationships at this time.

“I don’t know how she does it” by Allison Pearson is a wrought tale of a working mother and tackles the age hold debate (that is still raging like Australian bushfires both in the blog world as well as the real world out there) – are women cut out to manage their families as well as careers? What happens when you are pushed to the brink?

At times poignant and strangely resonant of the lives of many women I have known (including myself), the novel tears at your heart as the mother Kate fights her guilt at leaving her children behind each time she goes to work. Kate is a high profile investment banking analyst and travels around the world and assuages her guilt by buying loads of stuff for her kids each time she returns home. She wakes up at 2:00 AM to smash the instant pies she has bought to make them look like homemade pies so that the people at her children’s school fair think that she is a good mother who cares about her children (her guilt eats at her as she does this, but as she puts it, good mothers do not buy instant food for children or so she has been taught).

The story tracks her struggle in a male dominated career where she is told by her boss to stop saying can’t because “can’t is for pussies” and she has to swallow all her replies to sexist remarks because the men do not even realise that they are being old-school sexist. She is fielded with a Sri Lankan woman for an Ethical Fund Group presentation just to show diversity in the company which has almost no women working in its higher offices. The story also relates the harrasment of Momo, a Sri Lankan woman who joins the company and looks at Kate as her mentor and their revenge for the same.

As she leaves her daughter and son behind each day with her nanny Paula who holds her to ransom and her husband fights to get her attention, she makes to-do lists and promptly forgets them as she is pushed further and further into a juggling act.  As she puts it one day when sees the Nanny watching TV with her son and daughter, ‘This is why we pay them, to cuddle our children because we are not there to do it.” She is judged by her in-laws and neighbours because she is working and they wait for her to fall on her feet while saying each time, ” I don’t know how you do it”.

She is in contact with her best friends by email (as she has no time to meet them) and is in an online relationship with a client (an addiction that she tries her best to be rid of).

Kate’s recurrent nightmare of being in a court facing a judge who takes her to task for her supposed neglect of her children are written brilliantly and highlight the guilt she is fighting all the time.

The story ends with her finally calling it quits with the corporate world and throughout the story highlights that which is still so difficult for working mothers to do – deadlines at the office are unforgiving and do not care what sex you are. And children really don’t care for your deadlines either. The mother is expected to be the linchpin of the family, the wife is expected to be there with a loving word and shoulder and the investment banker is expected to be sharp and has to keep looking back to make sure she hasn’t been left behind just because she is a “mommy”.

Some of the best quotes in the book are reproduced here”:

“The way I look at it, women in the City are like first-generation immigrants. You get off the boat, you keep your eyes down, work as hard as you can and do your damnest to ignore the taunts of ignorant natives who hate you because you look different and you smell different and because one day you might take their job. And you hope. You know it’s probably not going to get that much better in your own lifetime, but just the fact that you occupy the space, the fact that they had to put a Tampax dispenser in the toilet – all that makes it easier for the women who come after you…. The females who come after us will scarcely give us a second thought, but they will walk on our bones.”

“I need my husband to be more like a woman, so that I can go out and work like a man.”

“Women used to have time to make mince pies and had to fake orgasms. Now we can manage the orgasms, but we have to fake the mince pies. And they call this progress.”

‘Is it coincidence that we spend far more than our parents ever did on the restyling and improvement of our homes – homes in which we spend less and less time… It is as though home had become some kind of stage-set for a play in which we one day hope to star.’

“There’s only so much you can confess, even to your dearest friend. Even to yourself.”

While the book has been written like a light read, do not be fooled for each line/sentence is deep and poignant with meaning. It calls out to you and grows into you, taking you for a ride each time you read it. This is a book that you cannot keep down once you start reading.

I have read the book around three times over the last two months and will most probably keep going back to it. All in all, a 5/5 score for this one.