Author Allison Pearson: ‘I tapped into a secret parallel world’
Twenty years ago, Allison Pearson wrote a book that spoke to a generation of exhausted working mothers. Now she wonders: how much has really changed?
“Miss Pearson, you’re about to go live in front of 40 million Americans. OK?” I smiled weakly at the producer and nodded. Over her shoulder, in the glare of the TV lights, I could make out a figure swathed in caramel cashmere, so goldenly glowing, so astonishingly airbrushed, that she could well have been a hologram of one of the world’s most famous people: Oprah Winfrey. Forty million people? My mouth was dry (would I be able to speak?). My clothes were wrong. But there was no going back. For months my publishers had strained every sinew to land this interview. An endorsement from Oprah (then at the height of her power) could add another million to your sales.
And then I heard my name. Oprah, the actual Oprah, was saying, “Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It is a bible for the working mother…” I walked on to the set and perched on a padded bench as Oprah cued a video of me with the family, filmed in our kitchen. I watched as my six-year-old daughter crinkled her nose and complained, “I don’t like it when my Mummy is writing. She don’t play with me.” I cringed, but the audience roared with laughter. Despite the fact that nerves had made my upper lip stick to my teeth, I joined in. After all, wasn’t that why I was there? Because I’d made millions of women laugh at how hard it is to juggle a career and motherhood? The whole thing felt utterly surreal, not helped by the fact that, like the heroine of my book, I was unravelling by then, although I didn’t know how badly.
I was in Chicago after months on the road promoting my first novel. My character Kate Reddy had been born 6000km away in our living room in north London. Like nearly all of my friends at that time, she was struggling to cope with two small children, one bewildered husband, a full-time job and 37 pending tasks on a to-do list that never got any shorter. Permanently fretting that she wasn’t a proper mum, like the Mothers Superior who made snide comments at the school gate, Kate bought supermarket mince pies and distressed them with a rolling pin so she could pass them off as home-made at her daughter’s carol concert. That scene, which appears on the first page of the book, entered into popular mythology. Two decades later, people still come up to me and say, “Are you that writer who did the faked mince pies?”
What the book tapped into, I can see looking back, was a secret parallel world, a world where millions of women believed that they carried their burdens alone, and their guilt. “But that’s my life you’re talking about,” readers told me. “I thought, Allison Pearson has been spying through my kitchen window,” recalls Jennifer Taylor, mother of two and a financial planner at the Royal Bank of Canada. “After Kate Reddy, I stopped beating myself up so much for being a failure.”
Reading makes us feel less alone. That is the great consolation of books. Twenty years ago, I Don’t Know How She Does It held up a mirror to the life of that stressed-out modern mammal, the working mother, and she felt seen and heard. I wrote it as a comedy even though much of it was desperately sad. As a writer, I prefer to laugh people into recognition; the darkness lightened by mirth. Besides, a life divided between little kids and professional duties very often plays as farce.
At the turn of the 21st century, working mothers still felt judged the whole time (not least, it must be said, by themselves). There would be no judgment in my novel. With her calamitous mishaps (crazily scratching her head during a presentation to a major client, having caught her kids’ nits), Kate Reddy was an uproarious one-woman embodiment of a universal predicament. The book turned out to have extraordinary global resonance, far beyond anything I could have imagined. Translated into 32 languages, I Don’t Know How She Does It was published in the UK in 2002, in the US the following year. Within weeks, this novel by an unknown British author was on every bestseller list.
A bitter irony. In the midst of all that whirlwind success, I had never worked more or seen my children less. Evie and Tom stayed with Daddy in a rented apartment in New York while the publisher sent me on a mammoth US book tour; 20 cities in 23 days, or maybe it was 23 cities in 25 days. I lost track. During that tour I heard hundreds of stories from working mothers and felt more determined than ever to campaign on the issues that would improve their lives: better maternity leave, getting your old job back when you returned from having a baby (not slyly being sidelined), flexible working, creating a workplace where “parent” was not a dirty word and wanting to take the afternoon off to go to the school play didn’t mark you out as “lacking in commitment”. Could a comic novel be a catalyst for social change? Maybe it could.
When I finally got back to New York after doing the Oprah show I lay in bed for days, unable to move. I knew I had to get up and take my clothes to the dry cleaners, but it felt more daunting than a trip to the Andes. The children, ravenous for my attention, swarmed over their shattered mother’s body. My three-year-old son curled up on my tummy. “Mummy, stay,” he said, wrapping his blankie around my arm.
A doctor who came to see me mentioned nervous collapse and prescribed antidepressants. I explained about the book tour and missing the kids and feeling guilty and overwhelmed. Oh, and Oprah. “Ma’am,” said the doctor, “Women like you, I don’t know how you do it.”
Twenty years have blurred many of the details, although I know that I Don’t Know How She Does It started life as a weekly column in the UK Telegraph in the spring of 2001. For quite some time I’d been mulling over writing about the lives of my cohort of 30- and 40-something women. We were supposedly the Having It All generation, enviably combining career and family, or so we were told by glossy lifestyle supplements. Somehow, we’d ended up Doing It All. Women retained the unpaid, full-time job of mother alongside their paid full-time job; the result was a brutal double shift.
In 1999, a few months after I brought my second baby home from the hospital, parked him under my desk and finished writing a magazine interview, I spotted a survey in Good Housekeeping magazine that asked working women what they wanted for Mother’s Day. The answers were strikingly poignant. Some 74 per cent said all they wanted was “a little bit of time to myself”. The respondents felt they were failing to meet their own high standards, both at work and at home. Not surprisingly, they reported that they were too exhausted to have sex with their husbands. The most shocking thing, though, was that women thought they had tougher lives than their own mothers.
Wow. That wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out, was it? In my newspaper column that week, I asked a question which had really started to bother me: Why is it so hard to make equality work in practice? “A few months ago,” the column said, “I was going abroad for work and I handed my husband a list of all the tasks that would need doing in my absence. Anthony looked at the two sheets of A4 for quite some time. Finally, he said plaintively, ‘But it looks like a plan for invading a small country’. In a way, of course, that’s exactly what it was.”
When I revisit that column now, I sense how my exasperation, even anger, was growing. Not long after it appeared I was invited to a seminar on work-life balance. The all-female audience was full of MBAs who began to stand up and volunteer their accounts of what it felt like to combine a job with a life as a woman. One New York lawyer said she had recently intercepted a memo from a senior partner in her firm. A line in the memo said: “Why does childbirth have to take so long?” The room was filled with laughter. At that moment I heard an answering laugh in my head and somehow I knew I was hearing the woman who would become the heroine of the novel I didn’t know I was going to write. Kate Reddy didn’t have a name back then. What I did know was that this nameless character had a fantastic sense of humour about the man-shaped world of work to which women like her must adapt. But what job should I give her? I asked Miranda Richards, a hedge fund manager I had met when we were both on maternity leave. We were lying on the floor doing Pilates, trying to reconnect our distended belly buttons to our spines. “Give her my job,” said Miranda, “it’s horrible.”
Sure enough, after returning to the office, Miranda negotiated one day a week working from home so she could better balance a frantic business life with three daughters under the age of six. But her colleagues soon set her up to fail, organising key meetings on her Fridays at home and gradually pinching her best clients. Eventually she resigned and put together a portfolio career while being a hands-on mother and chief writer of the school Christmas panto, a route so many disillusioned Kate Reddys ended up taking.
When the first Kate Reddy column appeared in the paper a few weeks later, it was as if I’d opened a furnace door, so intense was the blast of recognition from readers. Women started to send me their own crazy stories and I began a file of what I called “Kate Reddy Moments”. One marketing manager said she had just got back to work after giving birth to her second child and took a client out for lunch. Sleep-deprived, she drifted off during the main course and awoke with a jolt to see her client putting a forkful of food into his mouth. Before she could stop herself, she cooed, “Is that yummy in your tummy?”
I now wonder what difference, if any, the book made to readers’ lives. I’ve spoken to thousands of them and had emails and letters from many more. They say it enabled them to start a conversation in their office about things that had been too hard to say before. The Kate Reddys found each other and that gave them courage. For the first time, they knew they were not alone.
Back then, many of the (mostly male) bosses were married to women who stayed home to raise the children. They had no clue how demanding things could be for a mother who worked. Today, many male executives play a much more hands-on role as dads and their partners are likely to have a career. And, of course, many more bosses are women, and hooray for that! This has made a huge difference in transforming workplace attitudes.
For several years I campaigned with a charity for better work-life balance. I knew how mums just needed some flexibility to fulfil their caring responsibilities, like taking a little one to a medical appointment or their first day at school. In the end it took a global pandemic to prove that working from home was not only possible but actually good for families and firms. Millions of mums and dads discovered the pleasure of spending proper time with their children in 2020-21, and they won’t give it up in a hurry.
Do I think that things are better today for working mothers than when I set down the experiences of the Having It All generation? I’m sure they are. In 1996, when I had my first baby, paid maternity leave to which all employed women were entitled was 14 weeks. Most women I knew didn’t dare take more than four months and the truly ambitious were back at their desk the day after a C-section. It was madness; bad for baby and mother. More than that, women in the workplace no longer have to hide motherhood like a guilty secret, as Kate Reddy did. They don’t have “tougher lives than their own mothers”, in that devastating phrase that inspired me to write a novel. If I Don’t Know How She Does It played any part in improving the lives of our daughters and granddaughters, then I am the proudest author alive.
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