Living Life On A Treadmill (I Don't Know How She Does It - Allison Pearson)

Name: zoe_page_1

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	I Don't Know How She Does It - Allison Pearson
Date:	07.07.03 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Mostly humourous, with some hilarious happenings at parts

Disadvantages: The story has been done many times before

Look up the word “busy” in a dictionary and, if it were the kind of world where random people’s faces were used to illustrate meanings, you’d see a picture of Kate Reddy. Fund Manager, mother of two, devoted wife (or not), our heroine is the type of person who thinks sleeping is a waste of precious time. Why, think of all the important tasks you could accomplish in those 6 to 8 hours every night. Sleep? Sleep is for wusses. “I Don’t Know How She Does It” follows Kate through a year of her life, and what a frantic year it turns out to be: tales of divorce, pregnancy, affairs, incompetent staff, revolting subordinates, stroppy nannies, kangaroo disasters, pooing pigeons, home made porn and German bankers fill the pages. It’s all go in the Reddy household.

This is chick-lit with a difference. To me, that term refers to books which have mainly young, Bridget Jones style main characters. They are supposed to be easy to identify with, and so are usually found battling problems to do with, well, men and hangovers. Occasionally, jobs (not careers). Sometimes their weight. Perhaps drugs if we’re really lucky. They’re fluffy books, and while I’ll admit to having read, and enjoyed, quite a few of them, they’re hardly serious literature. This book is slightly different. For a start, Kate’s older – she’s a 30-something rather than a member of the 20-something age band usually favoured by this genre. She has baggage, and I don’t mean the Louis Vuitton kind – there’s a husband, a mortgage and two small children lurking in the shadows. She’s a grown up living in the real world, and assuming she manages to keep all those balls up in the air, making quite a good job of it. The storyline sounds pretty boring, and even overdone: working woman who wants everything, juggling family life with successful city career, tries desperately hard to keep it all together witho
ut having that breakdown that’s looming on the horizon. Looking after two snotty nosed brats is hardly a glamourous job, and investment banking, though lucrative, is not usually the stuff interesting, witty novels are made of. And yet, somehow, the author manages to pull it off this time.

The book is one of those originally-newspaper-column-now-tacked-together-to -make-a-novel ones, but that doesn’t really show. The story flows fluidly and the situations are all too believable. What it lacks in typical Chick Lit “devil may care” attitude, it makes up for with vividly described real life scenarios that no one could doubt exist. The book claims to be "a comedy about failure, a tragedy about success", and while it is funny at times, I often felt I was laughing at rather than with. The problem, it seems, is Kate. Throughout the book she has one complaint – that you cannot be taken seriously and treated fairly as a working mother in a city firm – and she never shuts up about this. This would be fine if she managed to do something about her problem, but she doesn’t even try and instead succeeds in irritating her employers and her family on an almost daily basis. Kate, me thinks, needs a good slap to bring her back down to earth. This is the real world. Stop whining and deal. The problem, in my mind, is that Pearson tries so hard to paint the picture of an ordinary woman trying to survive in a man’s world, but still doesn’t quite succeed. Reddy earns too much, for one thing. There must be so many working mothers out there who would like a better work-family balance who aren’t on 50, 60, 70K salaries, that you start to feel less sympathetic towards her plight. The working-class background helps, but only a little. The setting of Kate’s career is dumbed down a bit to make everyone able to understand, but it’s not done in a overly condescending way, and if finance isn’t your thing,
you might not even notice.

Ms Reddy aside, the other characters are rather lovely. The children are often the true stars of the show, and zee ‘usband and zee nanny are charming. In a down-trodden / over-worked-but-over-paid kind of way. The other employees in the office are typical of what I would imagine people in that position to be, and the various clients, thought rather unmemorable, don’t jump out as being fake. For me, though, what holds the book together is neither the people nor the plot: it’s the details. The description of the Barbie collection. The horror stories of giving birth. The to-do lists which never get shorter, and which put bikini waxes above husbands in the chain of all things important. The mince-pie faking affair. The fruit bowl drama (twice!).

It’s an ok book, and reasonably funny, but it did make me wonder what all the hype was about – it’s good, but not great. On the positive side, it’s very easy to read, and after a few pages I felt I had already come to grips with the characters and the story so far. Because of the initial (newspaper column) format the chapters are a bit shorter than normal, and very few come to a significant end, but because only one was printed each week, every one seems to have some kind of mini-plot to it – it’s like with a series such as Friends: the season has some underlying plots, but you need something to happen each week to keep the viewers tuned in. In this case, the columns needed to carry on the story each week, but also to include some new fodder for the readers.

With a story such as this there are only a few satisfactory ways it can end, and sure enough the book follows one of these paths. However it’s not all that predictable, Kate makes some choices you might not expect, and it’s only really the last quarter or so where you start to get an inkling as to how it will all turn out. The book’s written at a f
rantic pace which leaves you almost out of breath at times. Kate lives life on a treadmill, and after reading this you may feel you’ve just clocked up a good few miles yourself. Though, to be honest, it could just have been the fact that I actually read this while on one such piece of equipment at the gym that made me feel that way. At level 6 and speed 5.4 this book clocks up a total of 2000 Calories at the speed I read. Not bad. And I only felt shattered for 3 hours afterwards.

It’s on various best-seller lists at the moment, and seems to be being enjoyed by the masses. Readable and bearable, but perhaps not the best piece of fiction ever written. 3.99 GBP on Amazon UK at the moment. You’ll like this if you enjoy reading Helen Fielding, Sophie Kinsella, Marian Keyes, India Knight and Sabine Durrant. It is girlie, though some men may like it. Because of the older age of Kate, it’s not just a teeny book, and I imagine that, depending on your normal genre of choice, anyone from 16 to 60+ might enjoy it.

I may be getting cynical in my old age, but while I enjoyed reading it, I also enjoy reading the terms and conditions pages of the Thomson City Breaks brochure. Only an "average" from me, I'm afraid.

Summary: