I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson 2002 - eBay (item 320420821472 end time Jan-03-10 11:55:06 PST)

Last updated on 11:23:13 AM PDT, Sep 23, 2009 View all revisions

Item specifics - Fiction Books

Author:	Allison Pearson	Format:	Hardcover
Publisher:	Alfred a Knopf Inc	Edition:	1
ISBN-10:	0375414053	ISBN-13:	9780375414053
Subject:	--	Publication Year:	2002
Topic:	--	Special Attributes:	--
Language:	English	Condition:	Very Good

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Detailed item info

Synopsis
Kate Reddy is an executive in the financial world whose doomed attempt to micromanage her children and their nanny is only one of the picky little problems that dominate her life. However, things are soon spinning out of control. A friend dies of cancer, Kate's husband leaves, she contemplates an affair, and she gets stoned with a cab driver--all indications that, from now on, things will be different. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.
Size
Length:	337 pages
Height:	9.5 in.
Width:	6.5 in.
Thickness:	1.2 in.
Weight:	23.2 oz.

Publisher's Note
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.
Industry reviews
"The clever cattiness of the early chapters gives way to an earnest, endearing introspection that makes it possible for Kate to strike a more satisfying, if almost too-perfect-to-believe balance between family and work. From the upper echelons of working mothers, a fictional answer to THE NANNY DIARIES...." Kirkus Reviews (09/01/2002) "Like Bridget Jones, Kate Reddy originated as a character in a newspaper column, and those origins show. Famously adorable and sometimes brittle with self-regard, she has been given a set of friends and situations, then eased into a routine, unsurprising narrative....Ms. Pearson writes with gratifying elegance and endearing self-mockery much of the time. She is lethally funny about domestic details...and can be fearlessly honest....Still, her portrait of Kate is essentially a performance and its charm can be frayed." New York Times - Janet Maslin (10/07/2002) "[T]he lesson is that you can't have it all, as it inevitably must be in a book about making choices. And this is where I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT is, paradoxically, both disappointing and refreshingly authentic. Part of the allure of a book like Pearson's is that it offers the possibility of escape from certain hard truths. You root for Kate the whole length of her roller coaster ride. What working woman wouldn't want her to have a Hollywood ending? If it's a letdown when things don't turn out that way, it's nonetheless true to life. While there are times when Pearson's quippy sloganeering can ring hollow..., I have to admit that I fell for them, as I fell for this rambling romp through the quandaries of the working mother." New York Times Book Review - Kate Betts (10/06/2002)

I WILL BE ON VAVCTION FROM 09/23-09/28/09. ANY ITEM PURCHASED WITHIN THAT TIME FRAME WILL BE MAILED 09/29/09.

The jacket is a little worn but the book itself is in great condition.

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