~ How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson ~
Kate Reddy encapsulated the realities of life for many working women in 2002, when she appeared as the heroine of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It. (The 2011 film starring Sarah Jessica Parker turned Kate into a neurotic Americanized reconstruction with only the faintest hint of Pearson’s original wit and realism — don’t waste your time on it). Pearson went on to write a rather dull second novel, but in 2017, Kate made a welcome reappearance in How Hard Can It Be?
In the first novel, Kate Reddy struggled with the life of a privileged modern working mother: small children, a lucrative but demanding career, a kindly but generally unhelpful husband, the pressures of supporting the family, and a hectic schedule. In this sequel, the children are now teenagers, Kate is perimenopausal, the architect husband has gone into training to become a low-paid counsellor and has a time-consuming cycling hobby, and both their parents are elderly. But Kate is still a clever, wry observer of society.
Money is tight, and Kate prepares for re-entry into the financial world with a creative-writing masterpiece of a CV. Sample:
Over the past six years, I have built up an impressive track record in Conflict Resolution (Translation: Wrestled Xbox out of Ben’s hands after three hours solid on Grand Theft Auto IV)
International negotiating skills honed on domicile issues in the UK. (Bloody au pair Natalia and her cocaine-dealer boyfriend)
You get the idea. The CV, along with dropping her age to 42 and relentless workouts at the gym, get her a temporary job at her old hedge fund, where luckily the turnover is great enough that no one recognizes her.
This book grew out of Pearson’s columns about the ‘Sandwich Women’: working women who are dealing with their adolescent children as well as aging parents. And indeed, Kate has a daughter mortified by a viral ‘belfie’ (a selfie of her bum), a son addicted to video games, and two sets of parents with various medical problems, including a mother-in-law with Alzheimer’s.
What are the words you’d use to describe the fact that women take care of the young and the old, year in, year out, and none of that work counts as skills or experience, or even work? Because women are doing it for free it is literally worthless.
As in the first book, there are touching moments, such as when in a rare moment of lucidity, the mother-in-law remembers a trip to France as though it were yesterday.
In the first novel, Kate’s life was unsustainable and she had to make some hard choices at the end. Pearson seemed to want to keep this second novel light, which meant it had to have a fairytale ending. Many women will identify and chuckle at the sexism, ageism, and family problems Kate faces, but the ending is considerably less relatable.
The love interest from the first book reappears, and is even more ridiculously perfect than before. He is enormously rich, infinitely accommodating, has acquired no awkward baggage such as children or wives or girlfriends, and is ideally romantic at all the right moments, without ever being in the least demanding.
And in the end, it turns out that a lot of money can solve a lot of problems, in a rom-com sort of way.
How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson. St Martin’s Press, 2018
Recent Comments