Working Mothers

2:11 p.m. Am typing frantically while toddler with bronchitis lies on sofa, pale and hollow-eyed, watching Barney give big hugs to special friends on TV. Sleeping baby in curtained-off nursery is just beginning to emit marsupial waking-up noises—hurry! Get this written! Decide to wait until baby reaches max volume before turning off laptop. Sick toddler won’t mind the noise, probably too sick to notice. Glance at watch: One hour until I need to fetch other two children at school. Outside window, see purple clouds gathering, obliterating sun, dooming plans to take all children to park to kill time and blow off steam before supper ordeal.

Remember doctor saying to keep sick child indoors. Remember brand new birthday scooter, given this morning to six-year-old. Decide toddler will survive short trip to wind-buffeted, rain-soaked park. Baby wails now gently moving curtains. Think, Meghan, think. Deadline for book review horribly soon. It’s for The Weekly Standard, so must be witty, conservative (smile: like self), yet also sober, insightful (frown: unlike self). Make mental note to defrost salmon fillets, buy dental floss, call realtor about proper Washington house. Now, what to say about Allison Pearson’s novel I Don’t Know How She Does It?

Well, one thing I can say with iron certainty is that after reading Pearson’s book, I find her writing style has leached alarmingly into my own (see above nonfiction paragraphs). Or perhaps it’s more that her breakneck, scatterbrained, caffeinated narration of a working mother’s life is actually not far off the pace of any mother’s life, and that taking care of my own four children is sufficiently demanding and chaotic to translate smoothly into Kate Reddy-speak.

As alert readers probably heard during the recent Allison Pearson media-flurry, Kate Reddy is the Bridget Jones of working mothers, and I Don’t Know How She Does It is the diary-like account of Miss Reddy’s bruising odyssey through a crucial, pivotal year. If Bridget Jones articulated the amusing horrors of boozy spinsterhood, Kate Reddy does the same for mothers who work, as the quaint phrase has it, “outside the home.”

Kate Reddy is not merely a working mother, but a full-time, top-level, frequent-flying execu-babe in a merciless male-dominated industry. The first woman to become a fund manager for a white-shoe London investment firm, she’s married to a handsome upper-middle-class architect and lives in a large-and-crumbling-but-aesthetically-decent Victorian house in an unspecified part of London that I’d bet is Islington. Kate is thirty-five, good-looking (though still carrying a bit of baby fat), and the mother of Ben, one year, and Emily, five. And her life is one, long, rolling disaster.

Her life, a year of it, is also sparklingly narrated and vastly entertaining, in a crazed, wince-making, headlong way. She is forever running late, forever thinking up excuses, lies, and evasions to fool her daughter, her bosses, her husband, the nanny, her friends. She’s forever juggling dozens of tiny, maddening bits of information, of which any one—the birthday cake that must be bought, the stair carpet that needs repairing, the shares she must cash in—if forgotten, has the power to unleash further catastrophe and unhappiness, necessitating yet more lies and making her even later for whatever is next on the schedule.

And beneath it all, always, throbs the drumbeat of maternal guilt. She loves her children, but, frankly, she hasn’t time.

A few years ago, during the so-called Mommy Wars (a phrase never uttered by any actual mother, as far as I can tell, but popular with reporters and editors), society was mildly convulsed over the proper role of women with young children: Whether they should work, stay home, go flex-time, get on the Mommy Track, take unpaid leave, or put in even longer hours and make partner so their own girls would learn to be Women in Their Own Right. My impression is that this convulsion has eased. The flex-time-stay-at-home-as-much-as-possible argument has won, and the popularity of this novel confirms it. At last look, I Don’t Know How She Does It was seventeenth on the New York Times bestseller list, and you can bet it’s not selling to the “my children are happier because I work” brigade.

For though Kate Reddy may lie to everyone around her, she doesn’t lie to herself; she sees with brutal clarity what her insistence on working costs her children. It’s a reality that will be icily familiar to any besuited mother who has pushed her crying children back through the doorway so she can dash to a waiting taxi. “During the hours and days after I first get back from a trip, I always promise myself it’s my last time away,” Kate Reddy admits.

It’s hard to imagine Alfred A. Knopf wanting any part in popularizing these sentiments even five years ago.

The story line is straightforward and squared-off (if not already a screenplay, it will certainly become one: You can spot cinematic grammar in the regularly placed plot points), which is amply forgivable in a light novel that is really about the emotional quandary that ambitious modern mothers are in.

And though the central turning point is predictable, it’s also wrenching enough to produce tears. It involves a delightful woman who, amazingly, is not conflicted about work, but embraces a life caring for her husband and three sons. Readers will want to smack the callow career gal who dismisses this woman thusly: “I mean, what a waste to end up doing nothing with your life.”

If some books are meant to be chewed, and some devoured, this is a novel to be guzzled like a large frothy glass of chocolate milk. It’s definitely a “chick’s” read, and it’s often laugh-out-loud funny; any woman who has ever lived with a man (especially an Englishman) will find many amusing masculine quirks from her own experience replicated in Kate and Richard’s marriage. To wit:

I tried this on my own husband. It’s true: They can’t do it.

Meghan Cox Gurdon is a writer living in Washington, D.C.