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I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Person
- Abstract
THE IDEA that women can “have it all” has seen better days.
Each season seems to bring forth some new and ominous study, pointing to the deficiencies of day- care or the alarming incidence of childlessness among women in the top ranks of business and the pro- fessions. Making matters worse, sev- eral high-profile role models-pres- idential adviser Karen Hughes, ABC News commentator Cokie Roberts, Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift-have lately thrown in the professional towel, declaring (as Roberts put it), “I want a life.” Allison Pearson’s best-selling novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It, is yet another contribution to the deflation of career mothers, but of a decidedly different sort. An award- winning columnist for London’s Evening Standard, Pearson has writ- ten a sympathetic send-up, or what reviewers, alluding to another re- cent comic import from Britain, have described as a Bridget Jones’s Diary for grown-ups. Both books share a hyperactive, pastiche style, their pages festooned with e-mails, to-do lists, diary entries, and sen- tence fragments too frenzied to mention their subjects. But Pearson has given us something deeper than the meditations of the self-con- sciously single Bridget Jones, and her book’s popularity, I suspect, has to do with more than its obvious pleasures as entertainment.
About the Author
Kay S. Hymowitz, a contributing editor of City Journal, writes frequently for COMMENTARY on social and cultural issues.
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