Pearson, Allison

Born in 1960 in South Wales and educated at the University of Cambridge, Allison Pearson is a columnist for Britain's Daily Mail newspaper. In her popular column, Pearson addresses a wide variety of topics, mixing her particular interest in motherhood, family dynamics, and women in the labor force with attention to popular issues of the day.

Pearson is best known, however, for having authored the best-selling 2002 novel I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working[Page 976]Mother. This novel describes the life of narrator Kate Reddy, a wife, mother of two, and high-powered financial executive, who struggles to keep up with her numerous and competing responsibilities. The storyline follows Reddy between home and work as it plays out across conversations, e-mails with colleagues, and her “Must Remember” lists that grow longer and more harried over the course of the narrative.

At work, Reddy is a hedge fund manager at the Edwards Morgan Forrester investment bank in London's City. She has ascended to the highest position any female at her firm has achieved, which situates her in a highly visible, and acutely felt, token position. Reddy works tirelessly to manage her domestic and international accounts—a challenge that she finds genuinely fulfilling—but also to combat her colleagues' always-implied, often-articulated doubts that she can be both a mother and an excellent professional. At home, Reddy has little time for her children, her marriage, or herself. Her husband, Richard, is an underemployed architect who, with the nanny, manages most of their children's care. The children crave time with Reddy, and 5-year-old Emily has come to resent her mother's regular absences. Home is where Reddy feels the clash between work and family needs—and its attendant guilt—most intensely. This underlies her conflicted relationship with the family nanny, her ambivalent feelings about motherhood, and her straining connection with Richard.

Several weighty themes play out in the tensions between the narrator's professional and family lives. One of the most prevalent underlies Reddy's ambivalence about the putatively feminist goal that contemporary women “have it all”: “Back in the Seventies, when they were fighting for women's rights, what did they think equal opportunities meant: that women would be entitled to spend as little time with their kids as men do?” As a whole, Pearson's novel asserts that work-family conflict is a more persistent and profound problem than her somewhat optimistic conclusion suggests.