She's done it!

11 April 2012

A working mother walks into a shop to buy her six-year-old daughter a pair of shoes. She watches anxiously as the shop assistant places her daughter's feet on the measuring plate and slides the marker to the end of her toes. She waits for that familiar moment of humiliation, that theatrical pause before the shop assistant glances up and says: "Do you realise what size your little girl's feet are?"

"I thought I was going to be dragged off by the NSPCC," says Allison Pearson, star of this shoe- shop drama. "I thought, 'Oh my God, this is not the person I want to be, someone who is told off in shops for having forgotten my children's shoe size'."

It was moments like this that galvanised the award-winning journalist and Evening Standard columnist to begin writing a novel about a time-famished working mother. This, plus other funny, sad, desperate anecdotes from high-flying mothers who spilled their guilt over a glass of Chablis, convinced Allison that her own feelings were being played out on a much larger stage.

"I also read a report in Good Housekeeping which said that all working mothers wanted for Mother's Day was a little bit of time to themselves. A painfully modest ambition," she says, arching an eyebrow. "These women were too tired to have sex with their husbands, worried their relationships with their family were suffering and, what was very interesting, they thought their own lives were harder than their mother's. I thought, 'Oh, so we've made this great step forward, but we've really just created another stick to beat ourselves with'."

Beating herself furiously is the novel's central character, Kate Reddy, a strung-out City fund manager and mother of two. By day she tackles unbridled machismo: "Just get out there and kick the f***ing tyres," demands her charming boss. By night she mops up domestic chaos with a sulking nanny, children who clamber all over her with neediness and a husband whose idea of tidying the kitchen is to arrange the CDs in alphabetical order. Kate is so deranged with fatigue and guilt she distresses shop-bought mince pies with a rolling pin to fool the local Muffia (the stay-at-home mothers' cabal) into believing she baked them herself.

Kate's assault course through life makes you laugh with recognition and weep at her snatched moments of maternal love. It also leaves you feeling deeply cynical about that buzzphrase, the work/life balance, which is exposed for being just another euphemism for 'juggling' (and we all know what happened to that).

The novel launches next week, but it has already prodded such an open wound among female publishing executives, it has become the media fairy tale of 2002. You know, six-figure advances, US book orders of half a million copies (not to mention bidding wars in Germany, Japan and anywhere else you care to stick a pin) and a famous call from Miramax's Harvey Weinstein which spun into a £700,000 movie-rights deal. Just like that.

Inevitable comparisons will be made to that other zeitgeist hit, Bridget Jones's Diary. Indeed, Kate Reddy could be Bridget a few years on, just add a husband, children and attendant neuroses. Yet where Bridget was hilariously two-dimensional, Kate has a powerful soul which fills every page.

This is a novel which clearly comes from the heart and although Kate doesn't mirror Allison's life exactly, she comes pretty damn close. Meeting the 41-year-old writer for the first time, you expect to find the blue-stocking Valkyrie who chews up Tony Parsons on Late Review. But she is much less self-assured than her television alter ego. Pretty, petite and blonde, she does the North London Yummy Mummy look of denim skirt, wafty Armani blouse and whorehouse-red nails with casual ease. This is a girl who likes expensive underwear.

Married to the urbane writer and New Yorker film reviewer Anthony Lane, the couple live among piles of books and plastic potties in a Kate-like terrace house with their two children, Evie, six, and Thomas, three. Yet this picture of comfortable North London affluence took teeth-grinding ambition to achieve - the sort of determination a girl at a comprehensive in Lincoln needed to land a place at Cambridge.

"I'm a classic, mad, overachieving elder child," laughs Allison, who admits you don't need to probe far to find the source of her ambition. Like Kate, Allison's father walked out on the family when she was in her teens. "I don't see my dad," she says softly, twisting her seed-pearl bracelet like worry beads. "Kate's father is not like mine, but a lot of her feelings about him tap into feelings I have about my father. I think the relationship a lot of high-achieving women have with their dads is incredibly interesting. It is often a case of a man they were trying to please who gave them very little attention or had been very demanding or very absent. You become the son by default."

So turning out a bestseller as your first novel was the next logical step in Allison's career trajectory. God forbid, it could be just any old bit of chick lit. "I wanted the book to be a proper novel, to be taken seriously as a piece of writing, not just to be a book about an issue," she explains carefully. "Through Kate, I just wanted to express the feelings that I and a lot of other working women have, but are not generally articulated. When I was writing the book, I found myself crying a lot, tapping into all those times I wasn't with the children."

One particularly tearful episode involved a hellish trip to LA and a movie star who (typically) took five days to show up for an interview. Allison was anxious because Thomas was at home ill but, wanting to draw a protective veil over the situation, Anthony assured her it was only "a minor infection". It wasn't until she returned home that she realised Thomas had been violently ill with tonsilitis.

"When I walked through the door, Thomas's face lit up almost deliriously. I picked him up and he was so light because he'd lost so much weight I almost threw him into the air," she says. "I felt such shame that I had been mucking about with these ridiculous people when he needed me."

It's not surprising that the sticky issue of maternal guilt, which conflicts so directly with the Noughties woman's divine right to have a successful career, has taken so long to be woven into a novel with such power and honesty. This generation of working mothers has grown up with the heavy feminist ideology of the Seventies and Eighties, when girls graduated from college with a hammer welded into their hands to crack that glass ceiling. So now that women have successfully dam-busted male citadels in the City, shouldn't we just shut up and get on with it? Isn't it a betrayal of The Cause to whinge about work?

"Oh God, I'm not saying that women should give up work en masse," says Allison. "These traditionalists who say women should just go back to the home are wrong. Of course they can't, it's not viable economically for a start. But I am saying there should be recognition that women do two jobs, at work and as soon as they get home."

Allison is at pains to point out she is very 'pro women'. It's just that she questions how far we have come when the latest in a mounting pile of surveys about working mothers shows most are miserable and exhausted. "I had a stay-at-home mother and I know my sister and I benefited from having that attention. But when I went to university, I remember thinking, 'I don't want my mother's life'," she says. "But how could we have been so dismissive of women being just housewives when looking after small children is such a heroic role?"

Ironically, with the Miramax cash thudding into her bank account, Allison can now choose to become the kind of mother who leaves the scent of baking in her wake. She groans at the very idea. "I'd be a bad mother if I stayed at home with my children. I know I'm lucky. I have a very stimulating job which I love, but I am constantly asking questions about how well I know my children and how painful that feels not to know them. So, yes, I am planning to do less, but certainly not give up."

At the moment she is writing the film script for I Don't Know How She Does It. America is already beckoning, and the family intends to up sticks to New York for a few months at the end of the year while Allison promotes her book.

The very real outcome of the book's success will be fame and vast fortune. Enough to change her life. Yet Allison is almost shying away from the idea and certainly stopping short of indulging in Kate's love of 'property porn'. "One of my e-mail friends said I should buy a Suffolk manor with a moat because it's what Kate would have wanted," she laughs. "And I have thought about buying a really ludicrous sports car... but I haven't."

It seems her motives for writing a best-seller are considerably more noble. Her most singular and secret ambition is for I Don't Know How She Does It to win literary acclaim and make the kind of social waves that can influence an era. Of the ten friends who read the original manuscript, four resigned from their jobs and two became pregnant. It could just be coincidence, or it could be a stunning indication of the impact the novel will have on a generation of working mothers fed up with long, inflexible working hours and jobs that demand body-and-soul commitment.

"You have to ask yourself how much a work of fiction can do," says Allison, pausing to choose her words carefully. "I'm certainly not making any great claims, but if Kate could give women confidence to make a different choice about their lives, well, how great would that be?"

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