Allison Pearson reveals agonies in writing her latest book

I Dont Know How She Does It;The Film

        A new trailer has been released for I Don’t Know How She Does It starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Pierce Brosnan.The film is based on the book by Allison Pearson about a finance executive who is the breadwinner of her household, but can’t handle the basics including baking a pie for her daughter’s school.The comedy will be released in theaters on September 16.

Best-selling author tells of how she was engulfed by 'bad clinical

Depression.

"I think something I do have in common with [her fiction's teenage protagonist] Petra's life is that, like a lot of little girls, when I was young I wanted to be perfect, and I worked really hard to be good at everything. So I thought I'd be able to put my foot on the accelerator and get myself out of a depression but it doesn't work."

            Allison Pearson, the journalist-turned-bestselling author, yesterday spoke of the depression that engulfed her while writing her second novel and the anger she felt at her book being branded as "superior chick-lit".

  

             She told the Independent columnist Christina Patterson on the final day of the Woodstock Literary Festival, that she "fell into a bad clinical depression" while writing I Think I Love You, about a teenager's obsessive crush on the 1970s pop star and pin-up, David Cassidy.

Book Title: I Dont Know How She Does It


Allison Pearson's debut novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, is a rare and beautiful hybrid: a devastatingly funny novel that's also a compelling fictional world. You want to climb inside this book and inhabit it. However, you might find it pretty messy once you're in there. Narrator Kate Reddy is the manager of a hedge fund and mother of two small children.

The book opens with an emblematic scene as Kate "distresses" a store-bought mince pie to make it appear homemade. Her days are measured in increments of minutes and even seconds; her fund stays organized but her house and family are falling apart. The book is a pearly string of great lines. Here's Kate on lack of sleep: "They're right to call it a broken night.... You crawl back to bed and you lie there trying to do the jigsaw of sleep with half the pieces missing." On baby boys: "A mother of a one-year-old son is a movie star in a world without critics." On subtle office dynamics:

The women in the offices of EMF [Kate's firm] don't tend to display pictures of their kids. The higher they go up the ladder, the fewer the photographs. If a man has pictures of kids on his desk, it enhances his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases hers. Why? Because he's not supposed to be home with the children; she is.

There's inherent drama here: Kate is wildly appealing, and we want things to work out for her. In the end, the book isn't a just collection of clever lines on the theme of working motherhood; it's a real, rich novel about a character we come to cherish. --Claire Dederer --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.