Acquire Today I Dont Know How She Does It (Kate Reddy, #1) Envisioned By Allison Pearson Issued As Ebook
día a día de una mujer londinense trabajadora, Con dos niños, casada, y cuyo trabajo en bolsa la requiere estar muy pendiente del mismo, demasiado,
Ese tiempo que le dedica a su trabajo, le va a pasar factura, por lo que intentará volver a tomar las riendas de su vida sin tener que renunciar a su trabajo lo conseguirá
Comedia divertida, al más puro estilo Sexo en Nueva York, y llevada al cine con la protagonista de una de las chicas de la serie.
Kind of a Bridget Jones's Diary for the mommy set, this book is almost too clever to like, But I liked it. Still, as a cardcarrying underachiever, I couldn't always relate much to Career Kate, Too tidy endings tempt me to shelve this with fairytales,
I liked the Mary Poppins references and other popculture bits, those I could get, anyway, Liked the discussion about food or not in heaven and why there isn't a McDonald's, Liked the email exchanges, mostly, Liked her husband and her other romanticinterest guy, even if he did resemble George Clooney, چند ماه پیش بود که با دیدن مخزن عظیم کتابخانه مرکزی آرزوی گشتن و پرسه زدن بین قفسهها توی دلم کاشته شد. در اولین تجربهی قسمت کتابهای داستانی سعی کردم غریبترین کتاب ها با عناوین جالب انتخاب کنم. " زمانی برای زن بودن" یکی از آنها بود. کتابی که نه قبلا اسمش را شنیده بودم و نه فکر میکردم که تازگی ها چند سال اخیر به امانت کسی رفته باشد.
پنجاه صفحه اول طاقت فرسا و پرفشار بود بطوری که اگر عذاب وجدان نیمه رها کردن کتابها نبود حتما نخونده رهایش میکردم! اما کمکم فضای داستان و رومزهنگاریش دستم آمد و جذاب شد.
کیت مادر دو بچهی کوچک ن ۱ ساله و امیلی ۵ساله ست و در عین حال مدیر منابع مالی یکی از بزرگترین شرکت های مالی و سرمایه گذاری لندن است. زندگی کیت در جنگ و موازنه این دو جنبهی زندگیش میگذرد. کارمند یا مادر و همسر گاهی چنان فشار و استرس از کلمات بیرون میزند که انگار زیربار مسئولیتهای کیت دارید خم میشوید و دیگر نمیشود ادامه داد. من هر روز بیشتر از ۵۰ صفحه نتونستم بخونم به استثنای روز آخر که تمامش کردم.
به همه توصیه میکنم مردانی که به درک شرایط زنان اطراف و همسرشان نیاز دارند. به زنانی که در انتخابهای زندگیشان گیر افتاده اند و به کسانی که دوست دارند بدون قضاوت و پیش زمینههای الایی زندگی یک زن غربی شاغل را ببینند. این کتاب یک نمونه است نه توصیه یا نصیحت : This book is basically a work of nonfiction masquerading as a book of fiction, Every woman should read this before and during child rearing, Then she should dog ear pages of the book and force her spouse, partner or child's sperm donor to read, At that point, the spouse, partner or sperm donor will probably do some eye rolling and then ignore the crucial heart of the booksomeone has to take care of the details.
Such is life.
I found this book to be so achingly true it was more like a punch in the face than a breath of fresh air, In fact, it was almost a job to finish itsince it basically looked, smelled and felt like my life with the exception that I spend a shit ton more time with my kid then the, shall we say, heroine, and I would give my left boob to stay at home and raise himbut that's a whole other review and requires a lot of details as to why I'm not staying at home but instead have committed myself to a really jealous boyfriendi.
e. , my job.
Needless to say, the movie which is set to come out soon couldn't hold a candle to the book, I don't even need to see itbecause I guarantee you they changed the ending and made it a lot more romantic, There's no romance here ladiesjust a lot of pressure put on one woman to finesse the lives of her kids and one very kind but "slow" husband, You could sayshe shouldn't try so hard, But, that would be like telling a caged bird not to sing, So. Much. Anxiety. If I had kids, I would totally be Kate, Lost in between two worlds and failing miserable at balancing them both, I just cannot seem to grasp the high demand job motherhood balance, and it gives me heart palpitations just thinking about it, EVERYTHING in this book just confirmed that motherhood is not for me! Don't get me wrong I admire the people who can do it! I just have ZERO faith in myself that I'd ever be able to balance the two without buckets of Xanax and a therapist on speed dial.
Kate Reddy is having a hard time, She's got a high power job and some littles at home and she is struggling making it all work, She refuses to become a Pinterest mom, and doesn't really have the time anyway, plus, her job doesn't take her as serious as they should because she's a ROCKSTAR, but she's a women, so.
. . well, 'nuff said. Trying to find the time to be a good mom to her kids, wife to Richard, and give her job the attention it deserves is not working out, and Kate needs to figure out her priorities and fast!
I love Allison Pearson's writing its quick, descriptive, and so witty.
I get a bit lost in some of the British slang, but it's still fun pretending I understand it, Kate trying to figure out how to be a mother in a man's world, is equally sad and hilarious and I had fun reading this, Next up is How Hard Can it Be! I'm excited to read the follow up to this book and see where Kate has landed at! I don't even know why I stuck with this book for so long.
IT'S OKAY TO QUIT BOOKS, Erin, Note: I'm reviewing this quite a long time after I finished the book because I've been really busy for the past couple of months, I can still remember what I really disliked about this book, so I'm going to write the review, but I might be shaky on some of the precise details.
Be warned.
Are you a man who has lived alone for any portion of your life
Are you a man who can complete most domestic tasks
Are you a man who managed to dress yourself this morning
If so CONGRATULATIONS! I really don't know how you did it.
The distinct impression of men I get from Pearson is that they are, whether a highflying businessman or not, one very obvious type, They can do nothing by themselves, At one point, Kate goes on a rant that men insist upon being waited on by all women in their life: first their mother, then they get married as a solution to no longer having a mother to clean up after them, and expect their wife to do notihng but take care of the house and the children.
They get married not out of love, but out of the need to find a maternal substitute, Now, I don't have a utopian ideal of relationships or anything, but I did have the overwhelming sense that Pearson was bullshitting me, I understand that some men are like that but come on, She met him at Cambridge, She was obviously a career girl from day one yet, for some reason my opinion: Pearson needed as much misogynistic fuel as she could to spin on her sexist plot, he's incapable of grasping the fact that he has to do things for himself while she's on her eight a.
meight p. m. workday. But the worst element of all was in Robin CooperClark, the bigwig whom Kate works for, that she has used as a nice foil to her husband's neediness and made me think that, yeah, maybe this reasonable and kind figure meant that I Don't Know How She Does It wasn't utterly mired in misandry.
But, oh, no, How wrong was I When Robin CooperClark's wife, Jill , he falls apart, Quite literally. When Kate sees him, she gives an icky, inappropriate monologue about how much he's let himself go, And there I was, thinking, "oh, it's because of grief, you stupid hag", Kate took one look at him and surmised it was because he couldn't cope without a woman in his life.
Yep, that's right. Forget the fact that he's lost his wife, the woman he had children with and married for a goodyears, He just can't cope because men can't cope without women, But I Don't Know How She Does It wasn't quite at its nadir yet, Because, less than two months after that, Robin got back together with someone, Again, because men just can't cope without women, It was some creepy farright feminist bullshit going on here, and I say that as a feminist, One of my dad's friends didn't remarry for thirtyfive years after his wife died, I honestly don't know how he did it, if I believe Pearson's crap,
And all of this would have been slightly better if Kate hadn't had such a didactic freaking tone, She literally laid this stuff out for the reader in PARAGRAPHS, Some of the summaries I can remember: "Men are nothing without women, " "Men except to be mothered by their wives, " "All men are out to exploit, overwork and harass you, " So, be warned, ladies! Better regroup in a strip club and plot revenge against your allmale antagonists, While I don't doubt that sexism is rife in the City, you wouldn't believe the extent to which Pearson hammered this home, Having a Dark Ages creep, Chris Bunce, wasn't enough, Literally all of the antagonists were male, The best binary opposition I can think of is present in minor characters, Kate's underlings, Momo female and Guy male, While Momo is a quiet, welleducated young woman who gets mercilessly exploited by her male superiors, Guy is a supercilious twat whose good education is proof of what a dickhead he is, who is constantly trying to land Kate in it so that he can move up the City rungs.
The only time Kate achieves anything remotely like active, she does so in an allfemale group Kate's dad is used for the plan, but totally passively, because he's so drunk and deluded, so its down to the women to move him like a chess piece.
True, we have two totally 'good' male characters: Jack, who is Kate's minor 'love interest', but he's so cardboard cutout that I don't think he counts as a real character, because Kate never had to interact with him in a 'real' setting, and Winstone, but he's a perpetually stoned taxi driver whose car is full of marijuana smoke, so he's obviously outside of Kate's intense City world.
Kate's dad is, as I've mentioned, a deluded alcoholic who abandoned his family, While Richard, Kate's husband, is notsexist, he is definitely useless, Despite having an architecture job which, as Kate smugly reminds us, is nowhere near as successdful as her job in finance, he can't clean the house, pick up any slack for Kate or treat her with anything other than mild confusion.
And then, we have the women, You would have thought that a book with such a rampant antiman message could have scraped up a feminist message, don't you Well, no, Pearson spits out this little gem about how "becoming a man is a waste of a woman, " Out of context, you might think that that relates to intellectual challenge or whatever, Hell no. It refers to the stereotypical sticks ofs housewiving: motherhood, homemaking and putting out for your husband,
If I had to sum up the message of I Don't Know How She Does It because it did give the constant feeling of having a lesson taught, it would be this: "Ladies, you're never going to be as respected as your male counterparts, and you're going to do half as a job as both a wife and mother, so why bother Just jack in the successful job even if it's the only way you feel truly empowered and intellectually exercised and give yourself up to be a fulltime mother.
"
That's what happens to Kate, Despite repeatedly telling the reader quite reasonably, I thought that her job made her feel good about herself and she didn't want to quit, plot contrivance and not even very good plot contrivance: her son hurts his arm slaps her around the head and shows her what a silly, selfish person she's been.
She dumps the job, rejects all forms of compromise and settles down for boring domestic bliss in the country, Because that's all women are good for, am I right Well, of course not, And, in all fairness, Pearson doesn't quite come out and say that, But when she recaps what happened to each of her major female characters, there was a strong tone of, "I don't know why they bother" about the women still in work, because Kate constantly hammered it home that no matter how good they were, they were never, ever going to be viewed as equals.
There were also some huge plot holes in this approach, Obviously Kate and Richard are financially stable because Kate can finish at her very wellpaid job and they can start over in the country, However, Kate refuses to take a job with Robin Cooper Clark which he promises her will be part time because she just doesn't believe that it will be, But, if she's so financially stable, she can quit at any time she wants And surely a woman who doesn't need to be paid can look around for parttime work so she can have a better balance
But onto another problem that I felt with I Don't Know How She Does It: class.
Kate is blatantly upper middle class, They have a big house, private school educated children and they're both Cambridgeeducated, But one of the things that Kate thinks and wants everyone else to think makes her innately better than everyone else in this goddamn book that she comes from a workingclass background.
Not any old working class background her sister is still trapped in a councilhouseandfivechildren life and her dad is an alcoholic gambler and Kate thinks that her attachment to them makes her so much damn better because as she keeps reminding us, she's not upperclass like the rest of her peers and therefore she's not just better, but she's nicer, more relatable and more determined what I never saw any evidence of any of those informed attributes.
For instance, this gem:
"Happy childhoods are no bloody good for drive and success, "
So, basically, unhappy children make happy adults I don't think so, lady, Last time I looked, most of the results of an unhappy childhood come in therapy, emotional
scars and low selfesteem, Bear in mind, now, that she's also talking about her husband, Richard, who may be middleclass born and bred but still got into Cambridge, no mean feat even for a middleclass child and, while he may not be as wonderful and superior as St.
Kate, does work at an architecture firm, which seems to be his dream job, Also, her sister, Julie, is the product of the exact same childhood that Kate had, yet it's hardly made her driven and successful: she's a lonely, impoverished womamn in a council house.
All girls in the City apparently have Daddy issues, The men aren't lucky enough to get Freudian excuses they have the drive to succeed because they're men, and it's what men do, The City girls are all pathetic idiots and so are still subservient to men,
Not only that, but Kate has several other moral jewels to hold up: Kate is very opposed to abortion, Rather than explaining this moral view I'm really prochoice myself, but my sister is antiabortion, she simply sulks with Candy in a really disgusting scene, Candy is determined that she's not going to have children and so, when she gets pregnant as the result of a onenight stand, she's going to have an abortion.
Kate throws a hissy fit like, I'm sorry, Mrs, Reddy, I wasn't aware that this was your body under discussion! and her strongest argument is "you might regret it" Candy is alreadyand has shown no sign of regretting it and "a late abortion is not fun" not contesting that point, but seriously A late abortion is worse than bringing up a child you're not even sure you want I'm not sure if I'm biased because my mum and I were talking about children a few nights ago and she basically said that her desire to have children was overwhelming and, yes, she was absolutely sure.
Kate is proof that kids do swallow up your life, for better or worse, and that you have to be sure, Candy is not, yet Kate guilts her into keeping the baby, And of course having it is a wonderful transformative experience, because Candy realises how moronic she's been with her fun lifestyle and accepts her true purpose in life: motherhood!
Between disgusting, didactic sexism both misogyny and misandry and the most unlikeable female protaganist I think I have ever read, forget sitelinkThe Handmaid's Tale.
I Don't Know How She Does It is the true feminist nightmare, .