How Hard Can it Be?

Allison Pearson (Borough Press, £14.99)

Remember Kate Reddy, frantic mother and City banker, at the beginning of allison Pearson’s first novel I Don’t Know How She Does It, ‘distressing’ the supermarket mince pies for the school Christmas fair to make them look as if she’d made them herself? that small act of social anxiety became a symbol for the have-it-all generation of working women trying to juggle careers and motherhood.

Now, 15 years later, Kate is back, about to turn 50. How Hard Can it Be? asks the title. Well, very. Some 15 years ago, Kate had the children and her job to worry about, plus an embarrassing attack of headlice in the workplace. Now, she’s worried about her bolshie, but vulnerable teenagers; her errant husband, whose midlife crisis has turned him into a leg-shaving cycling fanatic; her ageing parents, who ring her at inconvenient moments to fret about carpet colours; her own midlife house move; and her plummeting selfesteem after too many years of not going to an office.

She is ‘Sandwich Woman’, caught between the two generations: bewildered, insomniac, menopausal, exhausted. She decides to go back to work, knowing that she’ll need to lie, this time, not about the mince pies, but about her age.

there can be no one better suited to portraying and interpreting the midlife state of womanhood than miss Pearson, who nails the comedy and the pathos of daily domestic life like no one else. I howled with recognition at Kate’s sense of the futility of trying to wean her children off their screens: ‘It would be like switching off the wind or the rain. If there’s a heaven, and my kids ever get there, their first question to St Peter will be, “What’s the password?”’

From office life to menopausal forgetfulness, dog walking and being out of one’s depth in the technological age: it’s all here in this gripping sequel. Ysenda Maxtone Graham