Allison Pearson: Why I really wrote I Don't Know How She Does It

telegraph.co.uk:

like the heroine of my book, I was unravelling by then, although I didn’t know how badly. I was in Chicago after months on the road promoting my first novel.

Kate Reddy had been born 4,000 miles away in our living room in north London. Like nearly all of my friends at that time, my character was struggling to cope with two small children, one bewildered husband, a full-time job and 37 pending tasks on a to-do list that never got any shorter.Permanently fretting that she wasn’t a proper mum, like the Mothers Superior who made snide comments at the school gate, Kate bought mince pies in Sainsbury’s and distressed them with a rolling pin so she could pass them off as home-made at her daughter’s carol concert.

That scene, which appears on the very first page of the book, entered into popular mythology. Two decades later, people still come up to me and say, ‘Are you that writer who did the faked mince pies?’What the book tapped into, I can see looking back, was a secret parallel world, a world where millions of women believed that they carried their burdens alone, and their guilt. ‘But that’s my life you’re talking about,’ readers told me.‘I thought, Allison Pearson has been spying through my kitchen window,’ recalls Jennifer Taylor, mother of two and a financial planner at the Royal Bank of Canada. ‘After Kate Reddy, I stopped beating myself up so much for being a failure.’Reading makes us feel less alone.

That is the great consolation of books. Twenty years ago, I Don’t Know How She Does It held up a mirror to the life of that stressed-out modern mammal, the working mother, and she felt seen and heard.