How Hard Can It Be?

If I have to save everyone else, I need to start by saving myself first. How hard can it be?

I hadn't read Allison Pearson's first book about the fictional Kate Reddy – I Don't Know How She Does It – and while it turns out that it isn't really necessary in order to understand what's happening in the sequel How Hard Can It Be?, maybe I should have read that earlier novel in order to have created some kind of empathy for the character – because even though this book was sold to me as the hilarious account of a woman of a certain age that I would no doubt identify with and cheer for, I found Kate to be vain, shallow, self-centered, and a crap wife and parent who doesn't understand why she's losing control on the domestic front, even if it's obvious to the reader. After sighing and plodding my way through this unentertaining mess, I do know this for sure: I won't be going back to read the earlier book.

I worry all the time about my children, my daughter especially; I worry about my mum, my sister, my husband's parents, my best friend who's basically a functioning alcoholic, my dog, my work. My health – which frankly is a bit of a landslide. And I know it sounds pathetic, but it's all too much. I can't break free, I just can't.

Where Kate finds herself at the beginning of this book (and I have no idea how much of this was set up in the earlier book): After going through his own “manopause”, Kate's husband, Rich, quit his job as an architect and resettled the family in the South of England (away from all the grandparents in the North) in order to attend college to become a therapist. Not only is he too busy to work, but Rich is required to take expensive counseling twice a week, he is in constant training for bicycle marathons, and his gluten-free/vegan/mindfulness lifestyle turns him into a condescending scold towards the family he's too occupied to engage with. When they first moved to this village, they could have bought a home in a brand new development, but having looked at a falling-down historic heap of a house and falling in love with it, Kate insisted on the fixer-upper, and the family's savings are disappearing fast into the money pit. Kate – a former high powered money manager who took a multi-year pause to focus on her family – must go back to work, but as she's approaching fifty, the only head-hunter she meets with tells her she's “beyond the cohort” of the employable. Shaving seven years off her age, Kate is able to land a temp position covering a maternity leave at the London firm where she used to work, and between trying to remember the lies on her resume and not letting anyone know that she actually started the fund she's now a junior exec on, Kate repeatedly saves the day with those clients (the Russian millionaire gangster; the rock star's flakey widow) that the office's hotshot young metrosexual overlords don't have the life experience to deal with. Meanwhile, Kate's two children have become lazy, backtalking teenagers (the daughter is obsessed with her social standing, the son with online gaming; both expect their mom to be a cash machine/sock finder/uber driver), Kate's own mother and her inlaws need attention that only she can give (despite other family members living closer to them), and with the onset of perimenopause, Kate is experiencing mental and physical changes that threaten not only her self-image but her overall competence. Whew. I don't know how she does it, but, how hard can it be?

This book is set very much in the now – I learned what a belfie is (a bum selfie), and what a MAMIL is (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra [with or without genitals dangling like low-hanging fruit]); Kate is a member of a Women Returners group (a self-help group of those women reentering the workforce after a domestic pause) and she is pointed out as the ultimate example of a modern day Sandwich Woman. The narrative is filled with texts and emails and Kate's kids live their true lives online. There is quite a bit about the unique present day pressures of the British education system (obsessing about league tables and A*'s; trying to compete for university spots against hard-working Asians, the upper classes who have their tutors do all the work, and the palm-greasing Russians) that was new to me. And while all of this is spelled out for the reader (more or less helpfully), I was annoyed when Kate writes her daughter Emily's essay on Twelfth Night in order to draw painfully obvious parallels between Shakespeare's tale of women using disguises in order to participate in a man's world and what she and her daughter were going through in the present:

What will future historians make of the fact that, at the start of the twenty-first century, when feminism seemed to have won the argument, girls like Emily tried their hardest to look like the courtesans of a previous age when women had almost no power except their looks and their ability to attract a man of status? Let's not even mention her menopausal mother, who, for the sake of a job, in new and hostile territory, must disguise her age as if it were her sex, in an effort to become, if not a man, at least one of the boys, and a forty-two-year-old boy to boot? Forsooth.

So, speaking of what is painfully obvious: In an overused and ultimately annoying device, Kate's failing memory prompts her to imagine that she has an elderly librarian named Roy in her mind that she is always sending to the archives to look up information for her: Roy, what was that song? Who is this woman? What should I be noticing about my family's behaviour? Kate is so busy between work, renovating her house, obsessing about her appearance, and caring for both her children and the older generation, that while she notices some major signs of trouble regarding her husband, her daughter, and her son, she constantly tells Roy to file these warnings away for later. So when what I suppose is the climax of the plot occurs – when Kate suddenly puts together all of these clues (or they are put together for her) – there are no surprises for the reader and I felt zero connection with Kate's sudden crises. Pearson's narrative choices baffle me; I am the ideal audience for this book and I connected with none of it.

Luckily, Kate is still gorgeous – after some boot camp and liposuction, she's a knockout at her college reunion – but after Kate reconnects with a rich and sexy American businessman she used to have a crush on, am I really supposed to be cheering her on to have a steamy fling with him? Am I supposed to be happy if, after proving herself to still be a smart and independent woman of varied and inexhaustible skills, this man offers to make all of her problems go away? Am I to think that Kate's indulgent parenting – laughing off her son ruining her credit rating with unauthorised gaming purchases, sighing over the kids at her daughter's Christmas party tearing up her Jane Austen for rolling papers and walking in on sixteen year olds having sex in her ensuite (at least Emily was going to be more popular when the photos hit Instagram!) – am I to think that this is the best that Kate could do? It's all so shallow and selfish, and it was interesting when Kate's sister (a working class single mother of a learning-disabled/gambling-addicted adult son and the primary caregiver for their ageing mother) called her on it:

“If that lad of yours can't find a bloody sock it's because you've spoiled him rotten and fetched and carried and –”

“Julie, please – ”

“Please nothing, you take them on fancy holidays, where was it this year? And oh, Mummy, can I have a new PlayStation, please, Mum, the old one's out of date. And Mummy, I'm worried about how many A bloody stars I'm going to get in my exams, please can I have a special tutor to help, like all the other rich tossers' kids? And meanwhile, poor Auntie Julie, proper poor, who lives up North in a house the size of your kitchen, oh, she's fine, she can take care of Grandma, right? I mean, it's not like she's got anything better to do.”

“That's not – ”

“And oh, Mummy would love to help Auntie Julie out, but she's ever so busy helping people with too much money make some more money, you know, just in case they run out of helicopters, 'cos you never know, do you? Like, you want to go to Abi bloody Dhabi in a rush, and money can buy you everything, right, especially with Mummy on your case. I mean, money really can buy you love, can't it, Kath?”

This exchange does properly chasten Kate and it serves to underline that even the author understands that Kate's biggest problems are shallow and self-imposed. There ought to be more stories about women going through menopause – it'll happen to a large portion of the reading population eventually – and with some percentage of these women finding themselves in Kate's position as a working mother and elder caregiver, there's likely a receptive audience for just this type of story. Ultimately, I think that Kate's sister Julie might have had the more interesting and relatable tale to explore, but either way, How Hard Can It Be was a total miss for me.