Having it all: It’s a matter of fiction

“Women used to have time to make mince pies and had to fake orgasms,” thinks Kate Reddy, harried working mother in Allison Pearson’s new novel, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” at the bleary hour of 1:37 a.m., fresh off a plane and trying to crumble the crust of two store-bought pies so they look homemade for her daughter’s Christmas pageant. “Now we can manage the orgasms, but we have to fake the mince pies.”

Kate Reddy began life as a joke: a meeting that a friend of Pearson’s attended in which the male head of the company, chagrined by the temporary loss of a valuable employee, asked with great frustration, “Why does childbirth have to take so long?”

“When I heard that story,” says Pearson, herself fresh off a plane, having left two children but not in the slightest bit harried, “I heard a dark, rich, bitter laugh, and I knew it came from Kate. I thought, if I could only capture that laugh in a character! And so I began collecting Kate Reddy moments.” Moments such as these found in the book:

“If I stay in the bathroom long enough Richard will fall asleep and will not try to have sex with me. If we don’t have sex, I can skip a bath in the morning. If skip the bath, I will have time to start on the e-mails that have built up while I’ve been away ... “

“Personally, I find nonworking mothers awkward company because it’s like someone standing there holding up a large polished mirror, the better to show the reflection of my guilt.”

There’s also the time Kate hides in the laundry room so her 17-month-old son won’t see her leaving for the airport at 7 a.m. There are the countless times she tries to avoid the local “Muffia,” the stay-at-home moms who are compelled to make Kate feel inadequate. There’s the time she gets stopped at customs because her nightmare of a purse contains, along with diapers and half-eaten candies, a urine sample she was supposed to leave at the doctor’s.

Pearson insists that she and Kate are entirely different people, though some of the principles in “I Don’t Know How She Does It” are universal. “The crux of the book is captured in one line in the novel,” Pearson says: “Women hold the puzzle of family life in their heads.”

Pearson launched Kate Reddy as a weekly column for the Telegraph in London, where she lives with her family. With her first column, Pearson was inundated with mail and Kate Reddy moments. Critics have called her the next Bridget Jones, or Bridget Jones 10 years later. Marjorie Williams, in her review of the novel in the Washington Post, wrote, “Here, at last, is the definitive social comedy of working motherhood.” Kate Betts in the New York Times took it a bit more seriously, calling it a “painfully sad story about the sordid disparity between the ideal and the reality of ‘having it all.’ ”

Both are true: The novel is a roller coaster of tension, humor, despair and pain (leaving sick or sad children to go to business meetings on the other side of the world) as Kate Reddy struggles to make it as a 36-year-old asset manager at a stodgy London firm. She has two children, a boy 17 months and a 5-year-old girl. Her husband, Richard, is a somewhat unsuccessful architect who tries pathetically to get his wife’s attention for months before walking out.

Pearson’s husband is Anthony Lane, the well-known film critic for the New Yorker. . Pearson swears that he in no way resembles Richard. The couple are thinking of leaving London for New York and have begun to look at schools for their kids, ages 7 and 3. Pearson is thinking seriously about having a third child, so her life must not resemble Kate’s too closely: Kate would probably rather be flayed alive than have another.

And Pearson is a journalist, not a money manager, though journalism can still be a haven for Neanderthal policies regarding parental leave and working motherhood. Even so, Pearson is more interested in the biological hard-wiring that seems to place the most stress in family care on the woman. The politics is an extension of cultural assumptions and traditional division of labor, including emotional labor.

Miramax paid $2 million for the book’s film rights, and while Pearson would like to stay out of it, she has become a little protective of Kate. “Everyone sees herself in Kate, which I love,” she says over a glass of wine on Abbott Kinney Boulevard in Venice. “There is nothing more wonderful than children,” she says. “Being a mother is a creative act.”

So is writing a novel, and there were many moments when the two competed mightily in Pearson’s life. “A man can really focus and tunnel in on a project; a woman is constantly distracted. The largest piece I’d ever written was 5,000 words. This was really an excavation of self, which made it acutely exhausting. I’ll never write another.”

Pearson put Kate in the heart of London’s “City,” or Wall Street equivalent, because “it is really the heart of the beast.” Is it any worse in London than here for a woman to work in an office? “I don’t think so,” says Pearson thoughtfully. “I think it might be worse in America.” But London has its share of horror stories. “In England, you’ve got the guys who were beaten and sodomized in school and they think everyone should have to fight to survive.” A woman lawyer Pearson knows said it was better to claim a cocaine addiction as an excuse for dropping work rather than admitting anything to do with children.

“Only the childless have had bad reactions to this novel,” she says, after hearing a quote from the review that ran in the Independent, in which Joan Smith accuses Kate of being a “poor little rich girl” and Pearson of “1970s feminism.”

“We’re supposed to feel like they are doing us a favor if they let us come back to work at all after having children,” Pearson paraphrases a character in her novel, Jill, who, before dying, writes her husband a lengthy memo about how to run the family life ... what cycle to use so socks won’t shrink, etc.

“All I knew was that I didn’t want my mother’s life,” says Pearson, who says her mother was woefully overqualified for housewifery. “There are two kinds of mothers: resentful and guilty. I’d rather be guilty.”

Pearson feels the book has been particularly well received (it hit No. 7 on Amazon and No. 8 on both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times bestseller lists, next to Tom Clancy and Stephen King) because it is more of a laugh than a rant. Above all, we are not supposed to sound shrewish. We are not supposed to complain. That might sound too “feminist.”

Pearson, at least, has irony if not hope. She finds the book tour exhausting, even if she does get to, as Kate so longs for, “sleep alone.” But she doesn’t mind sticking it out. “The one thing I can’t do is die,” she says. “They need me too much.”