After a 15-year hiatus, the queen of having it all is back.
Kate Reddy was last seen at the end of I Don’t Know How She Does It, Allison Pearson’s 2002 paean to time-poor working mothers, having quit her high-powered City job to move up north and save her marriage.
Now, with her 50th birthday fast approaching (“Countdown to invisibility: T minus six months and two days”), life has moved on for Kate but not perhaps as she might have hoped.
For a start, after seven years out of the job market, she is in need of gainful employment.
Her drippy but dependable husband Richard has taken a two-year unpaid career break so he can retrain as a mindfulness therapist.
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When he is not busy polishing his chakras, he is dressed head-to-toe in expensive cycling gear and speeding off on his bike.
Kate’s now-teenage children are another drain on the family finances as they strop around in a swirl of hormones and entitlement.
Then there is the crumbling house where the family now live that is the very definition of a money pit. So when a job comes up at her old firm, she jumps at the chance.
However an earlier disastrous interview, when her prospective employer was horrified by her advanced years, prompts Kate to knock seven years off her age on her CV.
“It wasn’t vanity, it was self-preservation,” she says.
But Kate’s memory is not what it used to be.
The “must remember” lists that peppered the first novel have been replaced by beseeching conversations with “Roy”, the imaginary personification of her memory loss.
Roy staffs the “dusty provincial library” that has replaced the “state-of-the-art digital retrieval system” that is her brain, and trying to keep track of the lie about her age is more difficult than she imagined.
So the scene is set for this warm and witty novel that tackles everything from ageism and elderly parents to the menopause and teenage “belfies” (that is bum selfies, for anyone over 20).
The plot fizzes along and while at times it is not hard to work out what is around the corner, there is much to enjoy as Kate negotiates her complicated existence.
But there is a melancholy note underneath all the laughs about the passing of time and the challenges faced by women in a society where they still have a sell-by date.
Pearson is especially astute when writing about motherhood. “History will pass its own verdict on whether modern parenting was a science of a fearful neurosis that filled the gap once occupied by religion.”
Sparkling, funny and poignant, this is a triumphant return for Pearson and hopefully not the last we will hear of Kate.