When I Don’t Know How She Does It was published in 2002 I ran out and bought a copy, just like virtually every other new mother of my acquaintance. I had a toddler, a newborn, a job, a sleep deficit so big I was easily deflated by things like ridges in my bath soap. Stealing an hour here and there to read a novel was deliciously self-indulgent, a defiant antidote to the just-keep-moving nature of my life. By the last page, however, I felt as if I’d been beaten with a cudgel of pink marshmallows.
Instead of feeling a kinship with protagonist Kate Reddy, struggling to balance motherhood with a career in London’s financial services sector, I felt ridiculed. I harbor too much trauma to remember the exact details, but Reddy spends a lot of time doing things like reaching into her purse for her lipstick only to pull out a Nuk, or realizing mid-presentation that her power suit is slicked with spit-up.
She knows the stay-at-home Mothers Superior at preschool judge her, so she mashes away at the supermarket cake she bought for the potluck, trying to make it look imperfect enough to be homemade. She feigns sleep to get out of sex, which she finds far less enticing than adding to her closet full of chi-chi pumps.
I know I was meant to sympathize with the novel’s send-up moments, but — come on. I don’t know anyone who addresses their ambivalence about the experience of becoming a mother with a pair of Jimmy Choos. Just what do Jimmy Choos look like, anyhow? Anything like the Polartec scuffs most mothers seem to end up in?
If I had found any comfort in Reddy’s boardroom dramas and nanny tussles, it would have evaporated when she blithely resolved everything by quitting her job and trading her posh city flat for a little place in the country. Her sex drive was even restored within a page. Presto — real womanhood!
Meet Momlit, spawn of Chicklit. (There’s a wee spot on the shelf for Dadlit, but don’t look for it to catch fire: Marketers are well aware that 85 percent of novels are sold to women.) The modern publishing house is far more interested in marketing formulas than the modern mother’s ennui. And it’s working overtime to keep hold of the generation of women who devoured Bridget Jones’s Diary and its countless imitators. There are exceptions, of course — my personal favorite is “Sex and the City” — but as a general rule, both genres are so loaded with empty calories, the slightest overconsumption will leave you nauseated and twitchy.
What a disappointment, particularly because it’s such fertile ground. There were moments during Gwendolen Gross’s The Other Mother, for instance, where I wanted to close the book and have a good cry. Its two suburban narrators — one pregnant at the outset, the other already the stay-at-home mother of three — are drawn to each other with a familiar hunger. Equally recognizable is their mutual confusion when fissures appear in their friendship.
Neither is anywhere near the Britney Spears level of mothering, but each is convinced the other is both judging and worthy of judgment herself. Pretty soon their New Jersey cul-de-sac is awash in recriminations over who works and who doesn’t, and, in a plot twist only the truly masochistic can suffer, dead woodchucks.
The fear and loathing that drives the storyline is one of the reasons why Momlit may manage to be every bit the publishing payday Chicklit was, and yet far less satisfying. When Cynthia Nixon had bad sex on “Sex and the City,” her face alone was worth the price of the box set: there’s no indictment of us out there in the viewing audience, there’s kinship. We’re there with her girlfriends, sipping cosmopolitans, as Miranda Hobbes spills all.
But Lara, the sarcastic, profane mom in Tales From the Crib, keeps going to her Mommy and Me class even though it means weekly torture at the hands of a clique of shrews she calls the Mommunists, which makes no sense since they do a lot of shopping. She goes home and wonders whether the nanny has put a voodoo spell on her. (Nannies are a Momlit must-have — so much potential for interpersonal tension and self-loathing.)
In the interest of public service, I did try to make it at least a chapter or two into Balancing Act and They Did it With Love — “Agatha Christie meets ‘Desperate Housewives,’” the press packet enthused — but after a couple of pages I’d find myself starting to wonder whether there was a new episode of “Real Housewives of Orange County” on the Tivo.
Have you ever heard of a book packager? It’s someone who tracks book sales and uses the data to come up with a saleable concept that can be spun into first a novel and then a movie or TV show and then a sequel. Someone’s eventually hired to write up the story, but the starting point is a target demographic. If Carson McCullers were trying to get The Heart is a Lonely Hunter published today, it would seem less like a landmark work of literature than a bundle of lost revenue streams.
Don’t believe me? Search “I Don’t Know How She Does It” on Amazon.com. Customers who bought it also bought Yummy Mummy, Slummy Mummy; The Yoga Mamas; Momzilla; Gucci Gucci Coo; Good in Bed; and two different books titled Tales From the Crib. There’s more pink on their collective covers than on Pepto-Bismol’s assembly line.
I don’t know whether any of the books mentioned herein were in fact midwifed by marketers. It doesn’t matter. No one likes to be marketed to with a blunt instrument, especially not when the territory in question is such a nuanced, bittersweet corner of the soul. I know what a Bugaboo costs and what it’s like to find oneself scoping strangers’ strollers at the mall. The only thing uglier than realizing you actually imagine this tells you something about their life is realizing you’ve indicted them for their choice.
For me, this is Momlit’s biggest failure: All this expertly marketed pink fluff could easily keep the conversation about the culture of modern motherhood mired at this level. It’s as unsatisfying as every other variant on the Mommy Wars theme: tantalizingly close to reality and yet so very far from the truth.
In the final chapters of The Other Mother, each protagonist comes to see how her suspicions about the other have more to do with her own self-doubt than with anything that actually transpired. Real enough, but you can’t just end a story there, can you? And so just as Kate Reddy solved the unsolvable by opening a dollhouse business, the Other Mothers get a vague resolution when a deus ex machina involving 9/11 makes their differences look petty.
Actually, it all looks petty, the whole pink lot of it, when compared to the real reasons why parenting is especially fraught at the moment — the high cost of good care, the inflexible workplace, the school system’s indifference to families, and so on. This isn’t the stuff of ripping good yarns. Can’t you just hear the manuscript buyers? Who wants to read all that dull, depressing stuff anyhow?
I would. Wouldn’t you?
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
I Don’t Know How She Does It
By Alison Pearson
Knopf, 2002, $13.95 (paperback)
The Other Mother: A Novel
By Gwendolen Gross
Crown Books, 2007, $23
Tales From the Crib
By Risa Green
Penguin, 2006, $12.95
They Did it With Love
By Kate Morgenroth
Plume, 2008, $14
Balancing Acts
By Kimberly Stuart
NavPress, 2006, $12.99
