How Hard Can It Be? By Allison Pearson

In juggling work, home and kids this Easter hols it was great to have a bit of down time to finish the novel How Hard Can It Be? By Allison Pearson.  My first encounter with Kate Reddy was about fifteen years ago. I was married, working full-time developing a distance learning masters in archives and librarianship and had been recommended the book by an admirer who felt it told a certain truth about the life of working mothers. Not being a parent of young children at the time, I shared little in common with the main character of Kate but I observed the madness she went through. Her role as a mother was deemed incompatible with being a financial fund manager and while this was often very painful for her it was usually very funny for the reader. Kate tried to hide her parenthood role at work and continued to compete or at least participate at the school gate (everyone remembers the hatchet job on the shop bought mince pies for the school fair). I was also struck by razor-sharp details such as how much travel was involved and the inordinate length of the working day – were you expected to see your family if you had an ambitious career? Apparently not, Kate comes into contact with her children mostly late at night.

Fast forward fifteen years, Kate Reddy returns. Her career took a twist and a turn. She stepped out of the rat race. Time has not stood still for me either. As I pick up the sequel I have a few more things in common with our heroine than I did on her first outing. I’m still married and my husband and I have had three children. I’ve left higher education. I’ve taken a career break. I’ve cared for an elderly relative. I’ve returned from a career break and taken a part-time job. Like Kate, I grapple with the pressures of being an older woman looking for work where my age and experience are not immediately viewed as assets. I worry about kids and online access. I have a teenager and young children and ailing parents. I too am a sandwich woman.

Bearing this in mind, I was very interested to see the relauncher tale play out in fiction. We meet Kate as she returns to the workplace after a leaving her career for family reasons.

In the novel we encounter her again just before her fiftieth birthday. Each member of her family is presenting her with concerns. Her husband Richard is retraining as a counsellor and she feels she needs to earn some money quickly after playing the role of ‘present parent’ for the past seven years. Highly qualified Kate joins Women Returners, a support group of wives and mothers, that tries to assist with making all the homemaking and childrearing skills of the past however many years ‘translate to employment’. Kate is a very successful relauncher, she manages to secure a good job quickly, with rewarding pay (‘the money’s good, better than I thought’) at the very hedge fund she founded. Her earlier successful career did not count for nothing. (The offer was made slightly more believable by being a temporary maternity post but Kate was extremely lucky all the same to get the very first job outside freelance that she tried for!)

Kate is concerned that her age will be held against her. She pretends to be 42 instead of 49. Youth is increasingly valued in the library profession. Yet while the new or young graduate has a distinct advantage in hiring this does not prevent Kate from getting back in. A few gym sessions here and a bit of work on getting her story straight in her head there and she manages to believe in herself enough to bring herself back.

I did identify very much with the idea that knowledge of family and kids can help in job roles and shouldn’t be so easily dismissed. I was a personal tutor in my previous library career and thought I had good people skills but these are even stronger now than when I was in my twenties. If you, in Kate’s words, ‘understand what it’s like for a client to get married, to lose a parent, to have miscarriages, to divorce, for kids to struggle and for parents to be scared for them’ it’s likely that you will relate to a wide variety of people. Employers are missing out if they choose not to value and recognise skills and experiences developed through caring responsibilities as well as more formal paid work.

The professional me enjoyed the fact that Kate refers to her memory as a man called ‘Roy’ and thinks of him as a librarian or archivist, shuffling around in her head finding her memories. Unfortunately my libraryreturner wages wouldn’t run to £100 for a Shaper suit, even for an interview. ‘Lunchtime lipo’ is definitely off the table. Kate is definitely a middle-age woman in a far more comfortable income bracket than my own! Despite this, it’s hard not to identify with Kate as a character and with her personal challenges even if I was occasionally frustrated that she didn’t see what was going on around her or reacted in a way I perhaps wouldn’t have (e.g. would I let Ben watch Game of Thrones?). And I haven’t even mentioned her perspective on the menopause, raising kids in the digital age, the marital relationship, self-harm and body image, the various sibling relationships, the different mid-life crises, former lovers, building projects etc!

All in all, I really appreciated having a fiction book to read about returning to work that I could relate to. There are times on this journey when it’s easy to believe that you’re a has-been, unemployable, been out too long, your skills are not relevant or as the character Sally observes un revenant, the French for ghost. Allison Pearson is one of the few authors to tackle this subject in this manner. The novel is humorous and poignant; I often laughed out loud, probably to the annoyance of everyone around me and not surprisingly shed a few tears. The novel doesn’t address quite how tough it can be to return, how difficult it can be to successfully gain a new post at the appropriate level, and it won’t help you find employment. But it does give a fictionalised account of the struggle of being an older woman returning to the workplace after being at home for a while. Would recommend!