(2 of 2)
Kate has been called Bridget Jones five years later. But Kate is a grownup, sharp and observant yet wise and sentimental, something Bridget can never be. Feminists may hate the fact that Kate quits her job after deciding that you can't have it all. But, by the way, it's not male or female but merely childish to think otherwise. Pearson says she has sackfuls of mail from women who reject what they have seen in the boardroom. "Who wants to sit at ludicrous meetings in some testosterone jungle," Pearson asks, "and think of our children as problems to be handled?" She didn't make Kate a journalist like herself because, she says, "it's not ball breaking enough. I wanted a place where Human Resources has a policy for dealing with mothers similar to their one for dealing with cocaine users, except they believe there's a cure for the drug addicts."
Pearson chats away for an hour on the phone, after subduing two children overly excited by a rare visit to New York City. There's not a dull moment in her conversation, just as there's not a dead page in her book. Pearson is married to New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, whom she squarely places in the hunter-gatherer category. He pitches in, she says, but "until they program men to notice you're out of toilet paper, a happy domestic life will always be up to women."
During the months when she was writing, Lane "loaded the washing machine, cooked dinner, read Owl Babies 300 times and even found time to write the odd film review." Pearson concludes her acknowledgments by saying, "I don't know how he does it."