Interview

Allison Pearson discusses why she wrote her immensely successful first novel about a high powered woman juggling business and family commitments, her suggestions for other women looking to climb the corporate ladder and the animosity between 'working women' and 'stay at home mothers'.

This is your first novel. What made you decide to write it?
I read a Stress Survey in Good Housekeeping magazine two years ago. It said that all that most working women wanted for Mother's Day was a bit of time to themselves. It also said they were too tired to have sex with their husbands and felt they were failing both at work and as a parent. I thought about my life and the lives of my friends with young children and I realized we were all being driven crazy by the pressure we were under juggling work and family. I thought it was a great subject - borderline farce, but full of incredibly poignant moments as you find yourself torn between responsibility to your children and the office. I wrote an article about working mothers in my opinion column in the London Evening Standard and I got literally hundreds of letters from women, all saying: That's My Life! It felt as though I'd opened a small door onto a parallel world and on the other side was this huge amount of unacknowledged feeling.

Then, I attended a discussion on work-life balance at the London Business School and the professional women in the room started to share their stories. One lawyer stood up and said she had intercepted a memo from ...