I Don't Know How She Does It is the movie for unsung mothers everywhere

Allison Pearson, fresh from the premiere of her Hollywood film, explains the heart-breaking inspiration for her book about working mothers – an extract from which we print below – and answers critics who deemed it 'anti-women’

Even by the standards of an overstretched working mother, it’s been quite a week. As I type, I’m in an airport departure lounge, returning home from New York and the premiere of I Don’t Know How She Does It. The film is based on my novel of the same name, and stars Sarah Jessica Parker as Kate Reddy – high-flying fund manager, wife to Richard and mother to Emily and Ben. Ten years ago, my novel was hailed as “the definitive social comedy of working motherhood”. Oprah called it “a Bible for the working mum”.

Against such a backdrop, perhaps it’s to be expected that there were grumbles. One female commentator even deemed the film “anti-women’’. Well, ignore the snipers. Yesterday I sat in a cinema full of mothers – both the office and the stay-at-home variety – and everyone was either laughing or crying with recognition at Kate’s struggle to balance it all. All the women said how glad they were to watch a blockbuster that was made just for them.

One of Kate’s greatest fears is that she is missing out on the day-to-day minutiae of her children’s lives. The part of the book which exemplifies this fear more than any other was, in fact, the first chapter I wrote and one of few episodes that does not appear in the film: a painfully moving story of a woman who had given up work to take care of her three boys and tragically died of cancer. Jill Cooper-Clark’s death was to become the beating heart of my novel. I was interviewing women in the City of London a decade ago when one mentioned that her boss had recently lost his wife to breast cancer. Still shellshocked by grief, the man had found a letter in which his spouse of 20 years had outlined in great detail everything that he would need to take care of when she was gone. “I never realised how much she did,” he confessed sadly.

In the novel, that letter became Jill Cooper-Clark’s memo to Robin, her husband and Kate’s boss. Your Family: How it Works is my tribute to the unsung and largely unacknowledged loving and often numbing work which millions of mothers do every day because it is the woman who carries the puzzle of family life in her head; that great 3-D jigsaw of birthdays, shoe sizes, packed lunches, nutritious meals, carol concerts and chickenpox. It’s a paradox. Women make the world work in order that men can run it. I like to think that the Government’s decision to remove child benefit from women like Jill Cooper-Clark will look even meaner and more shortsighted after you’ve read Jill’s brisk but heartbreaking instructions to her wonderful but oblivious husband in the extract from the novel below. The phrase “she gave up work” has always struck me as ludicrous. Devoting your life to raising the next generation is the opposite of giving up. Anti-women? I’ll let you judge.

By Allison Pearson Telegraph.co.uk