Kate Reddy had it all: a nice home, two adorable kids, a good husband. Then her kids became teenagers (read: monsters). Richard, her husband, quit his job, taking up bicycling and therapeutic counseling: drinking green potions, dressing head to toe in Lycra, and spending his time?and their money?on his own therapy. Since Richard no longer sees a regular income as part of the path to enlightenment, it’s left to Kate to go back to work.  Companies aren’t necessarily keen on hiring 49-year-old mothers, so Kate does what she must: knocks a few years off her age, hires a trainer, joins a Women Returners group, and prepares a new resume that has a shot at a literary prize for experimental fiction.  When Kate manages to secure a job at the very hedge fund she founded, she finds herself in an impossible juggling act: proving herself (again) at work, dealing with teen drama, and trying to look after increasingly frail parents as the clock keeps ticking toward her 50th birthday.  Surely it will all work out in the end. After all, how hard can it be?  Hilarious and poignant, How Hard Can It Be? brings us the new adventures of Kate Reddy, the beleaguered heroine of Allison Pearson’s groundbreaking New York Times bestseller I Don’t Know How She Does I Allison Pearson’s first book, I Don’t’ Know How She Does It was a smash hit when it appeared in 2002. The story of a hedge fund manager who could juggle nine currencies in five time zones but wakes up at 1:37 am in a panic over the need to produce a homemade pie for her daughter’s school, Oprah called it “the national anthem for working mothers.”  

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