After I said my piece, there was a silence — possibly a panicked, “who let her in” silence — and then everyone spoke at once. Sarah Jessica Parker finally threw up her hands and said nervously, “I’m really not shirking it.” Then she asked the PR person to step in. That’s when everyone started telling me to just have babies.
I was at a panel after a screening of I Don’t Know How She Does It, hosted by Moms In The City, and the audience was a weird amalgam of traditional journalists and mombloggers. It was the latter group that dominated. As Slate’s Jessica Grose pointed out, “SJP—who it must be said, has the highest EQ of any celebrity I’ve ever seen in person—correctly intuited that the crowd really wanted to talk to her, rather than listen to her answer the moderators’ boiler plate questions.” Yes, and she was unfailingly classy, smart, and sweet while doing it. She delicately acknowledged her unusual privilege when the moderators wanted to give her credit for being the ultimate working mom. She smiled and listened to mothers introduce themselves by the number of kids they had and entreat moms not to judge each other so hard.
When I got the mic, I started out by speaking personally — the gathering had taken on a real group-therapy vibe, so I went with it. “I don’t yet have kids but I would like to have kids. I’m one of five and my mother worked,” I said, and I didn’t remember harboring any resentments against my mom like the daughter in the movie. But.
“I have to be honest and say that when I was watching the movie and reading the book I felt terrified and intimidated,” I went on. “And there is this moment where [Parker’s character] Kate is talking to Olivia Munn’s character, telling her she can do it, even though I don’t know why she needs to do it right then. So I’m curious how do you balance being really honest about the fact that it’s really challenging, with scaring younger women?” [Spoiler ahead.]
“And second of all, how did you decide to have Olivia Munn’s character keep the baby instead of having an abortion?”
***
There are many virtuous, overtly feminist things about I Don’t Know How She Does It. Like its protagonist, the movie tries very hard. People say things — directly to the camera! — about the double standard for working women and men. But as in any such discussion about women’s lives, there’s always a negotiation between being honest about balancing high-pressure work with a family, and deterring others from trying to manage that very balance. In the case of IDKSHDI, this is partly because the style is intentionally, well, stressful. As David Edelstein wrote, Allison Pearson’s novel’s “whirligig rhythms make you feel as if you’re multitasking just reading the book.”
The movie is just as frenetic as the book, but in its Americanization — or SJP-ization — it’s less fun. Gone is most of the ballsy, acerbic humour. The book’s “attempt to be size 10” list-making heroine now has SJP’s tiny waist; fine, that’s Hollywood. But the trash-talking, fuck-it-all ambivalence is also gone, replaced by a sort of highly-organized woman-child who desperately wants to please everyone and gazes starry-eyed into her husband’s face roughly a half-dozen times. Almost all wit about the ironies of modern female existence is replaced with… slapstick physical comedy and gimmicks.
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