Around the World in Books / Wales

How One Woman Put Working Mothers On The Map Of Fiction

Dylan Thomas and ‘How Green Was My Valley’ used to be Wales’ main literary exports. Then came ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It’

Allison Pearson, who wrote ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It” / Credit: Knopf

This is the latest post in the daily “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing books about countries on six continents in alphabetical order of their country names. Xanadu isn’t a country but former city in Mongolia, but I’m slipping it in later today so I’ll have my “X.” Tomorrow: Yugoslavia

For generations, Wales had two literary standard-bearers. One was the poet Dylan Thomas. The other was the novelist Richard Llewellyn, whose saga of a Welsh mining town, How Green Was My Valley, was voted the favorite novel of 1940 by the American Booksellers Association and the movie version of which beat Citizen Kane for the best-picture Oscar.

Then the journalist Allison Pearson wrote a satire of sexual double standards in the workplace, I Don’t Know How She Does It, that became an international bestseller and a movie starring Sarah Jessica Parker. Her novel put frazzled working mothers on the literary map.

A native of Camarthenshire, Wales, Pearson went to Cambridge University, lives in…