I heard about this book from a friend's share of the Today Show's overview on Facebook and was quite intrigued. The author, Katrina Alcorn, chronicles her experience as a working mom and how she eventually broke down after trying to keep everything going- career, kids, relationship, household. Ms. Alcorn and her story are easy to relate to as an 'average' mom. I read this book right after reading Lean In and found it to be much more representative of my experience as a working mom. I also thought it was fun to compare and contrast the two books. They are worlds apart in some ways and very similar in others. I think the two represent the diversity that exists within the working mom experience as there are so many variables that shape the experience and lead to distinctly different pain points for each mom.
Overall, I thought it was well written and did a wonderful job of sharing her story. Alcorn is a talented writer and captured the many facets of being a working mom in a way that drew me in as a reader. I was fully engrossed in the book after the first couple of pages and had a difficult time putting the book down to tend to other things!
My criticisms, while not as deep as the ones that I had of Lean In, still are important especially in the context of the larger working mom conversation. First, this was one woman's experience that represented a combination of factors that may or may not be present for other working mom's. This book is a memoir and I had to remind myself that there would be parts that were just that- a memoir. Her experience, while representative of a larger group of working mom's, still is the experience of a single person and can't be assumed to represent the experience of any other working mom's. It would be super interesting to read a book that includes the experiences of many working mom's and highlights similarities that exist across a larger group. I feel like using a research study framework would be useful in really furthering the working mom conversation as our experiences have largely been left to individual memoirs and blogs.
Second, I liked that she included some very short sections in each chapter that discussed specific topics from a higher level, however, I was left wanting more from those sections. I really liked how Sandberg included information from the research community throughout her book and focused less on her personal experience and more on what the research says about working mothers. I think that Alcorn's book could have more credibility in the working mom conversation if it included more research driven information and data. The book description touts the book as being more research based and it simply wasn't that.
I enjoyed this book and found myself relating to many of Alcorn's experiences. I think that for the working mom conversation there needs to be more than individual mom's writing about their experience. There needs to be more research driven commentary and that really needs to be a bigger part of the conversation. I also agree with Sandberg that men and women need to be part of the conversation as real change will take a collective effort. Alcorn also says this (or alludes to it) in her book. Advancing the needs of modern families is not a women's issue as it often is cast off to be- it is an everyone issue and will take a collective effort to create real change.
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