Great post Squiffy.
Oh, this combination of English literature and City career is too tempting for me to pass by!
I've read IDKHSDI and it annoyed the hell out of me. I fall squarely in her "situation" remit - as do a number of other people on this thread - and agree that it is "a City high flyer" as interpreted by a journalist, as Squiffy so rightly pointed out, and it doesn't ring true at all.
I attended an evening function that Allison Pearson was at and she did an after dinner talk about the "Kate Reddy" effect. I thought she was tripe, tbh. She said that she had done a lot of research and talked to a lot of women who sobbed when they talked to her about glass ceilings and how they never see their children. But I looked around and saw a large number of happy succesful City women who were cheerfully and reolutely going about their jobs mostly untroubled by this bilge.
The clear reason for Kate Reddy's problems was that her husband was not pulling his weight and that she had turned all the "support" she should be receiving into the problem not the solution - none of her husband, nanny or cleaner were actually assisting her or relieving her of any responsibility, while she was assuming all the responsibility of being major bread-winner and major child care provider. Of course something has to give in that scenario - but most people don't put themselves in that scenario.
Ditto re the mince pies. Actually our mince pies for the Christmas play were hand made by DH because - shock horror - not all husbands are useless gender stereo-types. Otherwise our nanny would have made them with the children. Or we would have ordered them in the weekly on-line shop and sent them in in their packet. That's what real people do.
There is an interesting angle here about who writes these books and what market they are aiming at. Allison Pearson clearly is saying - girls, you can't make it, however hard you try (there is not, as far as I can recall, a single succesful, happy sorted woman in it). Definitely a whiff of the Daily Mail about it.