Brigid Schulte has baked cupcakes until 2am. She has carried her BlackBerry on school field trips, hyperventilating with fear that she would be fired, then gone back to work until 4am after her children were in bed. Her refrigerator is broken, her To Do list never seems to get any shorter, and the laundry pile in the upstairs hallway often looms waist-high... She is not proud of this. And she worries that, though she tells her nine-year-old daughter that she can be anything she wants when she grows up, she is already beginning to think the cost is too high: that it is simply not possible, as a woman, to be anything you want to be, have a family, and still have time to breathe. So when Brigid met an eminent sociologist who studies time, and he told her that she enjoyed thirty hours of leisure each week, she thought her head was going to pop off.
Overwhelmed is a funny, eye-opening and urgent book about burning our candles at both ends and in the middle. It is a book about busy-ness and the near-impossibility of pressing the 'pause' button on life. Exploring everything from the wiring of the female brain to male/female income distribution to the current state of gender equality in the workplace and home.
