A mother drops her daughter off at school. Photograph: AlamyCan the school gate really be a nest of vipers? According to the most hyped fiction release of the year, the answer is yes – and then some. The Hive by Gill Hornby depicts the battle for supremacy between Bea, Rachel, Melissa, Georgie and Heather at the gates of St Ambrose primary school as a festering morass of bitchery, oneupwomanship and competitive catering.
The author is the sister of Nick Hornby and wife of Robert Harris (Fatherland, Enigma). Predictably enough, the book sparked a bidding war and has already been dubbed "the Fifty Shades of 2013". In the novel, a gaggle of women is fixated by the effortless chic of "Queen Bea", the alpha female who drops mothers from her clique as insouciantly as she drops off bobbly Boden castoffs at the charity shop.
"The book is about queen bees, the rule of the clique and what that does to us," says Hornby, who based the book on her experiences in the home counties, where her four (now grownup) children went to school. These women probably exist, concludes one reviewer, "but whether any reader would choose them for company is another matter". One glance at angsty Mumsnet discussions suggests that in many pockets of the UK you don't get much choice about it. So never mind in fiction, how do you survive The Hive in real life?
1 Rise above the clique (unless you're a Queen Bea, of course, in which case you'll be thinking, "What clique?")
Hornby's inspiration for The Hive came from Mean Girls (screenplay by Tina Fey) which was in turn based on Rosalind Wiseman's non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, a sociological study of teenage girls' "popularity contest" relationships in high school. Wiseman argued that cliques stop girls from being themselves, harm their self-esteem and come to have a bearing on every situation in their lives. Hornby argues that you see the same thing in grown women all the time. Except, if anything, they're worse.
The term "queen bee syndrome" was coined in the 1970s by psychologists examining women succeeding in male-dominated working environments. More recent US surveys have found that, while men are equality-opportunity bullies, women target their own kind: female bullies target women 80% of the time. One survey of 1,000 working women found that 95% had been undermined by another woman. But is the school gate really comparable to working? After all, no one's job is on the line. On the one hand, The Hive is a slightly irritating caricature of women being bitchy and mothers being petty. On the other, there are 11,600 (bitchy and petty) threads on this subject on Mumsnet.
2 Treasure offensive remarks at drop-off and pick-up
The world of parenting is populated with fellow travellers who want to say strange, intrusive and sometimes downright offensive things about you and your children. Hornby reports someone saying to a friend about her children: "Aren't they just adorable? I'm so intrigued by the unusual size of their heads." Personal favourites: "Your son has a great vocabulary. But his cognitive skills are crap" (about a three-year-old). "Oh, I see you've graced us with your presence." (You get this if you work and only do school pick-up two or three times a week.) But at least it's better than being famous, according to actor Alison Steadman: "I used to pick my kids up from school, and some parents would look at me and say, really sarcastically: 'Oh, she's picking her children up!'"
3 Ignore rudeness: smile, smile, smile (but not in a fake way)
One of the biggest complaints about the school gate on Mumsnet is that mothers (and fathers) feel ignored, shut out or blanked by others. This is often in people's imaginations and can seem more like a hangover from their own schooldays rather than anything based in reality. But if you have a tendency towards paranoia then definitely don't move your child to a new school in the middle of term.
4 Beware the curse of the cupcake
Allison Pearson nailed the desperate quest for bake sale approval in I Don't Know How She Does It. Her heroine, Kate Reddy, bashes shop-bought stuff with a rolling pin. Tragic but understandable. Baking for school sales or catering for fundraising events is a nightmare. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you never bake anything, you'll get raised eyebrows and fake martyrdom: "Oh, that's OK if you don't have time this term …" If you do contribute, you'll be seen as some kind of desperate, envy-inducing Nigella wannabe trying to make everyone else feel inferior: "Did you bake those yourself? How on earth do you find the time?"
One top tip is to bake something that looks as though it contains nuts but actually doesn't and watch people go postal. I recommend brownies containing white chocolate drops that look like nuts. Cue millions of cries of "Have these got nuts in? You know this is a nut-free school? What other nuts have you brought on to the premises?"
Warning: Do not actually bake anything with nuts in it. If you do, you will cause some kind of international incident. And try not to cry when the ornate cake which you slavishly baked using ￡10 worth of ingredients is then sold for 50p because "there has to be something for everyone at the school fair, it's not just about raising money".
5 Wear what you want (including pyjamas)
On Mumsnet thread "So who is dreading the school gate 'fashion parade'?", several posters claim they have been sneered at for being too scruffy. One mum writes weepily: "Will my jeans and jumper surfice?" (sic). It's tempting to echo the feelings of UnquietDad: "Anyone who turns up at the school gate looking 'composed and confident' has too much bloody time on their hands." Worrying what other parents think of your outfit is foolish. Especially when they are probably too concerned about their own over-stretched tracksuit to care. Do not click on schoolgatestyle.com (yes, this is real – it mostly recommends colourful scarves). Do not wear high heels unless you are going to work. Do not buy anything from Boden. Do not compare yourself to celebrities on the school run such as Myleene Klass or Elle Macpherson. The best thing to do is to dress as messily as possible most of the time and then, once in a blue moon, come in wearing full makeup and a ball gown. Priceless double-takes.
6 Do not become class rep
The class reps look after the interests of the parents, liaise between home and school and organise coffee mornings and evening drinks for parents; they also spend a year going quietly mad. Some of them get Stockholm syndrome and volunteer to do it a second year. Or longer. They have to find volunteers for fairs, school trips, swimming and, most recently in our class, the circus. If you get through a year as class rep without having to register as Criminal Record Bureau-checked, it's a miracle. I repeat: do not become class rep. Or do become one and do nothing, thereby significantly reducing your own email traffic.
7 Say no to the PTA, the school quiz and sports day
Don't go to the school quiz. Or if you do, do not win. You will never be allowed to live it down. And it will be suggested that you used a mobile phone or you bribed the organiser or "revised in advance" (real accusation).
Beware "showing an interest" generally. If you ever go to one PTA meeting, you will be marked for life as a "joiner". Do not come to sports day wearing trainers. Participating in the mums' race reluctantly in bare feet is acceptable. But do not win.
8 A note to fathers
Hornby gives fathers a low profile in The Hive (mostly because her mothers are too busy competing to bed the new headmaster). This seems a bit pre-recession, though. Aren't there more dads at the school gate since the economic crisis? Still, I've yet to hear of a male class rep ever anywhere in the history of the universe. Any volunteers?
A woman demonstrates against the British government's 2012 decision to strip the London Metropolitan University of its right to sponsor visas for overseas students. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images