I know there are men like the jerk Dowd quotes, but life is too short to think about them. And I worry about the extent to which the culture is fixated on this problem. It's fine to wonder about the issue Hewlett has raised, but I see women wallowing in it. I practice what I think is a healthy denial on this question. The alternative, I think, is to walk around exuding an off-putting combination of entitlement and bitterness.

I felt most sympathy for the African-American professional women the book profiled, who Hewlett says have it worst: They're all desperately seeking single black professional men, who "are scarcer than hen's teeth," in Hewlett's words. But I also found myself wanting to encourage those sisters to date Latino businessmen, Asian social workers, white carpenters, black UPS guys. For all women, not just black women, the obsession with finding a man just like them -- the right race, age, religion; the right college, profession and income; the right taste in music and movies -- is probably as big a barrier to their finding a mate as the preference, among many men like them, for women who won't be "intimidating."

That said, I think Hewlett is right to encourage younger women to think about what they're ready to give up to have a successful marriage and family -- with any man. It's all sort of simple; it should go without saying, but I don't think it does. Ambitious professional women don't make enough time for anything besides their jobs, including themselves. But it takes time and intention to have a relationship; even more than that, to make a man feel loved.

More to the point of this book, nobody talks enough about the identity crisis that accompanies becoming a mother. I wish someone had made me think more about the trade-offs having children entails, so that I could have chosen to put my career second, for a while -- and I think I would have chosen that, had it felt like a choice -- rather than feel that it was forced on me.

Marriage and children require a lot of yielding that doesn't come naturally to alpha females. Both are enormous power struggles, and our instinct is to prevail, but that doesn't work in a family. Americans talk about power about as badly as they talk about sex, but there's a book to be written about the power trade-offs that a good relationship entails. It's a lot like sex, actually -- you have to try a lot of positions, experiment with submission, sometimes take turns satisfying yourselves, and most of all, learn to communicate.

Reading Hewlett's book I found myself thinking: What will I tell my daughter about all of this? Would I want her to read this book? My 20- and 30-something women friends are horrified by it. "I won't read it!" shuddered my brilliant, adorable, newly married 30-year-old friend, who I always thought was enviably sensible about the compromise marriage entailed; who I even thought might make (at least temporary) peace with letting her husband's career come first, while she had their children -- until her husband was recently laid off.

I also found myself wondering what someone would make of Hewlett's data if they approached it with an open mind. A few things jumped out at me: The data on high-achieving female entrepreneurs, whose fertility rates are about the same as the rest of their age cohort, was good news that Hewlett almost ignored. Clearly, the worst problems are for women at the very top levels of corporate America, where roughly half of all high-achieving female executives are childless, while only 19 percent of their male counterparts have no children.

That's no doubt unfair and ought to change. But to urge all ambitious young women to make professional and personal compromises based on the troubles of an otherwise enormously privileged, fairly tiny group of women seems strange. The advice I'd give my daughter, thanks to the survey data, would have less to do with blunting her spirit and intellect so as not to intimidate a mate than finding a career path where she can work for herself, and steer clear of dreary corporate America, until corporate America cleans up its act.

And significantly, Hewlett finds that childless career women aren't the only ones who are unhappy: Professional women who left the workplace to tend their family are also dissatisfied with their choices, but she doesn't spend much time talking about them. Fully two-thirds would like to pick up their careers. Maybe most intriguing, Hewlett's survey of almost 500 high-achieving men found that only 7 percent believed men could actually "have it all" -- defined loosely as the happy combination of marriage, kids and career -- while their high-achieving female counterparts were actually more optimistic about their own chances: 16 percent thought women could have it all.

Hewlett sneers a little at the one man she interviews who laments what his career did to his relationship with his children. To successful men, having it all means not knowing their children, she observes; to women it means not having children at all.

But I think she's too cynical. The only hope for marriage and family as we know it is to end the zero-sum battle of the sexes, and develop models of interdependent relationships where men and women get to take turns coming second and being in charge; being the caretaker, being the one cared for. I liked that this book hinted at some of those taboo topics. But in the end, it was a lot like the breathing exercises in my Lamaze class: well-intended, but not what you'll need when you're faced with the real thing

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