The very premise of Hewlett's book seems disingenuous. She was going to write a book celebrating women turning 50 at the millennium, she says, interviewing fabulous female luminaries and asking them about their success. But the list she compiled happened to contain exactly zero women with children. Television news queen Diane Sawyer, opera singer Jessye Norman, playwright Wendy Wasserstein (who later gave birth to a daughter), legal scholar Patricia Williams and a host of lesser-known corporate and academic standouts -- of the 10 women she talked to, none were mothers, and "none of these women had chosen to be childless." (There are a lot of these italicized emotional punch lines in the book.)

I found that unbelievable. Hewlett's own data shows that half of all 40-plus ultra-high achievers are mothers, but her list of 10 somehow didn't include even one? In the book's margin I began maniacally jotting a list of 50-ish overachievers who have children -- television news stars Jane Pauley, Cokie Roberts, Judy Woodruff and Barbara Walters; singers Patti Smith, Carly Simon and Tina Turner; children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman; social critic Barbara Ehrenreich; Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer and several more; even Hewlett's editor at Talk/Miramax, the formidable Tina Brown. It was harder in corporate America, but I eventually came up with Goldman Sachs' Abby Joseph Cohen, e-Bay's Meg Whitman, Oxygen's Geraldine Laybourne. I even found an opera singer, Frederika Von Stade.

I have no evidence Hewlett deliberately chose childless celebrities, and I don't doubt her larger point -- that 50-ish female standouts are more likely to be childless than their male counterparts, and not because they chose to be. It's been well-documented through the years. But I do think she exaggerates the degree of the problem, as well as its impact on women, through her selective use of anecdotal as well as survey data that confirms her pre-existing prejudice.

For instance, one has to look hard to find the fact that 20 percent of all American women over 40 are childless, a rate that's doubled in just 20 years. There's a gap between them and their high-achieving sisters (women who earn more than $65,000), 33 percent of whom are childless, but it was frankly less than I expected. Likewise, the fact that one in four 40-plus male high achievers, compared with one in three women, are also childless got less attention than it deserved. I was enormously encouraged by the fact that the high-achieving female professionals surveyed who are "entrepreneurs" -- they work for themselves as sole proprietors or run their own businesses -- have childless rates (22 percent) almost identical to the overall population.

The book's most questionable piece of data has come in for some criticism, and that's her finding that only 14 percent of these childless high achievers actually chose not to have children. It's worth paying attention to the way she derived her number, because it shows the way her survey stacked the deck. She asked respondents whether they knew in college that they definitely didn't want children, and only 14 percent knew that then -- leaving the impression that the other 86 percent were sentenced to childlessness and lament it.

Of course, few of us knew what we wanted in college; if our lives were judged by what we wanted then, most of us would probably be deemed disappointed failures. (Oh my God, I forgot to write my novel!) Strangely, Hewlett's survey failed to ask a straightforward question about whether childless women are unhappy they didn't become mothers, or whether, looking back, they'd make different choices in order to have children. No doubt many of the childless women she surveyed would answer yes to both questions, but I'd bet it would be a whole lot less than 86 percent.

Likewise, she looks at women like me, who have children but would have liked more -- a quarter of all 40-plus high achievers with kids say that -- and sees in us "a mother lode of pain and yearning." Oy. That's the problem with the whole book -- Hewlett can't distinguish between an occasional twinge of loss, and life-darkening despair, when it comes to women's regrets about children.

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