At 31, Julia Jamison* was the right age for marriage—old enough to know what she wanted, but young enough to wait a few years before having children. Ben, her fiancé, was a successful screenwriter; Jamison, a law school dropout who was currently unemployed, had sailed through a top Ivy League college and was contemplating her next career move.

Their wedding—an elaborate event studded with enough boldfaced names to fill a dozen gossip columns—seemed the perfect union of cultures as well as families. All reports indicated that the newlyweds were doing well—right up until a month before their first wedding anniversary.

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He wasn't my type. We worked together, and he kept asking me to do things with him, in a collegial sort of way. But when my friends asked if he might be a romantic possibility, I assured them that he wasn't my type at all. I had always been attracted to powerful older men —the kind who charm the pants off every woman they meet. You can imagine how well this worked out for me.

But Jeremy was a peer. Instead of being a generation older and far more successful than I, he was almost three … Read More

I spent many years establishing a rewarding professional life before having two children—just as my biological clock was winding down—and ever since then I've felt as though I won the lottery. A great career! A wonderful husband! Two beautiful, healthy children! Lucky me! Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that Having It All—the quintessential goal of recent generations of women—has gone out of fashion. Who knew?

One day I opened the newspaper to discover that today's young moms have nothing but scorn for the choices we baby boomers made. "The new breed of wife has learned from the '80s and … Read More

I was up half the night again, and it's all my husband’s fault. His invitation sounded so innocent at first. "Will you watch Nip/Tuck with me?" he asked disingenuously.

Brandishing the remote control, he might as well have been the devil, beckoning me with a seductive flick of his pitchfork. This time, however, I knew enough to resist his blandishments.

Having caught a glimpse of the previous week's coming attractions, in which a hack plastic surgeon and his evil assistant plan to kill off their handsome rival, Christian, I said firmly, "No way."

Even without murder plots, I find Nip/Tuck—an … Read More

As a reporter, I often travel on assignment. When my children were small, the prospect of my leaving town for a few days typically elicited great alarm from our family's nearest and dearest.

"Who will take care of the children!" they exclaimed, as if the little darlings had only one parent. When I replied that their father would doubtless make sure they didn’t starve to death while I was away, everyone from my women friends to my mother would simper adoringly, "Oh, you’re so lucky! Jeremy is soooo wonderful!"

Like my husband and me, our upstairs neighbors during those years, Amy and … Read More