Jill Farrow is a typical suburban mom who has finally gotten her and her daughter's lives back on track after a divorce. She is about to remarry, her job as a pediatrician fulfills her---though it is stressful---and her daughter, Megan, is a happily over-scheduled thirteen-year-old juggling homework and the swim team. But Jill's life is turned upside down when her ex-stepdaughter, Abby, shows up on her doorstep late one night and delivers shocking...

Ten years after leaving high-power jobs to raise their children, four New York friends enter their forties while struggling with the differences between their past ideals and their present realities.

"From the best-selling author of Maine, a gorgeous, compulsively-readable novel that tells the story of the complex relationship between two women, Elisabeth, a privileged new mother and writer attempting to find her footing after childbirth, and Sam, the idealistic, working-class college student she hires to nanny her young son"--

"When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted to have children, I always came back to this formula: If no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendships, art. I would not have invented child-rearing. Motherhood treats the most universal and consequential decision of early adulthood--whether to have children--with the candour, originality and wit that have won Sheila Heti international...