"For a group of four New York friends, the past decade has been defined largely by marriage and motherhood - but it wasn't always that way. Growing up, Amy, Jill, Roberta, and Karen were told by their mothers that their generation would be different. "You girls will be able to do just about anything you want," Amy's mother had predicted. And for a while, this was true. Amy and her friends went to good colleges and began careers as lawyers, film producers, bankers, and artists. But after they got married and had babies, they decided for a variety of reasons to stay home, temporarily, to raise them. Now, ten years later, at age forty, with their children older and no longer in need of their constant presence, and without professions through which to define themselves, the four friends wonder how they got here - in lives so different from the ones they were brought up to expect - and why they have chosen to stay so long." "When Amy embarks on a friendship with a charismatic and successful working mother of three whom the others think of as an "advertisement for work and motherhood and glamour and a refusal to compromise," a lifetime's worth of concerns opens up, both practical and existential. As Amy's entanglement in this woman's complicated life increases, it drives a wedge between Amy and her husband, as well as her and her friends, until a series of startling events ultimately forces the four friends to confront the choices they've each made and, for some of them, changes the landscape entirely."--BOOK JACKET.