[...] There is, in these pages, no sense of a woman comfortable in the world, a woman at ease. "Don't smile so much, sit up straight," she admonishes "Think about why I bite my nails at the movies.." How is it possible that anyone is this self-conscious? And how is it possible that this degree of consciousness could be fruitful?

[...] For a woman who had always believed in her own exceptionality, who had defined herself by her will to be different, to rise above, the terrifying democracy of illness is one of its most painful aspects. [...]

When we talk about the three-martini lunch these days, it is with a sort of dismissive contempt, tinged with a pleasurable thrill of superiority. How much more sensible we are than them! How much healthier! How much more prolific! "How did anyone get any work done?" someone will invariably ask. But maybe that's the wrong question, or maybe the kind of work they got done was a different kind of work, or maybe that is not the highest and holiest standard to which we can hold the quality of life.

[...] Hillary has a much more comfortable relation to younger, blue-collar women [...] the women most like her, the demographic most similar in their education and achievements, that have the most difficulty with her. This is curious. It makes one wonder whether there is an element of competitiveness to the dislike, a question beneath the surface: why her and not me? [...]

[...] the woman with the baby on her Facebook page [...] this style of effacement, this voluntary loss of self, comes naturally to her. Here is my pretty family, she seems to be saying, I don't matter anymore.

Badinter has referred to herself as a "fanatic of clarity"; and at times her commitment to clarity, her desire to overresolve or over-pin down, can be a bit constricting. (I prefer [...] what Elizabeth Hardwick referred to as Simone de Beauvoir's "brilliant confusion"--that is, the willingness to tolerate enlivening conflicts and complexities.)

Likewise children deliver us from the pressure of our ambitions, the shadows of our failures. I often think of Geoff Dyer's brutal, bravura passage in Out of Sheer Rage. In describing his decision not to have children, he writes, "People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really wanted is a compound of all those thwarting circumstances ... That's why children are so convenient: you have children because you are struggling to get by as an artist--which is actually what being an artist means--or failing to get on with your career. Then you can persuade yourself that children had prevented you from having this career that had never looked like working out."