I must admit that some part of me—maybe the same one that cheekily declared myself "something newer"—feels a kind of adolescent rebelliousness when reading these finger-wagging books. I want to put on a sparkly leotard and high-kick my way out from under these heavy concerns. At times I feel like Jade, the teenager in Helen Simpson's short story "Golden Apples" (from her excellent collection Getting a Life), who observes with disdain: "She would never be like her mother, making timetables and lists ... lost forever in a forest of twitching details with her tense talk of juggling and her self-importance about her precious job and her joyless 'running the family.'"

And yet it's not simply an immature instinct that drives me to Simpson. I crave a narrative that captures the woolly contradictions without having to shoehorn them into a tidy thesis. Simpson's book should be required reading alongside the nonfiction tomes about work-life balance. Together they paint a vivid portrait of the impossible upheaval of motherhood and our eternal grasp for resolution.

Simpson nimbly captures the countless ways to feel maternal emotion. Another story, "Café Society," reveals the inner thoughts of two mothers, Sally and Frances. "It was good for the girls to see their mother out working in the real world, [her husband would say] when she talked of feeling torn apart," Frances recalls. "There's no need to feel guilty, he would [say], with Godlike compassion. It's not guilt, you fool, [she would think]. It's the unwelcome awareness that being daily ripped in half is not good." Pair this with Bennetts's question—"If your husband divorces you or drops dead, was it really such a great idea to stay home if you can't afford to buy groceries for your kids?"—and you see just how complicated the whole equation has become. It might be more fiscally responsible to keep your full-time job with an hour commute as the mother of two, but it might also finish you off emotionally.

Of course, Simpson, as a writer of fiction, is blessedly exempt from offering solutions, whereas these nonfiction books are required to guide us. At their worst, they offer overboard scenarios: Divorce! Bankruptcy! Bad sex lives! But brave the wilds and you can find some sound advice. Bennetts, for example, recommends that women do volunteer work that further educates them in their fields of interest during the time they take off from work. Warner outlines a government policy that would provide Americans with institutions to help with child care instead of leaving families so completely to their own devices. Even Hirshman makes a useful point: Be clear and practical about what you want from marriage and work before beginning a family (though it's hard to hear it over her manic roar).

The experience of motherhood is unwieldy, particularly in this new high-stakes atmosphere of one-wrong-move-and-you're-out. Navigating it requires a vigilant and, at times, lonely sense of self. Perhaps that is also motivating our current cry for help. As much as we yearn to be good mothers, we also yearn to be fulfilled human beings. Friedan herself said it best when autographing her first reader copy of The Feminine Mystique: "Courage to us all on the new road."