SYLVIA HEWLETT’S BOOK “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children” has gotten publicity all over the place, but it’s still not selling. Publicity is useful for selling books, in that it’s hard to sell them without it, but it’s what we lawyers call a “necessary but not sufficient condition.”

Why isn’t it selling? Apparently, women find it depressing.

UPDATE: Reader R.Z. German writes:

Maybe women aren’t reading it because they disagree with the data, the analysis and the conclusions.

One point that hit me & my 40-ish friends: Hewlett is still painting women as passive victims of society & corporate America. Absurd. The choices we all face are tough, and books that either serve to inspire guilt over choices we made or anxiety over choices to be made may not be what women (and men) want to read. My thoughtful friends recognize that decisions about career, family etc, were hard to make the, and are hard to change 20 years later, but that there is fulfillment, happiness, etc, in either path

(or a hybrid betwixt the two).

Yeah, there’s a whiff of 1987 about the whole enterprise, it’s true.