While in college, Nadine, the heroine, admires her boyfriend Schlomo's mother for her career as a dentist and is ashamed of her own mother's inactivity. As an adult, although she freely chooses the role of housewife for herself, she eventually becomes frustrated and unfulfilled by it. "How could I have longed to be a housewife and mother when I grew up," she wonders, "when I'd grown up knowing that my housewife-mother was the loneliest of women?" She becomes jealous of Dianne's law career and angry "at still being stuffed into a role [she'd] partly outgrown." She regrets having never completed her degree and becomes insecure about her intelligence. Eventually she becomes convinced that "marriage is a weight that pulls me down" and she feels compelled to leave Amos "to make a life for myself."

Rossner uses Nadine as the embodiment of the neurosis that can be produced by...