"I don't like children very much. Which is how I became the mother of twins." Judith Newman's memoir of motherhood begins with those sentences, which in the annals of mommy memoirs - a slim subcategory, unlike the overstuffed portion that deals with unhappy childhoods - neatly joins Anne Lamott's, who notes in her own M.M., "Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year," published by Pantheon in 1993, "So anyway, I had a baby last week."

Anyone who is thinking of motherhood, or is already landed with it, should read this book: it's funny, truthful, unsparing, and, again, funny.