From the New York Times:

'NIGHT, MOTHER
by Penelope Green, Nov. 7, 2004

"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."

Like Ms. Lamott, Ms. Newman comes to motherhood mostly alone and rather later in life, armed with not much more than a sharp, dry wit.

Before the arrival of Gus and Henry, Ms. Newman's experience with children was pretty much confined to baby-sitting in Scarsdale, N.Y., during what she calls "The Ice Storm years," when she would arrive after the kids were asleep and rummage through their parents' porn collection. An only child with a wry sense of humor and a fear of driving, she marries a man 20 years her senior, just four years after the death of his second wife, an opera singer whose beauty and goodness seem to loom, Rebecca-like, just offstage.

Despite this lingering darkness, and despite the essential crankiness of her husband, John - he's like Uncle Matthew in the Nancy Mitford novels "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate," Ms. Newman writes - they live in relative marital bliss. She's a successful magazine writer; he's retired from his opera career and spends a lot of time at the gym, and at his apartment uptown.

Possibly real estate is the key to their happiness, or maybe it's just that Ms. Newman is, as she puts it, "the queen of low expectations."

"If you never want anything too badly," she writes, "you'll never be disappointed."

After eight years of marriage Ms. Newman crosses a threshold. She's no longer a relatively young woman who can't have a baby and could care less, but one of "advanced maternal age," and a veteran of fertility treatments. John remains stubbornly in the country she's left behind.

"I thought we'd have a wonderful life," he says plaintively. "I thought we'd do everything together. I didn't think you'd want children."

Henry and Gus appear just a few weeks after 9/11. Not, as Ms. Newman had hoped, on H. L. Mencken's birthday, but on the birthday of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. (That's Sept. 25, for those of you taking notes.)

And so Ms. Newman comes of age, hilariously, as the single mother of twins in a 750-square-foot apartment. (She has bought the apartment upstairs and sent as much money to the contractor as to her fertility specialists, though the renovation, unlike her children, remains just out of reach.)

As for her marriage, I won't spoil the ending, or the warts-and-all conclusion contained in the last lines of Ms. Newman's book. Suffice it to say that she is wholly comfortable with the implications of the phrase caveat emptor.