"How even I, "a dutiful daughter," as Simone de Beauvoir once described her young self, was living a life so different from my mother's; when she was my age she was married, about to become pregnant with me. I was beginning to think that this habit of mind--constantly tracing myself back to my mother, to where she'd begun and left off--wasn't idiosyncratic, but something that many if not most women did, a feature of the female experience."