This is not about my afternoon sleeping habits ... and my naps rarely reach the length where they are measured in years! The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer is the best book I've read in, well, years! Or maybe it just seemed like that since I wolfed it down over the course of two rainy, gloomy days a couple weekends ago.

The Ten-Year Nap delves into the lives of some very different women living in and around New York City who are contemplating their lives after ten years of motherhood. I say "some" women because, although the description says four women, there are many women whose lives are touched on throughout the book and Meg Wolitzer crafts her book so beautifully that you never feel like, "Oh, this is Karen's chapter." Their lives weave in and out of one another's seamlessly. Every time you think something has the chance to devolving into cliche, it doesn't.

None of the women is a cookie-cutter stereotype of the "I left my career and regret it" or "I am the earth mother who needs nothing more than my children to complete me" roles that we often see in books focused on mothers. There are so many situations that will make you think, make you look at your own feelings about motherhood and make you think about the judgments you make about others.

Wolitzer even manages to weave in the past, interspersing the experiences of women of previous generations. What happened to the feminists and their consciousness-raising groups of the 60s? What bearing does that have on today's women? What happens to a woman who left her dream behind because marriage and family was expected?

Part of what made this book so compelling was that I read it following a typical Friday night with my friends who are also a diverse group of women. And strangely, I wrote this post about the value of diversity of friends on Saturday morning, before I became engrossed in The Ten-Year Nap. Wolitzer captures this sentiment and the messy overlaps of and distances between our perspectives.

Di appears Wednesdays on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Di at her blog Live and Let Di.