I describe the book as having a conceit because it’s a work of fiction. No one will actually follow the rigorous mixing and freezing and scheming Ms. Seinfeld prescribes. I’m equally repelled by and attracted to her program. Without apology, Deceptively Delicious fully indulges in that retrograde 1950’s version of domestic life where the woman controls everything and does all the work happily from the back seat, and so cunningly that the husband almost thinks he’s the one with all the ideas and the map, driving the car.

On the other hand, who doesn’t have fantasies about being that sort of wife—that is, when one is screaming at a baffled spouse: “Why do I feel like I should thank you right now? I do this every day and you don’t thank me!” Moreoever, I, like all privileged upper-middle-class Western world mothers, am a control freak who knows for sure I have failed if my 2-year-old, Woolfie, is not eating vegetables or whole grains in each of the eight small meals he’s supposed to be ingesting daily. I’m a perfect patsy for this book’s promises. I decide to give Deceptively Delicious a shot.

Day 1

Ms. Seinfeld on her puréeing process: “I have a standing date with my husband in the kitchen every Sunday night after the kids have gone to bed. We do a good catch-up while I purée the night away … and when I’m done I feel so virtuous.”

My husband is away on a business trip. After a hellish pilgrimage to Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza green market, wrestling unwieldy cauliflowers and kales into my NRDC tote, the last thing I want to do is purée the f*ckers! Still, I steam a massive bunch of iron-rich chard, then throw it in the Cuisinart, to hide in her ridiculous mac-and-cheese recipe. Ms. Seinfeld puts a box of store-bought Kraft on the counter to trick her children. Woolfie has been brought up without that crap ever entering the house, so is delightfully unfazed by his Tony Duquette-like pink-and-green dinner (the red chard stems dyed the whole-wheat macaroni). He takes a few mouthfuls.

Day 2

At dinner, Woolfie responds favorably to an avocado purée dip, an easy one, but I’m exhausted at the thought of prepping more purée, not to mention horrified at using environmentally unfriendly Ziploc bags, Ms. Seinfeld’s method, to freeze it. I noticed in a Vogue story covering one of the author’s children’s parties a photo of Julian Seinfeld, her middle boy, holding up a gigantic beet from her garden, tended organically by her gardener. Yet her book says nothing at all about eating organic or local vegetables. Is it not for the masses, Ms. S.?

Day 3

Yay! It’s Monday. Over to you, dear nanny. I ask her to make Woolfie Ms. Seinfeld’s meatloaf, which uses ground turkey and carrot purée, for lunch. She looks mildly annoyed. We substitute ground beef and the leftover chard. Woolfie won’t touch the green-flecked loaf.

I have to work late, and my husband, who unlike Mr. Seinfeld actually cooks, agrees to purée beets for pancakes tonight. We are mystified that the recipe calls for pancake mix, all the more so because Ms. Seinfeld apparently makes her own ketchup. Still, pink pancakes for dinner are a hit.

Day 4

My husband fashions whole-wheat pita pizzas for lunch, a recipe that suggests hiding a thin layer of puréed greens under store-bought tomato sauce and low-fat mozzarella. He reports that although the spinach doesn’t remain invisible, as the recipe claims, Woolfie eats almost an entire pita. Later, he announces that he hates Ms. Seinfeld, arousing me to almost honeymoonlike ardor.

Against the author’s advice, we meet at a restaurant for dinner, toddler in tow.

Day 5

For dinner, I decide it’s not cheating if I use a recipe from Deborah Madison’s just-out revision of the fantastic Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, because it’s a recipe that calls for puréed kale, barley and cave-aged Gruyere with an easy stovetop roux and milk or broth. It takes 30 minutes to steam the barley, but it seems like real food, rather than the Deceptively Delicious recipes (I mean, rolling puréed turkey and low-fat cheese into whole-wheat tortillas for Tortilla Cigars? She’s got to be kidding). But Woolfie refuses the fancy gratin.

Still, the experiment wasn’t a total failure: I have a freezer full of beet purée, and some leftover pink pancakes. I can’t wait to invite some of the closet-uptight other So-Slow (as I call South Park Slope) mothers over for these. “They’re healthy too!” I’ll gloat, as the kids gobble them down.

“Sitting at their table,” my friend shuddered, “feels dangerous.”

The in-laws’ sofa is the Boa model, by Edra, an Italian company, and it looks like a nest of soft snakes piled on the ground. “It’s impossible to conduct any kind of formal or even informal interview on it, or even drink a cup of tea,” my friend reported, “and if a high-school date came in to meet the parents, it could pose problems. How do you sit in it? Or get up?”

As New York’s design cognoscenti trundle off to Milan for the annual Salone di Mobile (a.k.a. the Chair Fair), and as Berlin prepares for a highly anticipated art exhibition on pain (Schmerz), is it a coincidence that much of today’s au courant furniture looks masterminded by someone who really, really hates it when their guests stay too long?

At the Soho store Moss, Dutch daredevil designer Maarten Baas has done a charred version of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous, puritanically rigid Argyle chair for $12,000, part of the store’s new “Extreme Seating” category. At Phurniture on Bond Street, a crushed-aluminum Shlomo Harush chair recently sold to a Manhattan couple for $15,000 (Dolce & Gabbana bought several others).

Such “art furniture” attempts to collapse the borders between art and design, which means functionality can sometimes get short shrift. “It’s not supposed to be comfortable,” snapped my friend’s father-in-law, while shopping for a sofa even more punishing than the Boa. “It’s art.”

Take the Sweetheart Chair, by Forrest Myers, a Williamsburg artist—or maybe pull it out for a much-despised ex instead: It looks like a old-fashioned ice-cream-parlor chair that’s had its seat cushion ripped off and survived a nuclear holocaust. “That piece is really more sculpture,” said Barry Friedman, Mr. Myers’ dealer and one of the leading figures in the contemporary art-furniture world. “This is very, very high-quality stuff. Museums collect it.”

Mr. Friedman took another of Mr. Myers’ chairs, the Parker, to Design Miami, the design show at Art Basel Miami. This chair, at one point  named the Aviary, resembles a human-sized bird’s nest—if a bird’s nest were shaped like an easy chair and the twigs were skin-pinching steel wires. “It’s not an implement of destruction,” said Mr. Friedman, who had to perch on the Parker during the show because of a health problem that kept him from standing for long periods. “If I had a three-and-a-half-hour movie to watch and I had to choose between that and a sofa, I’d choose a sofa,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t so bad.”

Mr. Myers, part of the 1970’s and early-80’s avant-garde, works in a Williamsburg loft across the street from The Future Perfect, a brave young home store that sells daring, difficult work by several new-wave designer-artists. Mr. Friedman, along with his young partner, Marc Benda, is planning to move his uptown gallery to an 18,000-square-foot space in Chelsea, the ground floor of which will be partially devoted to art furniture.

The Benda-Friedman space is near Larry Gagosian’s downtown gallery, where Aussie design darling Marc Newson had a solo exhibit earlier this year, featuring one-of-a-kind seating in marble—not the most yielding substance, but it does cunningly suggest unaffordable luxury-condo kitchen-counter sex fantasies and Caligula’s orgies. (The Romans didn’t need chair backs!) People bought it: Even with item prices in the six figures, the show came close to selling out.

Mr. Newson’s most famous piece, Lockheed Lounge, made in an edition of 10 in 1985, can be viewed around the corner at Sebastian + Barquet: a rounded hollow chaise constructed of patchwork airplane metal, with a ladylike single club foot at the front. The unpretentious Mexican dealer Ramis Barquet might even let you have a test lie-down. Freud surely would’ve liked to place his more windbaggy clients on it.

“No, you would not sit on it for very long,” said Mr. Barquet, but the chair brings him immense pleasure. He got it for $950,000 at Sotheby’s in spring 2006, the most ever paid for a contemporary furniture piece.  (In 2000, a Lockheed Lounge sold for $105,000. If only you’d known then that you wanted a chaise that would double as a block on which to practice karate chops so you could be like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill II!) “You would spend millions for an important painting,” Mr. Barquet said. “I got a deal.”

He also noted a practical point of the Lockheed: “It’s metal, so it’s cool in the summer.”

Meanwhile, Joris Laarman, a rising Dutch designer, has created a fantastically beautiful—and potentially perilous—radiator of curlicues that creep up your wall, as well as the less exuberant Freedom of Beech: a backless chair that consists of a seat-level plank with two front legs and two back legs that extend beyond the seat to shoulder height but have nothing between them. Excellent for yoga back bends! Mr. Laarman isn’t interested in “the luxury of comfortable living,” he wrote on his Web site, but “with the luxury of uncertainty and imagination.”

Such a philosophy makes perfect sense to the director and designer Robert Wilson—“I have many chairs and seldom sit on any of them,” he remarked in an e-mail—and to the Miami- and New York–based real-estate developer and collector Craig Robins. “For some people, looking at something beautiful and important does something to their psyche that’s more important than comfort,” Mr. Robins said. “Sitting surrounded by radical design that’s beautiful and important makes me feel much better than staying in some fake decorator lobby in some five-star hotel chain that says, ‘I paid a lot of money to be here.’”

Mr. Robins conceded that when his children were toddlers, he put his more aggressive collectibles in storage. “Some of it was dangerous,” he said. But now that they’re in grade school, he’s shifted toward the metal and Corian, favoring Zaha Hadids, Ron Arads and Newsons.

According to Ken Ames, a professor at the Bard Graduate School of Design, challenging chairs are nothing new. “Furniture was originally about power and prestige,” he said. “Comfort only comes into play in the 18th century, probably in France, and carries on through the Victorian era with the rise of upholstery.”

Though his colleague, Pat Kirkham, believes the desire for comfort is ancient. “One assumes the Egyptians were after it,” she said. “Some of their stools have contours to cradle each buttock.”

Avant-garde furniture’s reputation for sadism was cemented with the Bauhaus’ mania for sharp angles and metal tubing. By the 1950’s, people were crying out against the modernist project, begging for a little cosseting (hence Eames’ famous 1956 padded lounge chair, not to mention a generation of suburban Barcaloungers). Even now, many hotels advertise themselves with phrases like �
��the perfect blend of modern and comfortable,” as though the two are opposed.

Comfortable furniture can be not only bourgeois, but also sinister. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the susceptible young hero Hans Castorp first begins to fall prey to the indolent, lust-ridden world of the Swiss Alps sanatorium after reposing in one of the chairs created for the rest cures, “which had almost mysterious properties [he] found difficult to analyze …. It was terribly pleasant just to lie there … he could not remember ever having used a more comfortable lounge chair.” Castorp ends up leaving the world of progress for seven years in favor of illness and perversion.

“What is comfort, really?” asked Constantine Boym, the witty Russian genius behind miniature touristy sculptures of edifices like the World Trade Center and the New Orleans Superdome.

For the Soho store Moss’ booth in Miami, Mr. Boym custom-made one-off “Art Furniture”: stretching ready-made replicas of Renaissance paintings over wooden frames. “The form-follows-function formula was pronounced in the early 20th century,” he said. “Ninety years have passed; it’s been absorbed by design culture, and people have moved on. It’s exciting to sit on a chair that has a different sensation. When you go to a restaurant, you don’t always order brisket or another comfort food. Sometimes you order escargot or steak tartare.”

In the living room of his Lower East Side apartment, Mr. Boym excites guests with two Strap chairs made from polypropylene bands. “Probably not the most comfortable, especially if you’re in a short skirt, but it’s O.K., it’s interesting,” he said. “Comfort is psychological. If you have a pretty girl on your lap, any chair would be the most comfortable in the world.”

Toni Schlesinger is on vacation.

“About ten years,” she said. “And it’ll probably be another ten.” She rolled her eyes.

“God!” I thought. “It wasn’t just a paranoid fantasy, people in New York actually do have to live in sheds now.” Then my haze of insanity lifted and I realized that the question was, “how long have you been at Hachette?”—as in Hachette Filipacchi Media, the French conglomerate that employs many of us at 1633 Broadway.

Sheds were on my mind because right before I’d left the office, I’d had a tear-stained phone conversation with my husband that ended with my saying “Yeah, and then maybe they’ll let us live in a 300–square-foot shed in their backyard!” I had called him to calm what felt like the beginnings of a massive anxiety attack, upon hearing the gossip from a real-estate agent at an open house: the actors Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal were buying the four-story brownstone near Fifth Avenue in North Park Slope. The untouched-by-time, old-lady house of my dreams.

I want an old-lady house the way some people want to write a bestseller or have a baby. If I were a G.I. Jane doll, I would squawk, “Original detail! Original detail!” when my cord was pulled. I’ve come to believe that if I could just lasso my 30-year fixed around a dusty, dilapidated, circa 1850 to 1900 brownstone, near an express subway, and not more than 30 minutes to midtown, with knob-and-tube wiring, caked-on lead paint, tiny glass-fronted kitchen cabinets made for pre-supersized people, fireplace mantels, cornices, cracked wood frame windows, those crazy beautiful swirling flowers in plaster in the foyer, encaustic tile, light fixtures from any decades but the past four, tenement linoleum, etc., my life would be complete. I make pacts with the God I don’t believe in that I will never want another thing.

I didn’t actually get to enter the “diamond in the rough.” I stared at the pictures on the Corcoran Web site (“six original mantels...original hall sinks”) and peeked in the windows. I didn’t get inside the house because by the time I found out it was for sale, it had already received multiple offers. The real-estate agent claimed he couldn’t show it again because the seller didn’t want to deal with any more people. Best and final was tomorrow at 3:30 P.M. He expected it to go well above asking.

I know someone friendly with the lady who had lived in the house for 30 years. She mentioned it to me casually, as only those not eaten alive with desire for a decaying wreck—who wisely bought their four-story brownstones in 1996 and now have fantasies about sprawling nine-room, all-new-construction, one-level condos—can. “The house across the street is for sale, and guess who’s looking at it? Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Isn’t that weird? Oh, actually Miranda, you would love this house, it’s so you.” The woman who lived there, she said, had totally preserved it.

Thus began a heart-palpitating day of attempting to gain access to the house. My friend even went across the street to try and convince the occupant to let me in. The fact that my husband and I couldn’t really afford such a purchase had nothing to do with anything at this point. Panic coursed through my veins: “The last old-lady house in the North Slope, the last four-story for under $2 million, get it, get it, get it, I will save it, I will love it so much, the money will come, I will rent it all and sleep in one of the clawfoot tubs....”

The owner was intransigent, claiming exhaustion. I now see there was a multi-person conspiracy going on. The agent wanted to sell to movie stars. My friend wanted movie stars to buy it (her real-estate values). Even the innocent, tired senior wanted to sell to movie stars. “Best and final.” As if! Oops, did we forget to clarify that is was “best and final from the most glamorous bidders?”

I stared at the pictures longingly until Corcoran took them off the site, at which point I tried to forget about it.

But hearing that it was Maggie and Peter who would likely buy it felt like a punch in the gut. It seemed somehow more relentlessly unfair. “They could buy a mansion right on the park, why did they have to take this?” I wailed to my husband on the phone. “Don’t you see what’s going to happen? They’ll tear it all out. They’ll do a gut reno.”

“But Maggie’s stylish,” he said (of course, defending the cute girl star).

“Peter will sway her. He’ll want a new kitchen, then bathrooms. They’re actors! Dumb actors. They’ll get Svengali’d by some Jula.” (My parents had once been hypnotized by a sinister interior decorator named Jula.) “They probably bought under-budget so they could afford to really make it ‘theirs.’”

My hysteria escalated. “With movie stars there, the prices will rise beyond comprehension,” I said. “The market will never flatten. There’ll be an invisible wall between the North and South”—where we unfortunately bought, on a street replete with new trees and vinyl siding (though I hasten to add that one of the Strokes does live on it).

On the long F-train ride home, I thought about the first job I applied for in New York, in 1998. A grande dame editor at Grove Press, part of a Southern media-baron family, offered me a job as her assistant for $20,000 a year. I told her I was worried about paying rent. She said—very “let them eat cake”—“But your husband will buy a place here.” In my mind I responded, “Are you out of your beautiful fucking mind, lady? Buy a place? He’s a lawyer, not a financier-scion. Apartments cost half a million dollars!”

I wish, wish, wish like everyone else, that I’d bought then, but what I really wish is that I could go back to that era. When movie stars lived on the parks (Central, Gramercy, Washington Square), not in crumbly, crummy Brooklyn. When old-lady houses were everywhere and it seemed like there was time, because developers and gut renovators weren’t lurking outside every chipped stoop. When you did get enormously wealthy (by 90 percent of the world’s standards) because you’d worked Manhattan hard, you knew you’d buy a place—cramped but with dentelle molding, not in the West Village, but maybe Kips Bay. Or you just didn’t think about it all the time. Before the vile New York Times real-estate section, or the viler Key, which I had to instantly throw in the bin, the transparent forum for condo ads was so psychically damaging.

I want to be joking when I say: “I’ll never be able to enjoy a Maggie Gyllenhaal movie again.”

“About ten years,” she said. “And it’ll probably be another ten.” She rolled her eyes.

“God!” I thought. “It wasn’t just a paranoid fantasy, people in New York actually do have to live in sheds now.” Then my haze of insanity lifted and I realized that the question was, “how long have you been at Hachette?”—as in Hachette Filipacchi Media, the French conglomerate that employs many of us at 1633 Broadway.

Sheds were on my mind because right before I’d left the office, I’d had a tear-stained phone conversation with my husband that ended with my saying “Yeah, and then maybe they’ll let us live in a 300–square-foot shed in their backyard!” I had called him to calm what felt like the beginnings of a massive anxiety attack, upon hearing the gossip from a real-estate agent at an open house: the actors Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal were buying the four-story brownstone near Fifth Avenue in North Park Slope. The untouched-by-time, old-lady house of my dreams.

I want an old-lady house the way some people want to write a bestseller or have a baby. If I were a G.I. Jane doll, I would squawk, “Original detail! Original detail!” when my cord was pulled. I’ve come to believe that if I could just lasso my 30-year fixed around a dusty, dilapidated, circa 1850 to 1900 brownstone, near an express subway, and not more than 30 minutes to midtown, with knob-and-tube wiring, caked-on lead paint, tiny glass-fronted kitchen cabinets made for pre-supersized people, fireplace mantels, cornices, cracked wood frame windows, those crazy beautiful swirling flowers in plaster in the foyer, encaustic tile, light fixtures from any decades but the past four, tenement linoleum, etc., my life would be complete. I make pacts with the God I don’t believe in that I will never want another thing.

I didn’t actually get to enter the “diamond in the rough.” I stared at the pictures on the Corcoran Web site (“six original mantels...original hall sinks”) and peeked in the windows. I didn’t get inside the house because by the time I found out it was for sale, it had already received multiple offers. The real-estate agent claimed he couldn’t show it again because the seller didn’t want to deal with any more people. Best and final was tomorrow at 3:30 P.M. He expected it to go well above asking.

I know someone friendly with the lady who had lived in the house for 30 years. She mentioned it to me casually, as only those not eaten alive with desire for a decaying wreck—who wisely bought their four-story brownstones in 1996 and now have fantasies about sprawling nine-room, all-new-construction, one-level condos—can. “The house across the street is for sale, and guess who’s looking at it? Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Isn’t that weird? Oh, actually Miranda, you would love this house, it’s so you.” The woman who lived there, she said, had totally preserved it.

Thus began a heart-palpitating day of attempting to gain access to the house. My friend even went across the street to try and convince the occupant to let me in. The fact that my husband and I couldn’t really afford such a purchase had nothing to do with anything at this point. Panic coursed through my veins: “The last old-lady house in the North Slope, the last four-story for under $2 million, get it, get it, get it, I will save it, I will love it so much, the money will come, I will rent it all and sleep in one of the clawfoot tubs....”

The owner was intransigent, claiming exhaustion. I now see there was a multi-person conspiracy going on. The agent wanted to sell to movie stars. My friend wanted movie stars to buy it (her real-estate values). Even the innocent, tired senior wanted to sell to movie stars. “Best and final.” As if! Oops, did we forget to clarify that is was “best and final from the most glamorous bidders?”

I stared at the pictures longingly until Corcoran took them off the site, at which point I tried to forget about it.

But hearing that it was Maggie and Peter who would likely buy it felt like a punch in the gut. It seemed somehow more relentlessly unfair. “They could buy a mansion right on the park, why did they have to take this?” I wailed to my husband on the phone. “Don’t you see what’s going to happen? They’ll tear it all out. They’ll do a gut reno.”

“But Maggie’s stylish,” he said (of course, defending the cute girl star).

“Peter will sway her. He’ll want a new kitchen, then bathrooms. They’re actors! Dumb actors. They’ll get Svengali’d by some Jula.” (My parents had once been hypnotized by a sinister interior decorator named Jula.) “They probably bought under-budget so they could afford to really make it ‘theirs.’”

My hysteria escalated. “With movie stars there, the prices will rise beyond comprehension,” I said. “The market will never flatten. There’ll be an invisible wall between the North and South”—where we unfortunately bought, on a street replete with new trees and vinyl siding (though I hasten to add that one of the Strokes does live on it).

On the long F-train ride home, I thought about the first job I applied for in New York, in 1998. A grande dame editor at Grove Press, part of a Southern media-baron family, offered me a job as her assistant for $20,000 a year. I told her I was worried about paying rent. She said—very “let them eat cake”—“But your husband will buy a place here.” In my mind I responded, “Are you out of your beautiful fucking mind, lady? Buy a place? He’s a lawyer, not a financier-scion. Apartments cost half a million dollars!”

I wish, wish, wish like everyone else, that I’d bought then, but what I really wish is that I could go back to that era. When movie stars lived on the parks (Central, Gramercy, Washington Square), not in crumbly, crummy Brooklyn. When old-lady houses were everywhere and it seemed like there was time, because developers and gut renovators weren’t lurking outside every chipped stoop. When you did get enormously wealthy (by 90 percent of the world’s standards) because you’d worked Manhattan hard, you knew you’d buy a place—cramped but with dentelle molding, not in the West Village, but maybe Kips Bay. Or you just didn’t think about it all the time. Before the vile New York Times real-estate section, or the viler Key, which I had to instantly throw in the bin, the transparent forum for condo ads was so psychically damaging.

I want to be joking when I say: “I’ll never be able to enjoy a Maggie Gyllenhaal movie again.”

She responded: "No baby yet. Four months trying. But found out the colon cleanser I take daily (on derm’s rec.) could be a big part. So no more colon cleanse."

There was a time when it would have been considered rude for me to ask how her attempts to spawn were going, and for her to answer so frankly. Now, it’s quite the opposite. Never mind the colon cleanse: The once-stigmatized topic of fertility is so far out of the closet, you might as well turn the closet into a nursery. As any thirtysomething female will tell you, getting pregnant is the new yoga. (Except it’s not, because as so many people are delighted to share, "Only the missionary position really works.") It seems the ability to intercept a sperm cell has replaced artistic talent/big salary/social connections as the sine qua non of Manhattan womanly achievement.

My startled observations include:

—Women rushing to the doctor after only a month without birth control to have their ovarian reserves and hormone levels tested.

—Friends not drinking in preparation for pregnancy, not because they are pregnant.

—Widespread weight gain. (I recently heard a newly pudgy acquaintance, who’d long survived on the thin edge of the anorexia wedge reassuring a gal busily snorting a Beard Papa cream puff: "It’s O.K. if you’ve gained a few pounds. It’s easier to get pregnant that way!")

—Conspicuous bottles of pre-natal vitamins lying about.

—Pregnancy envy.

—Obsession with getting enough sleep.

—Graphic conversations about recent sex acts, ovulation times and cervical-mucus consistency.

—Everyone owning those special basal-body temperature thermometers or the upscale version, LadyComp.

—Not eating (potentially mercury-laden) fish.

—Fascination with actresses, such as Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts, going to fertility clinics.

The concomitant media frenzy has planted seeds of anxiety where once there were none. It doesn’t stop at The Star and Us Weekly, with their frantic documentation of celebrity "bumps." Now there is Conceive, a Florida-based magazine that preys solely on commoners trying to go gravid, with panic-inducing articles ("How fresh are your eggs?"), advice columns ("Fun ways to keep the romance alive while trying!"), sinister beauty-product plugs ("You glow, girl! You don’t have to wait until you’re pregnant to get that special glow") and fertility-porn features ("A quick look at the fertility history of our candidates’ spouses").

A press kit for Conceive arrived, wrapped in a diaper, at the offices of Elle, the fairly progressive women’s magazine where I work. I read the slogan—"celebrating the creation of families"—and felt a wave of first-trimester-like nausea. Could it be that the independent, intellectually rigorous women I’d moved to New York City to meet—and happily did—might embrace this insipid fertility-fetish rag? Examining the first issue, I felt a certain kinship with the giant, translucent-skinned baby head looming from the cover. It looked like an alien, and I’d been feeling like an alien.

Horrified yet intrigued, I found myself going to Conceive ’s opening party, on the 14th floor of the D&D building on Third Avenue, where a staffer greeted me with an offer of "Water, soda [long, cautious pause] … some wine?"

I met the magazine’s founder, one Kim Hahn from Orlando, a middle-aged former executive at SunTrust Banks who saw a niche to fill between Modern Bride and Fit Pregnancy after four years of unsuccessful fertility treatments (she ultimately adopted). "There was no magazine for me," Ms. Hahn said. "We’re going to fill the gap."

The room was full of her family and friends, many of whom seemed also to be her shareholders, looking distinctly Florida-does-corporate: the tan men in forest-green poly-twill blazers and white pants, or mock turtlenecks and sports jackets; the women in too-long blazers over floral-print dresses; everyone in gold jewelry.

Frantically searching for a more familiar fashion ethic, I began chatting with Jane Tervooren, a consulting board member of the magazine and the marketing director of IVF New Jersey. Although it was ostensibly in her professional interest to tell me that there’s no rush to have babies, she gave me the straight dope (the topic of fertility seems to send women straight into "sisterhood is powerful" mode): "Our eggs go so south after 35, you wouldn’t believe it. Honey, I am not kidding. I don’t mean to scare you."

"But we don’t even own an apartment yet!"

"Screw that. Don’t wait. Have a baby. Believe me, I’ve seen what happens when women wait."

I’m 33, and it’s not that I don’t have longings to see my husband holding a mini-us (sooo cute!), or—I’ll admit it—to triumph in a fray where simple good genetic fortune trumps wit or hard work. (The fantasy: "I know, I just threw my Leah’s Shield away last month," I say, smiling ruefully. "I’m just so fertile!")

It’s just that I feel a profound resistance to the wholehearted acceptance of biology as destiny. Am I the last one whose loudly ticking clock hasn’t drowned out the quiet thrum of rational analysis? I still have questions. Beginning with: Isn’t this obsession with having one’s own offspring just narcissism, when our maternal energies would be far better directed at the terrible schools for children who already exist, or unloved foster kids? What about Sylvia Plath and her bag of green apples? And what of that old saw, overpopulation? As Conceive gaily tells potential advertisers in its sales package, the population is going to double in 60 years. Does anyone want to be around when this city is twice as crowded? Do you want it to be your fault?

My friends placate me with a few tossed-off comments, but their eyes cloud over. The answer seems to be: You just know you want a little life to mold, and that’s all there is to it. Then they light up again, discussing luteal phases, soft cervixes and that RNA clinic on 60th and Lexington that offers the latest technology: egg-freezing services for healthy women at $15,000 a pop.

Sadly, I’ll probably buckle and "start trying" this year myself, caving to this mysterious force— Conceive its glossy envoy—spreading the creepy, resurrected notion that the most important experience of a woman’s life is motherhood, and that, unless I want to be faced with a huge, gaping hole in my heart when I’m 45, I’d better, as Ms. Tervooren said, "hurry the hell up." Worse still, I probably won’t be able to stop talking about the process.

Her office has white walls and small gray-toned etchings. She sits in that quilted black leather Eames chair. I sit on a small white denim couch. It's not my style, but I can respect it.

When I'm shopping for a new one, a therapist's aesthetic can make or break her chances of winning me as a patient. One woman I saw en route to Chiarna had long, overly manicured peach nails and navy pleated slacks reminiscent of Scientology uniforms. That could seriously block the transference. And more to the point: Can you trust a therapist when you can't stand her pants?

I'm not totally inflexible. Lisa, the couples therapist whose counsel my husband and I briefly sought, had cloying Big Sur–genre poetry on the walls, but she also had shelves jammed with freakishly fascinating children's toys. She once dug through them and procured for me a four-inch, poseable Wonder Woman action figure to ease my fear of flying.

But ultimately, I always feel that I'm settling.

The problem is that I carry around an anachronistic, idealized image of shrinky glamour days: Freud sitting in his sophisticated- gemütlich , Oriental-rugged, chaise-adorned office in a three-piece flannel suit. Of course, it hasn't been that way since the 60's, when the monarchy of Freudian analysis was overturned and split into the fractious republics of Gestalt, Object Relations, Control Mastery and so on, and along with the deregulation of theories and schools came the freeing up of the analysts' once-formal uniform. Now there are the New Agers swathed in chakra colors, the gender theorists who embrace the feminine masquerade by wearing six-inch stilettos in session, the bohemians in chunky jewelry, the ego psychologists in their playful ties. Basically, anything goes. And the patient is left not only to winnow out the therapist smart enough to help her, but also to find one whose office décor and outfits won't make her serotonin levels plummet faster than the Stuntman's Freefall at Six Flags.

When I raised the issue with friends, some claimed they would find a style-conscious therapist discomforting. A playwright I know said she liked the drab clothes her practitioner favors: "She wears these shapeless gingham shifts that I can't imagine actually being in any store anywhere." But most responded strongly to the visible aspects of the talking cure.

My friend Cameron, a fashion editor, e-mailed me: "I've started going to a therapist who specializes in gay men. I can't stop staring at his shoes-they're those awful sport/dress hybrids with chunky rubber ergonomically designed soles. They're so distracting. I'd much prefer him in a longer, flatter and leaner shoe." Oh, Cameron, how well I understand the perfect world that would be embodied in that longer, flatter, leaner shoe.

My mom, who's the anomalous well-dressed psychologist in Berkeley, has, as you can imagine, seen the very worst. At her psychoanalytic institute meetings, Eileen Fisher is considered the height of chic-shorts and Tevas are the norm. She thinks addressing the problem directly is the only ethical response and has gone so far as to upbraid her own analyst on his ill-fitting suits. She claims he's actually starting to dress better.

Freud said that he hid behind the couch because he didn't want to be stared at all day. But maybe he also wanted to avoid critics like my mom. And from his safe, behind-the-head perch, he could also avoid giving his patients (many of whom were analysts in training) the kind of snap-judgment fodder their own modes of dress provided him. As he notes in his Papers on Technique: "A clever young philosopher with exquisite aesthetic sensibilities will hasten to put the creases of his trousers straight before lying down for his first hour; he is revealing himself as a former coprophilic of the highest refinement."

One acquaintance of mine, Ellen, read her doctor's scuffed Ferragamo knockoff flats and droopy Pierre Deux bags as a sign, though not of anything as piquant as coprophilia. "I finally decided it meant that she didn't feel good enough about herself to make me feel better," Ellen said. "I mean, she practically made the noise schlumpf when she walked down the hallway."

Of course, in a session, when you bring up what you perceive as a taste transgression, the therapist-sitting in the catbird seat-can simply pull the old Gaslight maneuver and act like your comment merely indicates something about you, not her: "Do you think your dislike of my badly dyed hair has anything to do with the fact that you feel I'm abandoning you by going on vacation?"

Some shrinks try to level the playing field. "She made everyone take their shoes off in the hall," one woman told me about a "therapeutic" encounter. "I felt it was to make us put down our defenses: If you're wearing high heels, it gives you a certain power. Or maybe it was because she had white carpets … I don't know. But it was disgusting."

I did talk to one patient who is content-nay, ecstatic-with her shrink's sartorial savoir-faire: Jen has found, of all things, her dream therapist. "She buys her clothes in Milan; she's impeccably dressed. The last time I saw her, she was wearing a tight, knee-length leather skirt, perfect real stockings, very high Manolos with these crazy details on them, a simple silk blouse. Oh, and she has these reading glasses on a gorgeous chain with stones around her neck."

Was Jen threatened? "No-she's so out of my league, I'm just inspired. I'm obsessed with my therapist: She's my fashion/sex-life guru/cheerleader. She's in my corner, you know what I mean?"

I was momentarily envious that Jen had found her ideal therapist, one who demands no aesthetic compromises of her. But I've been in therapy long enough to know that if I did find my ideal New York therapist, I wouldn't even need her.

It's my perpetual disappointment in the discord between the real and imagined that keeps me forking over the $120 a week in the first place. I'll be done the day I stop feeling let down and sad every time I look at Chiarna's Oriental rug and notice that it's machine-made, that the colors aren't rich enough, and think impetuously: "This should be our last session. With a rug like that, she obviously couldn't get me .