The Philosopher's Doll focuses on a professional couple in their late 30s struggling with the issue of when to have children. Much of the book deals with an intense few weeks in which the wife, Kirsten, has become pregnant and is deciding when to tell her husband, Lindsay, while he, unaware of this biological incident, is arranging to buy her a dog to satisfy temporarily her procreative yearnings.

It's an accomplished novel of contemporary life that reflects on the dilemmas of generation X and their attempts to plan how to have it all: the career, the house, the renovations and the children. It's a conundrum Lohrey has observed many younger friends and colleagues trying to solve. She is not unsympathetic to the trials of the Xers and thinks things are harder for them than for her generation: "Baby boomers had full employment, reliable contraception, quite a bit of free education." But she can also remember a time before reliable contraception, when the postponing of children was not a "choice" and many marriages were unacknowledged "shotgun" weddings. Thus progress in one area, enabling control over the timing of reproduction, has delivered a new set of problems.