Story highlights Brigid Schulte: New parents aren't the only ones who need time for something other than work in their lives

America, it's time to work shorter, more focused hours, she says

Brigid Schulte is the director of the Better Life Lab at New America and author of "Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when No One has the Time." The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) When I think back on the happiest times of my life, I immediately think of my two periods of maternity leave after my children were born. And it's not just because of the sheer joy of being with my babies.

It's also because after working flat out and full steam as a daily newspaper reporter for more than a decade, in an era of shrinking staff and expanding appetite for ever more "content," my leave -- partly paid, mostly unpaid -- at least got me out of the office.

Yes, I was physically exhausted, but maternity leave was such a welcome respite from the grinding pace of work. After years of willingly working evenings, weekends and sometimes pulling all-nighters, I was just really, really tired.

So let's get two things straight: Meghann Foye, author of the new novel, "Meternity," about a woman who fakes a pregnancy just to get a break from work, is absolutely wrong when she calls maternity leave a blissful time for "self-reflection" -- an ill-advised claim that has set the Internet on furious fire. (I get it. Maternity leave is not a vacation. On "productive" days with my newborns, I may have managed to clip their fingernails. Most days evaporated in a sleep-deprived haze.)

Brigid Schulte

But Foye is absolutely right that new parents aren't the only ones who need time for something other than work in their lives. And we shouldn't let the backlash against this book (Foye has already canceled media and promotional appearances) obscure the critical questions about our work cultures, structures and policies that it raises. Americans -- whether they have children are not -- are fried. Indeed, beneath the furor over Foye's way of making this point lies the difficult truth that a growing body of research has been showing us for years: The American way of work isn't working -- for anyone.