I know I'm supposed to be inspired, but cheery stories about former lawyers-turned-successful entrepreneurs with picture-perfect family lives are getting on my nerves. More annoyingly, in the accompanying photos they are always striking one of those "Look, I'm successful personally and professionally" poses.

Recently, I came across such a picture in Working Mother magazine, which showed a woman with her four beautiful children and beaming husband (what else?) in some Eden-like setting. It's a first-person account by Sarah Davis, a California lawyer, who managed to turn her love of designer handbags into a multimillion-dollar business.

This is Davis's breezy account of her success:

"I got the idea for my business while out shopping. A woman was buying a stack of clearance blankets for $17 each. She said she'd sell them on eBay for $40.

"EBay was something I thought I could do. So I started selling everything in our house that wasn't nailed down and that was easy to ship.

"I soon began selling my own handbags. I've always loved fashion, so I came up with fashionphile.com as the name of the business.

"These days I sell high-end bags like Louis Vuitton and Gucci that have been preowned. If someone buys a Chanel handbag for $1,000 and gets tired of it, we sell it for her.

The upshot – Davis was doing so well that she decided to call time on her legal career. "I was making $30,000 a month on the bags. I paid off my school loans," she writes gleefully. What's more: "I opened a high-end boutique in Beverly Hills in 2008, because that's where the bags are. We had 12 employees. So I was operating online and offline."

Then there's the ultimate point of the story, which is that you can have it all: money, success, home and hearth in one magical mix: "My work is all about family. I get to spend more time with my kids – Izzie, 12; Aerie, 10; Ike, 6; and Zoie, 4."

"My work is all about family"? What does that mean, anyway?

Sometimes I think we are overselling the idea of the perfectly balanced life – particularly the fantasy that home and work mesh wonderfully once you hop off the legal or corporate track. Dare I say this seems to be a women's magazine obsession?

The Careerist is a blog by American Lawyer Media.