Novelist │ Mystery Writer │ Columnist “Maternal ambivalence is my subject,” says the provocative novelist and essayist Ayelet Waldman. In her bestselling
Mommy Track Mystery series, in her critically acclaimed literary novels, and in essays that have appeared in
The New York Times, the
San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com and others, Waldman brings refreshing candor to the socially-charged issues of wifehood, motherhood, sexuality and family.
Born in Israel and raised in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Waldman was a Harvard Law School graduate working at a New York law firm when she met her husband, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon. They had relocated to Los Angeles and Waldman was working in the Los Angeles public defender’s office when they had their first child. Several years, another child and many lost drug cases later, Waldman quit her “soul crushing” job. She had never had
literary aspirations, but she thought she could increase her chances of getting a position teaching law if she wrote articles for law journals. Instead, she began to write what became her first
Mommy Track Mystery.
The protagonist of the
Mommy Track series is Julia Applebaum, a former federal public defender and full-time mother who finds herself repeatedly drawn into murder investigations. In
Nursery Crimes, published in 2000, Julia’s first case involves the death of a nursery school owner, but the real reason to read it is Applebaum’s comic struggles with domestic life as she tries to solve the crime. Nursery Crimes was followed by
The Big Nap, A Playdate with Death, Death Gets a Time-Out, Murder Plays House and
The Cradle Robbers.
In 2003, Waldman published
Daughter’s Keeper, her first literary novel. The story of a girl entangled in a drug deal gone awry and her mother’s attempts to help her offered Waldman a chance to express her frustration with what she considers America’s unduly onerous drug laws. People magazine praised the book, saying it “offers a compelling portrait of the unintended victims of the American legal system.”
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, published in 2006, was another artistic and commercial success. Emilia Greenleaf is a Harvard Law grad married to her soul mate and living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The thorn in her side is her stepson, William, a know-it-all preschooler. When Emilia loses her newborn daughter, the sight of any child brings her to tears, and Wednesdays with William become almost impossible. Ironically, it is only through her misbegotten attempts to bond with William that Emilia finally emerges from the fog of grief.
Publishers Weekly raved, “How a five-year-old manages to make the adults in his life hew to the love he holds for them is the sweet treat in this honest, brutal, bitterly funny slice of life...William is charmingly realized, and Waldman has upper bourgeois New York down cold. The result is a terrific adult story.”
The mother of four children, Waldman is also well-known for her column on
Salon.com, in which she explores everything from her own bipolar illness to her son Zeke’s confession that he might be gay. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in many magazines and newspapers.
Truly, Madly, Guiltily, an essay written for the anthology
Because I Said So—33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves, created a furor when it was excerpted in
The New York Times in 2005. The controversy ignited over Waldman’s admission that she loves her husband more than she loves her children.
In March 2006, Waldman told Louisa Kamps of Elle that her husband always reminds her “if you’re not writing dangerously, you’re not writing close enough to the edge, close enough to the bone.” Waldman’s fearless essays and fiction demonstrate that this is exactly what she does.
Ayelet Waldman has a law degree from Harvard University and is an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. Her fiction and essays appear in a wide range of popular publications. Waldman is at work on more
Mommy Track Mysteries and a new novel,
Winter's End, about a woman has given up everything—her career, her identity and her marriage—for her child, and suddenly finds herself wondering if it was worth it.
SELECTED WRITINGSNovels- Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Doubleday/Random House, 2006)
- Daughter's Keeper (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2003)
Mysteries- Bye Bye Black Sheep: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2006)
- The Cradle Robbers: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2005)
- Murder Plays House: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2004)
- Death Gets a Time-Out: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2003)
- A Playdate with Death: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2002)
- The Big Nap: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2001)
- Nursery Crimes: A Mommy-Track Mystery (Prime Crime, 2000)
To hear an audio interview with Ayelet Waldman from eyeonbooks.com, click here.For more information about Ayelet Waldman and her work, go to www.ayeletwaldman.com.