Ayelet Waldman
| Ayelet Waldman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 11, 1964 Jerusalem |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | Israeli-American |
| Education |
Wesleyan University Harvard Law School |
| Notable works | Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Bad Mother: A Chronicle... |
| Spouse | Michael Chabon (m. 1993) |
| Children | 4 |
| Website | |
| www |
|
Ayelet Waldman (born December 11, 1964) is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
Ayelet Waldman's grandparents on both sides emigrated to North America from Ukraine early in the 20th century. Her father, Leonard, was from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but was living in Israel when he met her mother, Ricki. After they married, they moved to Jerusalem, where Waldman was born. After the Six-Day War in 1967, her family moved to Montreal, then Rhode Island, finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey when Waldman was in sixth grade. Waldman attended Wesleyan University, where she studied psychology and government and studied in Israel in her junior year, graduating in 1986. She returned to Israel after college to live on a kibbutz, but found it too "sexist" for her taste. Waldman then entered Harvard Law School. She graduated with a J.D. in 1991.
After graduating from law school, Waldman clerked for a federal judge, worked in a large corporate law firm in New York for a year, and then moved to California with Chabon, where she became a criminal defense lawyer. Waldman was a federal public defender for three years in the Central District of California. Chabon mentioned on their first date that it was his intention to care for his children so his wife could pursue her career, which he did after the birth of their first and second children. After the birth of her first child, she tried juggling legal work with mothering, then left her job to be with her husband and child. This was short-lived.
Waldman was an adjunct professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2003. She also worked as a consultant to the Drug Policy Alliance, a resource center advocating a drug policy based on harm reduction. While working as a university professor, she found writing scholarly articles uninteresting and intimidating, so she began writing fiction instead. According to Waldman, her fiction is "all about being a bad mother." Waldman said she would not return to the legal profession. In her fiction Waldman has drawn extensively on her legal experience.
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