Waldman, Ayelet

Ayelet Waldman is a fiction and nonfiction writer whose books and editorial columns challenge an idealized and romanticized vision of mothers as self-sacrificing and asexual. In a contentious essay published by the New York Times in 2005, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” Waldman famously stated that her children were not the center of her passionate universe. She went even further declaring herself a bad mother and plainly admitting that she loved her husband more than she loved her children. Waldman therefore joined the ever-increasing group of women who are not afraid of declaring themselves bad mothers. Waldman's 2009 best-seller Bad Mothers: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace was partly conceived as a response to the angry letters the author received after her New York Times piece.

Waldman was born in Jerusalem on December 11, 1964, but grew up in New Jersey. She attended Wesleyan College and graduated in law from Harvard University. After her degree she worked for a New York law firm and then as a federal public defender in Los Angeles. In 1993 Waldman married Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, and the following year the couple had the first of their four children. Soon after giving birth to her second child, Waldman resigned from her federal job and, still plagued by doubts of having made the right move, took up writing. In 2000, she published Nursery Crimes, the first of her Mommy-Track Mysteries, murder mystery novels that center on the character of Juliet Applebaum, a part-time sleuth, full-time mother, and retired public defender. The series has now reached its seventh episode, Bye Bye, Black Sheep (2006). The crimes in the novels are mostly caused by the parents' lack of care for their children and, as the character of Applebaum unveils such crimes, she also reflects on her own mothering practices. Waldman has also published two other novels, Daughter's Keeper (2003) and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006). Yet, it was nonfiction writing that turned her into a best-selling author and a focus of media attention.

When the New York Times published Waldman's essay “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” the author found herself at the center of a media furor. Her admission that she loved her husband more than her children, “satellites, beloved but tangential,” caused angry mail and threats to report her to the Department of Social Services to have her children taken away from her. When she went on the Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss her column, the audience was particularly [Page 1254]hostile. Waldman wasn't intimidated, though, and in 2009 she published the bestseller Bad Mother, which further elaborated on her New York Times piece.

According to Waldman, motherhood needn't be a selfless, self-sacrificing vocation. Mothers should be wary of how the ever-higher expectations placed on motherhood, together with the well-documented inequities of domestic chores, make them resent their husbands and transfer their romantic love to their children. Bad Mother also candidly shares some of Waldman's worst and tragic moments of motherhood. The author talks about a later-stage abortion after discovering that the baby may have had genetic abnormalities, a choice that caused an enduring sense of guilt and that she was able to overcome by discovering that other women had gone through the same experience. As Waldman puts in an interview, her book was conceived to “give people a sense that they are not alone” and show to those mothers who do not want to be defined solely by child rearing that they are part of a burgeoning group.

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