Ayelet Waldman

They live in a 1907 Craftsman house in the Elmwood district of Berkeley, California.

The couple work from the same office in the backyard of their home.

They edit each other's work, and offer each other advice on writing, sometimes going on "plot walks" to discuss issues.

Many characters in her fiction are Jewish.

Her novel Love and Treasure is about the Holocaust.

Ayelet Waldman (איילת ולדמן, 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 was born in Jerusalem, Israel.

Her grandparents on both sides were Jewish immigrants to North America from Ukraine early in the 20th century.

Her father, Leonard, was from Montreal, Canada, but was living in Israel when he met her mother, Ricki.

After they married, they moved to Jerusalem.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, the family moved back to Montreal, then Rhode Island, finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey, when Waldman was in sixth grade.

She was raised in a Jewish family, attended Hebrew school and Jewish summer camps, and lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year while in the tenth grade.

She has said that her parents were atheists, but very Jewish, and that her "whole life was immersed in Judaism, but in a very specific kind of Labor–Zionist Judaism."

Despite this, she did not celebrate becoming a bat mitzvah.

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 again live on a kibbutz, but found it too sexist for her taste.

She then entered Harvard Law School and graduated with a J.D. in 1991.

Waldman has been married to fellow author Michael Chabon since 1993.

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 an adjunct 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.

Waldman has written various online and print articles about mothering while at home on maternity leave after the birth of her first child and again after she left her job as a public defender.

She has at various times said that she chose to write because it was not as time-consuming a career as the law, because it gave her something to do during naptimes, it kept her entertained, because she was starved of someone to laugh at her jokes and because it gave her a way of putting off going back to work.

In 1997, Waldman started writing mystery novels, thinking they would be "easy … light and fluffy."

At first she wrote in secret, then with her husband's encouragement.

She has said that she chose mysteries because they are primarily about plot.

Waldman has said that her first mystery work, eventually published as Nursery Crimes, was her first attempt at creative writing, describing it as her first piece of fiction "aside from my legal briefs."

Waldman wrote seven novels about the "part-time sleuth and full-time mother" Juliet Applebaum.

Waldman has written several times about her 2002 diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness that runs in her family, and has spoken publicly about parenting while having a mental illness.

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 Michael 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.