Anyone who has read her blog or her Salon.com columns knows Ayelet Waldman is a forceful, opinionated woman who has either the courage or the self-centeredness to write about her life in a way that often reveals her less-flattering traits, as well as her struggle with bipolar disorder. "Don't I get any credit for that?" she asks. Waldman created a firestorm that landed her on Oprah when she confessed in the "Modern Love" column in the New York Times that she loved her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than their four children (two boys, two girls, ages 2 to 11).
The five-foot-tall red-head with a Harvard law degree says she created Juliet Applebaum, the public-defender-turned-stay-at-home-mom investigator in her Mommy Track mysteries (Berkeley), because, as a public-defender-turned-stay-at-home mom herself, she was starved for someone to laugh at her jokes. Like her character, Waldman is both intrepid and self-deprecating, especially when it comes to her mothering skills. And that, as it turns out, is what a lot of people didn't think was very funny.
We meet for lunch at Rick and Ann's cafe across the street from the grand Victorian-style Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, which is the setting for the main characters' first kiss in Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, her novel published by Doubleday this month. Waldman blurts out the details of a non—life-threatening crisis at home but then tells me I can't write about it. When she is stressed she eats ("I'm like, I have to make some bacon and pasta"), and she has already reserved a table for us under my easier-to-pronounce first name. As for hers, she coaches people that it's "I-YELL-it," not at all inappropriate for a woman who likes to shake things up.
One of the things in the now infamous Times column that struck a particular nerve was when Waldman played the "God Forbid game." That is: God forbid something would happen to one of her children, or God forbid something would happen to her husband. How would she survive? Her answer—that she could imagine a future without one of her children, but not without her husband—made women boil. Oprah Winfrey defended her, and did an entire show around Waldman's premise that too many women supplant the love they feel for their husbands with motherly love. "Those women were really angry," says Waldman. "I just wanted to go sit in Oprah's lap."
Waldman admits that Chabon, to whom she's been married for 12 years, is way more private than she is. Does he ever get mad at her for revealing too much? "Michael always says that if it's not true, you can always tell," she says. "He has written a lot about this mission of the golem, which is that in writing you are creating this thing and then it does whatever it is going to do. Nine times out of 10 what it does is turn its back on you."
Still, the response to the Times column shocked them both. Even as a self-described provocateur, Waldman never expected the vitriol she inspired.
She originally wrote the essay for an anthology, Because I Said So: 33 Mothers WriteAbout Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves (HarperCollins, 2005)."I thought, people buying the anthology are going to read Anne Lamott's piece, they are not going to read me," she says. A review copy found its way to Dan Jones, who edits the "Modern Love" column. When he approached Waldman to excerpt the piece in the Times, it was a pinch-me moment for a girl from Ridgewood, N.J., who grew up reading the paper.
Then, after the piece ran, "It was as if a bomb went off in my hands," she says. "It was pretty brutal." Waldman became the topic of many heated conversations and the subject of a searing spoof of her blog that ricocheted electronically around the country. She says she didn't read most of what was written about her, but that she was amazed how friends felt perfectly comfortable pasting it into e-mails. "A friend of mine called me from a Starbucks in New York to tell me that the women at the next table were trashing me." Waldman adds, "There's no need to do that."
Ironically, her new novel, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, is about a woman coming to terms with the death of an infant and her new role as stepmother to her husband's five-year-old son. The idea came out of a conversation Waldman had with Phyllis Grann, who was a fan of Waldman's first non—Mommy Track title, Daughter's Keeper (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2003).
Waldman had recently lost a baby in her second trimester, and found herself obsessed with the idea of dead babies. "I suddenly remembered that my grandmother had had a stillborn before my Dad was born," she says. "It felt like my whole world became a world of women with dead babies. And [Phyllis] said, 'There's your book.' "
While still only in the talking phase with Grann, who would become her editor, Waldman went off to the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire and wrote the first 100 pages in a fit of inspiration. "There was a day I wrote 8,500 words," she says, still amazed. "The pads of my fingers were numb; I thought I had worn off my fingerprints." Until recently, when Waldman rented an office space outside of their Berkeley home, she and Chabon wrote in the same room—Chabon on the night shift and Waldman on days, scheduling their writing time around the needs of their four small children. Still, a few weeks each year one or the other will go to a writers' colony for treasured blocks of undisturbed writing time.
Waldman drew on much of her own experience and personality to create Emelia, the protagonist in Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. "She's selfish and immature at the beginning of the book, and I often feel selfish and immature," says the self-deprecator. "I'm proud of how Emelia grows to not only embrace but cherish her stepmother existence."
Waldman, who did not set out to be a writer, knows her path to publishing has been fortuitous. She and Chabon met on a blind date in New York; three weeks later they were engaged. Waldman then took a job with the Los Angeles public defender's office, thinking she'd support the writing husband. After a while, she tried her own hand at writing. Then, Chabon (not yet a Pulitzer winner) passed along the manuscript to his agent, Mary Evans. Evans sold it.
Waldman describes her next project, also with Grann, as "Madame Bovary on the Peninsula"—an affluent area south of San Francisco. The main character, an SUV-driving stay-at-home mom, has lost all sense of self—except for her identity as a mother. When she meets a man who lost his fiancée in a tragic accident, it's not clear if she is falling in love with him or with the ghost of a woman who was her polar opposite. "She's like those women sitting across from me on Oprah," says Waldman. Is the intrepid provocateur making another appearance? For Waldman, it's about the story and where the characters take her; if that gets people rethinking the status quo, she says, "that's fine."
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm tiny," she explains. "I've spent my whole life trying to be seen."
Walking back to her car after lunch Waldman comments about how she and Chabon recently scaled back their nanny's hours. "That means when it's three o'clock and the kids get out of school, I have to be there. That's what mothers do," she says, with a shrug.
