Ayelet Waldman - Fiction

Fiction

Waldman has written often about how she found full-time parenting to be monotonous. She started writing 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, to keep 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.

While working as a university professor, Waldman attempted to research legal issues with a view to writing articles for legal journals and thus increasing her chances of a tenured job teaching law. She has said that every time she tried to write those scholarly articles she became uninterested or intimidated, so she began writing fiction instead.

Waldman has said that her fiction is all about being a bad mother.