Ayelet Waldman

Ayelet Waldman is an American-Israeli essayist and novelist best known for the Mommy-Track Mystery series of novels, and four other novels. She also gained notoriety for a series of autobiographical essays about motherhood and family life. Most of her fiction is inspired from her years of work as a federal public defender. Her parents immigrated to the Americas from Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century. After her parents, Leonard and Ricki got married, they moved to Jerusalem where they had Ayelet Waldman. They would then move to Montreal and Rhode Island before finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where Waldman spent most of her childhood. After attending Wesleyan University, she moved to Israel but was forced to move back to the States, after finding her Kibbutz too sexist. Post her Harvard graduation in 1991, she worked as the assistant for a federal judge before moving on to California where she practiced as a criminal defense lawyer. In addition to practicing as a California federal public defender, she worked as adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law between 1997 and 2003. Finding the scholarly articles she had to write as a university professor incredibly boring and intimidating, she quit in 1997 to become a full time mother and launch her writing career in 1997.