Ayelet Waldman is a novelist and essayist who was formerly a lawyer. She is noted for her self-revelatory essays, and for her writing about the changing expectations of motherhood. She has written extensively about juggling the demands of children, partners, career and society, in particular about combining paid work with modern motherhood, and about the ensuing maternal ambivalence. Waldman is the author of seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and has published three novels of general interest, Daughter's Keeper, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits and Red Hook Road, as well as a collection of personal essays entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. A graduate of Wesleyan University and Harvard Law School, Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and in all her fiction she has drawn extensively on her legal education and career as a lawyer. 

December 11th, 1964 in Jerusalem (Age 59)