Ayelet Waldman

Ayelet Waldman was born in 1964 in Jerusalem

Waldman was born in Jerusalem in 1964 to Leonard and Ricki. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the family moved to Montreal, then Rhode Island, and finally Ridgewood, New Jersey. She grew up in a Jewish family and spent a year on a kibbutz in tenth grade.

She studied psychology and government at Wesleyan University and graduated in 1986. She then lived on a kibbutz again before entering Harvard Law School, where she earned a J.D. in 1991.

After law school she clerked for a federal judge and worked at a New York law firm. In California she became a criminal defense lawyer and served 3 years as a federal public defender. From 1997 to 2003 she taught at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1997 she began writing mystery novels, and she published 7 books in the Mommy-Track Mysteries series. Her novels include Daughter's Keeper, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, which became a 2011 film, and Love and Treasure, set against the Holocaust. She has also written essays on motherhood and on her 2002 diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

She has been married to author Michael Chabon since 1993, and they live in Berkeley, California.