Ayelet Waldman was born on December 11, 1964. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1986 and from Harvard Law School in 1991. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked at a New York law firm and as a federal public defender in California. She is the author of the Mommy-Track Mysteries series, Daughter's Keeper, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Red Hook Road. In her essay Motherlove, which was published in Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write about Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race and Themselves, Waldman admitted that she loves her husband more than her children. Her book Bad Mother was written as a result of the negative reaction to her essay.