“As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.”

Israeli-American novelist and essayist

Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist known for her mystery fiction and personal writing. She wrote The Mommy-Track Mysteries, a seven-book mystery series, along with four other novels. Waldman also wrote autobiographical essays about motherhood. She spent three years as a federal public defender, and that experience often informs her fiction, especially the legal and everyday pressures that shape her characters.