“I certainly don't think it's inevitable that we don't love children who don't carry our own DNA. If that were true we wouldn't have millions of successful adoptions to consider. I do think that it's harder to love a child when you come into that child's life after the unrequited passion of infancy and early childhood has passed.”

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.