Here are some reasons you might know of Ayelet Waldman: She’s the author of a number of well-received novels, including, most recently, the absorbing Red Hook Road, about the effects on two families when a young bride and groom are killed in a wedding-day limo accident. She’s also the wife of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon. (And yes, as a feminist, I feel some unease describing Waldman in “the wife of” terms. But when you’re married to a Pulitzer winner, you’ve probably made your peace with that. Besides, Chabon plays an important, if indirect, role in this story.)
You might also know of Waldman because she’s the Bad Mother. Not a bad mother, lower-case style, but the Bad Mother, a title bestowed on her after the New York Times, in 2005, ran her essay “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” in which she wrote about being the only mom at Mommy and Me who was “getting any,” the only mother of young kids she knew whose sex life was as satisfying as it had been pre-kids. Waldman wasn’t boasting, she assured readers; in fact, she wrote, she worries what it means that her four kids have not replaced her husband as the loves of her life, as our culture expects happens to all new moms.
“If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother,” she wrote. “I love my husband more than I love my children.”
That essay—that last line, in particular—stirred up a shit storm of anti-Waldman sentiment. “The Bad Mother police were swiftly on the scene,” Waldman later wrote. “They speculated, publicly, down in the toxic mud of the comment sections on blog pages, that I was crazy, evil, a menace, that my children should be taken away from me.” Finally, she landed on that crucible faced by all Americans who’ve incurred the disapproval of their fellow citizens: The Oprah Winfrey Show.
I don’t envy Waldman what she went through. Still, she’s managed to make some pretty juicy lemonade out of the rotten lemons hurtled at her by those mean mommies. The controversy brought her the kind of attention publicists dream of (for Pete’s sake, Oprah—where, Waldman notes, the pathologically gracious host defended her). Indeed, a press release announcing Waldman’s Red Hook Road book tour directs journalists to UrbanBaby.com—HQ in the anti-Waldman campaign—to check out the vile bile for themselves.
Most significantly, and to the benefit of thinking mothers everywhere, Waldman turned her 15 minutes of infamy into her 2009 book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, a collection of deeply personal and often unexpected essays about her life as a mother. I admit (and I hope I don’t sound like one of those mean mommies myself) to impatience at times with what felt like Waldman’s overindulgence in self-pity over her public excoriation—this is a woman who, prior to becoming a writer, kicked ass as a public defense attorney; I found myself wondering, was she really that torn up by what some snippy stranger in cyberspace thinks about her parenting?
As it turns out, she was. In Bad Mother, Waldman lays bare her deepest insecurities, her darkest fears, her ambivalence about the sometimes incompatible roles of mother/professional/partner/individual. She writes candidly of her struggle with bipolar disorder; her decision to abort a fetus with genetic disorders; her one-sided competition with her mother-in-law to claim ultimate ownership of her husband’s heart. There’s nothing unique about Waldman’s self-confessional writing; modern memoirists seem unable to resist the urge to show every bump and bruise. What is unique is Waldman’s voice and perspective; the demons she wrestles might not be pretty, but they’re her demons, damn in, and she’s not about to apologize for them, or pretty them up for her more sensitive (or judgmental) readers. You might disagree with some of her positions, or find her a bit too whiny or smug at times, but I defy you not to find her smart and engaging—sort of like a friend who sometimes drives you up a wall but whose company you’d suffer without.
Ayelet Waldman will read and sign books at Congregation B’nai Israel, 253 Prospect St. in Northampton, on June 5 at 7:30 p.m.
