Ayelet Waldman Talks About Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
Posted on February 28, 2006
USA Today has an interesting article about novelist Ayelet Waldman, who set off a firestorm of controversy when she said in an article that she loved her husband (novelist Michael Chabon) more than she loved her four children (although she went on to say that they both adore all their children). That comment got her on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where some women attacked her for her comments about "maternal ambivalence" and others supported her. Then, New York magazine then ran an article sniping that Waldman was "writing in the shadow of husband Michael Chabon, especially after [she] bragged about preferring her Adonis of a mate to her own children." So, how does Waldman feel about everyone discussing her family life?
"Usually I try not to read that stuff. For someone who writes openly about her life, I have the thinnest skin," Waldman says. "I don't like feeling that people don't like me. It makes me very upset."Ayelet Waldeman's latest book is Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Doubleday, $23.95). The book's protagonist, Emilia Greenleaf, is a young woman whose baby dies of SIDS; she's married to a man with a 5-year-old son from a prior marriage. Emilia does not like William and the book chronicles her struggles as a wife and stepmom. Publisher's Weekly says of the book: "How a five-year-old manages to make the adults in his life hew to the love he holds for them is the sweet treat in this honest, brutal, bitterly funny slice of life."That the magazine article was referring to something Waldman wrote nearly a year ago, and that journalists continue to ask her about it, suggests that the furor still hasn't died down. Waldman and Chabon, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, have been married 13 years. They met on a blind date and were engaged three weeks later. They live in Berkeley, Calif., with their four children, Sophie, 11, Zeke, 8, Rosie, 4, and Abraham, almost 3. Waldman says her comments about her love for her husband "were no big deal to our children. They don't have any doubts that we're both completely enamored of them."
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"I've always written about maternal ambivalence," Waldman says. "It's the subject that consumes me." Waldman doesn't shy away from sharing her feelings, even about herself. She has written for newspapers and magazines about her bipolar illness, losing a baby and contemplating suicide. "When I write about being bipolar, I feel queasy and ashamed, but I also feel really strongly that I shouldn't feel this way, that this is a disease, like diabetes. It's a chemical imbalance." In a self-deprecating way, Waldman says, she also tries to see the "good" side of being bipolar. "For an artist, a creative person, as diseases go, this is a pretty good disease. I once wrote three novels in seven months."