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The words stung enough to send novelist Ayelet Waldman into a hysterical cry.
What set her off was a story in a recent issue of New York magazine. The article was about novels dealing with family problems, including her new Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and carried the zinger that Waldman was "writing in the shadow of husband Michael Chabon, especially after contributing a (New York) Times 'Styles' column that bragged about preferring her Adonis of a mate to her own children."
"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."
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.
The essay, in which she concedes, "I love my husband more than I love my children," set off a maelstrom of criticism. It caught Oprah Winfrey's attention and landed the author an appearance on Winfrey's TV show, on which Waldman talked about her "infatuated devotion" to her husband.
"It was a group of two dozen women arrayed around this living room," Waldman says. "Four were on my side, and the rest were trying to figure out how to hang me."
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."
Her newest book, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Doubleday, $23.95), is about Emilia Greenleaf, 32, whose baby dies of SIDS. The protagonist is married to an older man who divorced his wife to marry her. He has a 5-year-old son, William, from his first marriage, a stepson Emilia detests.
"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."
Waldman began writing while at home with her first child. She had returned to work after Sophie's birth, "breast pump in one hand and briefcase in the other."
But the writer called it quits when she became jealous of all the time her work-at-home husband was sharing with the baby.
She soon discovered that staying home wasn't her cup of tea. "I looked for support at the playground," she recalls. "I said to the other mothers, 'Doesn't this kind of suck?' and everyone would look at me like I was a criminal."
With four children to care for, Waldman says, she writes "from car pool to car pool" while Chabon writes at night. In between soccer games, school activities and orthodontist visits, she and her husband always find time to talk about their work.
"We do this thing called 'plot walks,'" Waldman says. "We'll walk for hours, hashing through a plot problem. That's where we help each other the most."
Waldman is at work on another novel, Winter's End, which she says was inspired by the women who confronted her on Oprah.
"I looked at those women and thought, 'That's the kind of person I want to write about': the person who prepared herself so completely for a professional career, was single-minded about it, then got married and had children and found herself with a totally different life.
"It's a good life in this sort of Madame Bovary way," Waldman says. "It's beautiful and perfect and seems to be just what you want but ends up becoming a gilded cage."
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