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In 2010, when her essay collection „Bad Mother“ (Link) was finally published in Germany, I had the opportunity to interview Ayelet Waldman for a big German weekly, Die ZEIT.

We spoke on the phone, for about 40 minutes, and before I translated and shortened the interview for the – much quicker / condensed – German version (Link), I did a lengthy transcript… colloquialisms, warts and all.

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Ayelet Waldman (Link: Wikipedia) was born in 1964. She studied law at Harvard University and lives in Berkeley with her husband, Pulitzer-winning author Michael Chabon (Link), and their four children. In the last decade, Ayelet Waldman has started to publish mysteries, literary fiction and personal essays – and she’s quickly growing into one of the most outspoken and relatable US intellectuals when it comes to questions of motherhood, domestic life and the conflicts of women in the professional sphere.

In 2011, Chabon and Waldman developed a new HBO drama, the supernatural period piece „Hobgoblin“ (Link). During our phone conversation (in October of 2010), Waldman explained the development and pitching process and the early stages of script development.

Here’s our interview! Enjoy!

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Stefan Mesch: Thank you for having me! I’m nervous – this is my first transatlantic interview!

Ayelet Waldman: Don’t be nervous! I’m like a little machine: You just ask me a question, you turn me on and I will RUN!

Stefan Mesch: Awesome! So you are… an accomplished novelist and just published „Red Hook Road“ this summer, you’re an essayist, you’re a mom, you’re the wife of a Pulitzer-winning author – and you’re addressing all these issues: contemporary parenting, gender roles… How do you see yourself? What’s your place in life right now

Ayelet Waldman: It’s a funny question to ask because I think that in this stage of my life, my head has been down for so long… just looking down, working so hard – I haven’t lifted it up take a more macro look at what I’m doing. It’s more about getting from minute to minute, you know?

But I have been thinking lately that it is time to figure out the greater question of what I’m going to do professionally. When I try to imagine my career having an arc, I’m still figuring out what that arc is. Recently, I had agreed with my publisher to try a second book like ‚Bad Mother‘, a kind of hybrid, essayistic form… but I found myself really resisting doing that and I found that I didn’t have anything that I wanted to say right now. I needed to take a minute to ask myself: ‚What do I want to do next?‘

Not: ‚What is going to sell the most?‘ Or: ‚What is likely to make me the most money?‘ But: ‚What do I really want to do next?‘ And there is a novel idea that I had been working on whenever I had the time. So – that’s what I realized that I actually want to do right now, and it’s what I’m doing: Embarking on another novel project.

I wrote the essays for ‚Bad Mother‘ (Link) in the middle of ‚Red Hook Road‘ (Link), but for this next novel, this will mean a couple of years of quiet. I probably won’t be writing articles! I still have a small public presence via Twitter (Link) and Facebook (Link) – but I think that after this coming election is over, I won’t be having a lot to say about politics.

Stefan Mesch: That’s sad – but I can see that…

Ayelet Waldman: I will write this next book; focus on that instead of having this kind of public persona. I’m also at the stage where my children are old enough that they don’t want me to write about them! They really don’t want me to write about motherhood! So I need to take a more quiet approach: My two oldest are teenagers and I don’t think they even like to hear my name in their house.

Stefan Mesch: So were there… repercussions in your family circle?

Ayelet Waldman: There weren’t really – but I think there would be if I kept writing the kinds of essays that I’ve been writing. If I kept going, I think there would be.

Stefan Mesch: What is making you worried, specifically?

Ayelet Waldman: It’s not so much about being worried. The children now have very independent identities. They are developing stories about their own lives, they’re creating their own narratives. My daughter is fifteen, and she’s entitled to express her feelings herself and not have to see it through the lense of her mother’s thoughts, her mother’s ideas, whether they’d be personal… psychological… or political.

Stefan Mesch: I can see that. And the prospect of another novel sounds great. Were you happy with [this summer’s family novel] ‚Red Hook Road‘?

Ayelet Waldman: I was happy for about fifteen minutes, and that’s how it always is: There’s nothing as horrible as re-reading a book you’re already finished with, so every time I open it up all I see now is places that I could have trimmed! [‚Red Hook Road“s] boxing match? All I wanted to do is go back and cut out the repetetive moments of it – go back and trim and cut and re-write. But you know: I think that happens to every writer.

„Red Hook Road“ was a huge step forward for me on a literary level and I worked on it harder than I’ve worked on any book before: I am really proud of that. The quality of my prose took a loop forward. Now, I’m writing on this new novel and I once wrote a book that I loved but that I ended up throwing away for all different sorts of reasons and I had promised myself that I would harvest bits and pieces of it in this new, different work.

I thought: ‚I have this perfect chapter in this book that I wrote (called ‚The Bloom Grows‘) and I’m going to go and use that, change it a little bit and insert it here in the novel!“ Then I went and trimmed it out and I got it into the new novel… and I realized that the prose wasn’t good enough. It seemed clichéd, it seemed hackneyed, it seemed sort of… bulky, it didn’t flow well enough… you know, I wrote it probably seven years ago and it wasn’t good enough anymore!

Stefan Mesch: You could actually see your own progress?

Ayelet Waldman: Yeah – that is what keeps people going from book to book: The idea that you’re making progress, that you’re learning and you’re getting better.

Actually, I don’t remember how many years ago this happened, but it was before I wrote [my novel] ‚Love and other Impossible Pursuits‘ [published in 2006, Link]:

I’ve always straddled this line between being a commercial writer and being a literary writer and I kind of wavered back and forth, and I was whining to my husband about that, and he said: „You know, your problem is that you don’t read like a writer, you read like a reader. You love to read and you grab a lot of books, but you need to make much more conscious decisions what you read and you need to read much more analytically. Once you do that, you’ll find that your prose gets better!“

Initially, I sort of tried to defend myself. But almost immediately, I realized that he was right and that I had been reading too voraciously and too quickly and just for the love of reading. Now I have a much more critical approach to a lot of my reading, and I think you see that in my writing, too: One of the reasons that my writing has gotten better is that my reading has gotten better. Although I still haven’t managed to make it through Proust, which may be a sign that there’s only so far I am going to go.

Stefan Mesch: I was impressed with „Red Hook Road“… so please continue whenever you’ll find the time! What about your timetable, though? Do you see yourself as a mom with a half-time job, or… what’s your… ‚identity‘?

Ayelet Waldman: I don’t know – because whenever I’m not working, I feel like I’m procrastinating. But realistically, I’ll only write a few hours a day. Then, there’s all the other stuff that’s part of the job, like talking to you. So it IS very part-time in the sense that when I was a lawyer, I was working twelve-hour days. But it didn’t feel… you know – I’m probably a full-time a writer.

Because there are writers who claim that they write twelve hours a day, but the only one who really does is Joyce Carol Oates. Everyone else is lying! I certainly produce as much as some full-time writers. But it’s hard to think that when your job is kind of… amorphous and it kind of expands and contracts depending of where you are on your projects, it’s hard to think of yourself as „half-time“ or „full-time“.

I like to think of myself as part-time-everything: part-time writer… I certainly think of myself as a part-time mother because I’m always feeling so guilty that I’m not spending enough time with the kids and as a part-time writer because I’m always feeling guilty that I’m not spending enough time writing… and then there are these long parts of the day where I feel like all I’m doing is things on the internet.

If there wasn’t an internet, I’d be a full-time writer AND a full-time mother and I would do everything beautifully and with incredible focus: I blame the web for all my woes.

Stefan Mesch: When you were an attorney, you were working full-time, and then you switched to being a full-time mom, so basically, fifteen years ago, you still thought of yourself as someone who did things full-time. And then something happened. So… was it a growth process? Or did you just feel like you were falling apart? Was it a crisis? How did this switch happen?

Ayelet Waldman: You know, it had a lot to do with envy: I was working really, really hard and I would get these wonderful e-mails… no, wait, this was before the days of e-mail! I would get phone calls from Michael who would spend all this time with our daughter, playing. He was working at night, but his days were free; he would have these long, languid days and he joyfully put her into one outfit after another to take her photograph – they would spend hours doing that, you know? Taking pictures of the baby.

They would go for walks! They would go to bookstores and just have these lovely days with her that I was jealous of. I was jealous of him spending time with her, but I was also jealous of her because she got to spend all this time with him, and I had this idea that if I came home, we would be able to travel and we would all be together and it would be wonderful and it would be easy.

Working full-time and taking care… it’s exhausting to just do it all, and I had this idea that it would be easy and languid and marvelous. So when I quit, I had in the back of my had the idea that it was going to be short-term, and I couldn’t just walk away from one job, so what I did was I got a part-time job teaching at a law school. When I left my job as a public defender, I would still do SOMETHING – but that was very part-time, it was a single class and it was in the evening and it never… it felt like I was a full-time mom with just this little side thing, teaching law school.

I mean: It wasn’t a mistake. I don’t think it was a mistake to leave my job in the public defender’s office because I ended up writing and that has been a very satisfying carreer for me. But the mistake was thinking that I would ever be able to tolerate being a full-time mother. That was not me!

Stefan Mesch: Because you plunged into depression.

Ayelet Waldman: Yeah. I mean: Something about the monotony of suddenly not BEING someone, you know, not having an independent identity, I just thought it was boring – boring, boring, boring. And I became profoundly depressed. And you know, I taught for a year, and then we moved up to Berkeley and when we came here, I still had another very part-time teaching job, but then I really was a mother… for three years… with two kids, one in pre-school and one home full-time.

And the one who was home full-time was sort of a constant round-the-clock nurser, a VERY good baby, you know, but it really was a very difficult time in my life.

Stefan Mesch: Did you feel guilty that you didn’t enjoy it more? Did you KNOW that you were depressed, or did it really take time to acknowledge the fact that you’re not getting as much out of it as you thought you would?

Ayelet Waldman: I knew that I was depressed, certainly. But I also felt so much shame for not enjoying it… it was awful to not love every minute of it, but it was almost like I couldn’t convince myself. But then I still insisted on doing it because I not only felt that I had to do it, I had to like it. I felt like I was failing.

Stefan Mesch: And what was the turning point? Was there a moment when you stood up and said: „Okay – something needs to change!“?

Ayelet Waldman: I had begun to toy with the idea of writing while I was still teaching. I was writing a lot of legal protocol, and then I started to sort of flirt with the idea of writing this murder mystery. Initially, I had no expectation of being published. It just seemed like something I could be doing. And then I just worked away on that – not working very hard on it, just once a day, during nap time -, but after a couple of years of that (you know: babies sleep a lot!), I had a book.

And THAT was the turning point when I sent the book off to my husband’s agent and she accepted it and sold it and suddenly… it wasn’t like I was happy the next day, it took a lot of time for me to admit that I was writing, and that that was a carreer, too, and to treat that as a real thing, to value it, you know, a long time I was thinking that I was on maternity leave and not that I was acutally writing silly little murder mysteries (Link).

Stefan Mesch: Did you actually tell people around you or was it something that you did in private for a while before you told people that you were working on a manuscript?

Ayelet Waldman: I kept it a secret, I was terrible about that. It seemed so much like I was ‚the writer’s wife‘, ‚working on her own little novel‘, I felt like I had heard that story before and that it made me feel sorry for the woman: ‚Oh, really? Of COURSE she is! Isn’t that cute? Writing a book. Ooooh!‘

I didn’t want to be that person. You know, I’d had this really independent identity, so that suddenly doing something that was so clearly in his shadow, I was emberrassed about it.

Stefan Mesch: Were you emberrassed in front of your husband, too? Did you have to ‚come out‘ to him?

Ayelet Waldman: Yeah! You know, I had made a toast on our wedding. Michael’s first wife was a poet who had never been published, or very rarely, and that was part, I think, of what was wrong with their marriage, so on our wedding, I made this toast on how I’m never going to be a writer and I was always going to have health insurance for him and I was always going to support him and nobody had to worry about us… blah, blah, blah – and than, lo and behold, two years later, I said: „Oh, I’m writing a novel!“

I was horrible about that, so I kept it a secret for a long time. And then, when I gave it to him, I said: „Look. If this is garbage, I want to know. I don’t want to be working on something that is stupid, and I don’t want to be one of those idiots struggling with something they’re bad at, so tell me, tell me if it’s bad!“

And he said: „This is great. Keep going!“ And I wouldn’t hear it. I said: „No. Look: I don’t want to hear it’s great. Tell me the truth!“ And he just kept going „It’s great. Just keep writing!“ And finally, I listened to him and I kept going. And there it was.

Stefan Mesch: But you didn’t write when you were a teenager or when you were in law school?

Ayelet Waldman: No! You know, I was always very good at writing brief. My briefs were always very good briefs and my bosses did rely on me to write these pizzazz-y briefs. I never wrote the typical dry legal prose, I always wrote with a little bit of style because I knew that that’s what I like to read, so I wanted to give… I knew the judges, they were readers, too, and I knew that I could better convince them if your brief is worth the read. But did I ever write fiction or anything? No.

But you know? I was a criminal defense attorney: Much of my writing was telling the stories of my clients and trying to convince the judges to be lenient. And WHAT is that – if not fiction? „Your Honor, this guy is so wonderful – let me tell you about the ways that he is wonderful. Really. I promise! He’s not a bad guy!“

Link to the German version, ZEIT Online: Link

Stefan Mesch: What are you reading right now? Not as in „this very moment“, but you’ve said that you always need to read something to become a better reader.

Ayelet Waldman: I’m reading on three tracks right now. The first track is stuff that I’m reading very specifically for a novel that I’m writing, and that ranges from a lot of Hungarian history – part of the novel is set in Budapest in about 1900 -, so I keep reading and try to find Hungarian fiction which you can’t find a lot translated into English. And I’m expanding to stuff about Vienna in the earliest part of the 20^th century, and that’s non-fiction, mostly, although I do still look for novels, too, because those give you a great sense of… you know, if you want to know what people are eating and wearing, it’s good to read fiction from that time period. So the struggle with the book is that so little Hungarian literature has been translated specifically from that period – so I’m reading that kind of stuff.

I am reading for a project that Michael and me are working on together, I’m reading about spycraft and magic…

Stefan Mesch: That sounds awesome – can you elaborate, please? The fanboys will go crazy…

Ayelet Waldman: I can’t say much about the project, but the last book I’ve read was called „Operation Mincemeat“ by Ben Macintire (Link) and it was about this deception perpetrated by MI6 on Hitler’s „Der Adler“ – they tried to convince them that the invasion of the mediterranian was going to come through Greece rather than through Sicily, so they created a very faboulous fake corps with fake letters and all that stuff… I’ve read that.

And then, I always read fiction that I think will inspire… fiction that feels like the novel I am working on. Not likely from the same period or anything like that, just writers who write with a kind of voice that feels right for what I’m doing, that feels like it can help me, so for example when I wrote „Red Hook Road“, I’ve read some Anne Tyler (Link), I’ve read some Elizabeth Strout (Link), I read a bunch of Alice Munro, read and re-read AND re-read Alice Munro (Link)… so for THIS book I’ve just re-read a book by an American writer named Julia Glass called „Three Junes“ (Link) because one of the things I am trying to do is three sections of the book that work independently but also work together, they’re all part of the same novel, but they have different characters. So I just re-read that to pick apart how she does it.

Also, I re-read some Ian McEwan (Link) because of the way he writes about period. „The Innocent“ (Link) is a book that takes place in post-war Berlin and I read the book because I wanted detail on post-imperial culture, I just wanted to take a look on how he dealt with period.

And I have been reading some Coetzee (Link) because there’s a kind of distance he has in his prose. There’s one book in particular, „Summertime“ (Link), that I’ve just read – especially about the way he draws you into the story, he’s so sparse and so precise.

I tend to have sort of a florid tendency and he’s a good antidote for that. There are writers whose work I enjoyed who, if I read them right now, would be really bad for me: If I read Nicole Krauss (Link) right now… she has this same kind of florid tendency that I have. And that wouldn’t work for me right now, so I can read and enjoy those books when I’m working on something else, but right now, I think that would be bad for me – I need writers that are much more strict. I’m always kind of imitating who I’m reading at the moment, and it’s good for me to imitate, so right now, I should do my best to do a pale approximation of Coetzee.

Stefan Mesch: Did this love for reading translate to all members of your family?

Ayelet Waldman: Wouldn’t that be nice? Actually, one of our children said „I hate reading. It’s SO boring!“, and my husband and I promptly just stabbed one another in the heart. No, a couple of them read: Our littlest is an avid reader, but what’s most exciting is that when he picks up a book, he gets sucked into it almost immediately; you can actually see it happening: his face is buried in the book and you can’t pry him out. That’s nice to see.

And our younger daughter, the one who’s dyslexic, also just loves, loves, loves to read, so THEY are readers, our older kids less so, although our [older] daughter, she’s very excited about books she likes, she reads a lot but she also listens to a lot of [radio shows] „This American Life“ and Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff (Link).

And she’s doing this amazing project with Dave Eggers – Dave Eggers has more energy than anyone on the planet. Every year he does this project with high school students where they publish a book. It’s called „Best American Nonrequired Reading“ (Link) and they read, the harvest all those short stories and essays and publications from around America and they put out a book, and she’s on that project this year. I don’t know how that man actually… he must not sleep. But she meets with him and this group once a week and she’s been reading fabulous stuff for that, and I think it’s turning her into an even more devoted reader.

Stefan Mesch: Does that mean she’s part of the editing process? She’s reading all these other peoples‘ texts?

Ayelet Waldman: Exactly, and it’s giving her this great editorial eye, so that’s good for the future, I think – we can ALWAYS use more editors around here (laughs). And it’s so funny because they always have an opinion. I was pitching a TV series to ABC. I did a pitch at the dinner table, and my youngest one, at seven, he said: „Yeah. It’s missing some sha-whoa!“ And I said: „What?“ And he said: „No, it misses something – you need a little sha-whoa!“ And he was totally right, it WAS missing something. I’m not sure what sha-whoa is, but whatever sha-whoa is…. it was missing it.

Stefan Mesch: Is the project still in development? Are you still shopping it around?

Ayelet Waldman: This one died a sad and lonely death, as does most stuff in Hollywood, but I always have some iron in the fire. You know, in America, our lives are basically defined by our desperate need for health insurance, and writers don’t get health insurance and we don’t have any… you know, it’s a complete hysterical, panic-ridden struggle particularly in my family: we’re Jewish, devoted hypochondriacs, so we have all these illnesses real and imagined, so we’re ALL desperate for health insurance, and Hollywood is the only way that writers can get… that WE have found, so we can get insurance, so we always have something in the fire so I can go to my psychiatrist, so I can go to my gastroenterologist… do all those things that your basic neurotic jew must do.

Stefan Mesch: Good luck with these pitches! So… what’s the biggest misperception about motherhood? Do you feel like there’s some big, collective lie?

Ayelet Waldman: Yes – that it’s a constant joy, and that if you’re not full of joy, something is wrong with you. I think that’s the biggest lie. Or… you know what else? There are so many! Another lie is that it can only be done… that it MUST be done in a certain way and that our children do better if we hover over them and manage every moment of their existence, and I actually think that the real truth is that our children, what they need from us, is exactly the opposite, they need from us our inattention, they need to be on their own and they need to be bored and they need to learn to navigate the world, without the… this has been a terrible lesson for me to learn, but kids need to learn to navigate the world without my constant interference! And it’s hard for me to learn that.

You know, I still find myself… just the other day, my son was ill and I was e-mailing with his teacher about the make-up excam, asking when he was going to take it know, but then I thought „He’s thirteen! He can decide! He can find a date for his own damn make-up­-exam, he doesn’t need his mommy doing that for him!“ So I think that’s one of the biggest… I think we all need to learn to let go a little bit more. I mean – I don’t mean to say „Leave your toddler alone, while you go off…“, but…

Stefan Mesch: It’s about giving kids a free range.

Ayelet Waldman: You don’t have to go on every play-date! I don’t know if you have this phenomenom in Germany, the play-date…

Stefan Mesch: Yeah. We have.

Ayelet Waldman: So I can’t tell you how many time these mothers have come to my house and then I’ve suddenly realized ‚Wait a minute, this is… they’re STAYING! This is a play-date for all of us. I have to spend time with these… lovely women.‘

I don’t want a play-date! I want to sit and read the New York Times. I don’t want to play with you! The children will be fine. They’re better off if we’re not playing with them.

Stefan Mesch: So who do you think has an interest to create this kind of image of the happy, fun-loving, easy-going mom? Where does that come from? Who gains by that public idea?

Ayelet Waldman: Who gains? I loved how you said „The happy, fun-loving, easy-going mom“ – wait! Where is she? I want to be her! I think that the current expectation that mothers are ever-present and entirely self-obligating is a curious phenomenom because JUST when women have entered the workforce in greatest numbers these past few decades, three things did happen simultaneously.

One: motherhood suddenly became this thing that you needed to do with all your focus and all your attention. See, my mother used to open the door and said „See you tonight“, but now, suddenly, motherhood demands this constant effort, you must attend the children’s playdates, you must bake the cookies, being a mom becomes this MUCH more demanding, rigulous enterprise… and at the same time, WORK has become this much more demanding, rigulous enterprise. So when I was a young girl and the train pulled into the station from New York City, while this was in suburban New York, all the daddies got off the train at 6.30 at night, you know? Now the train pulls into the station and nobody gets off that train at 6 or 6.30, people get off the train at 8 or 8.30 because work has suddenly expanded and a full-time job is no longer 40 hours a week, it’s much more demanding.

So three things have happened: Women have entered the workplace and SOMEHOW, coincidentally, the workplace has become much more demanding AND their expectations of their role as mothers have become much more demanding, so suddenly, it has become impossible to do both.

So if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you’ll say „Well, this is certainly the patriarchies‘ way of defending it’s hegemony“, right? So now, you’re in a worse place because you might have managed it to work full-time in 1960 and be at home in 1960, but it isn’t. But then, I’m not necessarily a conspiracy theorist: So maybe the answer is just that this is what we have. There’s no point in whining about it. And what we need to do is do our best to change it. I think the most effective way to change both work and home is to demand male participation in the home life because as soon as men realize there are – and I think European men are way ahead of American men in this thing, they are actually spending more time at home and going on paternity leave and all that – but as soon as they realize the rewards and the challenges of being intimately involved in the domestic sphere, they will demand changes in the public sphere that are necessary.

So I have my hope that that will happen. I used to think my job was to raise strong-willed women who will demand that their husbands – if they are heterosexual – can grasp the domestic responsibilities, but now I realize that the much more important job is to raise men who expect to do that, too – as opposed to see this role as a woman’s role.

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After a 40-minute conversation, our interview ended: Ms. Waldman had to get burritos for the ‚burrito day‘ at her son’s school. To finish up, we had a short final exchange by e-mail:

Stefan Mesch: When you wrote „Bad Mother“, did you ever feel like you were over-sharing or outside of your comfort zone? How did you feel about breaching the ‚taboo‘ that still surrounds a lot of domestic problems by adressing your loved ones‘ more personal issues?

Ayelet Waldman: The things that felt like oversharing got edited out! Actually, it’s always funny to me that I’m accused of oversharing. There’s so much people don’t know. And there are so many things I’d simply never say. For example, I don’t think there’s a single time where I’ve ever written about an argument my husband and I have had. Now, obviously, we argue. All couples do. But the nitty gritty of those arguments? That’s not something I’d ever share.

Stefan Mesch: In „Manhood for Amateurs“ (Link), your husband writes about a lot of the same issues – but he makes it sound a little more… whimsical and easy going. Childhood is an adventure, fatherhood is a blessing… does he have a different outlook – or is he in a better place than you?

Ayelet Waldman: Funny. It comes down, I think, to the fact that fatherhood is simply less fraught than motherhood. To receive accolades for being a good father it’s enough, quite simply, to show up. Anything more and you’re a paragon of virtue.

Stefan Mesch: There is a „culture of confession“, with memoirs, talk shows, blogging… but still, your book got so much attention and seems like a rather singular concept: Is there STILL a void that needs to be filled? Is there STILL a need for more *personal* accounts of these kind of first-world struggles?

Ayelet Waldman: Let’s hope so! I’ve got four children to send to college. In all seriousness, I enjoy reading nonfiction and essays that speak to my own experience, and I enjoy reading essays and nonfiction that illuminate the experiences of others. I think that will always be true.

Stefan Mesch: One theme of your writing are control issues and the influence other people’s expectations have on people’s decisions. „Red Hook Road“’s Iris is a very micromanaging mom who wants to shoulder ALL the problems of her family. Do you find these urges inside yourself? Or is it more like some kind of… cautionary tale about helicopter parents?

Ayelet Waldman: Absolutely. Iris is in some ways my worst self. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she’s the self I’m most afraid of being.

Stefan Mesch: Thank you so much! This was one of the nicest interviews I’ve ever had. Please let me know if I can get you some iTunes or Amazon gift card-thingy: You’ve went out of your way – and I’d like to say thanks!

Ayelet Waldman: OF COURSE NOT. It was an absolute pleasure.

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„Bad Mother“ at Amazon: Link

„Red Hook Road“ at Amazon: Link

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Related Links: Interviews (English)

• Interview: Sally Pascale – feminist, suburban mother… and the world’s most passionate ‚Green Lantern‘ fan (English, Link)
• Interview: CEB, author of Collected Editions (English, Link)

Interviews, German:

• Interview mit Cory Doctorow (ZEIT Online, Link)
• Interview mit Anne Köhler (ZEIT Online, Link)
• Interview mit Barbara Honigmann (ZEIT Online, Link)
• Interview mit Ilka Heinemann (Glück & Schiller, Link)
• Interview mit Olaf Petersenn (Glück & Schiller, Link)