Bad Mother
A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace

According to an informal Gawker poll, Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon have received the second-most votes for literary power couple that make Gawker readers wish they had never learned to read. As of today, they are quite a few percentage points behind Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, but t......more

Reading this book took me back to my recent book club meeting. In a tangential conversation, my book club friends and I discussed the self-doubt we sometimes heard from parents our age about their decision not to use corporal punishment with their children. “It’s not the spanking itself,” one friend......more

I seriously doubt that any woman who gives birth to a baby goes into it aspiring to be a bad mother. But within days, hours, and honestly probably before the baby is even born, we all have moments where we're sure we're not going to be as good at this motherhood thing as we want to be. One of my fir......more

Ayelet Waldman is a self-confessed bad mother, the only problem being that it only takes a few pages of reading to decide that she's wrong. I felt like I was a bad mother myself as I devoured this book after coming home from the library today, leaving my six children to their own devices. The author......more