a criminal defense lawyer. Waldman was a federal public defender for three years in the Central District of California. Chabon mentioned on their first date that it was his intention to care for his children so his wife could pursue her career, which he did after the birth of their first and second children. After the birth of her first child, she tried juggling legal work with mothering, then left her job to be with her husband and child. This was short-lived. Waldman was an adjunct professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2003. She also worked as a consultant to the Drug Policy Alliance, a resource center advocating a drug policy based on harm reduction. While working as an adjunct professor, she found writing scholarly articles uninteresting and intimidating, so she began writing fiction instead. According to Waldman, her fiction is "all about being a bad mother." Waldman said she would not return to the legal profession. In her fiction Waldman has drawn extensively on her legal experience. Literary career Waldman has written various online and print articles about mothering while at home on maternity leave after the birth of her first child and again after she left her job as a public defender. She has at various times said that she chose to write because it was not as time-consuming a career as the law, because it gave her something to do during naptimes, it kept her entertained, because she was starved of someone to laugh at her jokes and because it gave her a way of putting off going back to work. "Mommy-Track Mysteries" In 1997, Waldman started writing mystery novels, thinking they would be "easy . . . light and fluffy." At first she wrote in secret, then with her husband's encouragement. She has said that she chose mysteries because they are primarily about plot. Waldman has said that her first mystery work, eventually published as Nursery Crimes, was her first attempt at creative writing, describing it as her first piece of fiction "aside from my legal briefs." Waldman wrote seven novels about the "part-time sleuth and full-time mother" Juliet Applebaum. Waldman has said of Juliet, "She is me, well, she was me," and "They say to write what you know . . . so I wrote exactly what I knew." Like Waldman, Juliet is a