How Ayelet Waldman Found a Calmer Life on Tiny Doses of LSD

Ayelet Waldman is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and activist, but to many she is best known as the author of a Times piece, from 2005, in which she stated that she was more in love with her husband than with her four children. (“Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose,” she wrote dryly, about her newborn daughter. “It looked better on him.”) The essay, which inspired her tenth book, “Bad Mother,” was blunt, unapologetic, startlingly candid, and funny. In an age of video baby monitors, it was also heralded as blasphemous, and an awkward fallout lingered. Being contrarian is easy, but provoking the like-minded is a heavy gift. Waldman, whose fans had known her as a parent since she began publishing a mystery series with an overcommitted mother as a sleuth, found herself subject to a gantlet of domestic criticism, hate mail, and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”