Ayelet (pronounced I-yell-it) wrote Nursery Crimes, the first Juliet
Applebaum mystery, during her son's daily naptime. The Harvard Law School graduate had traded
in a challenging but emotionally draining career at the Federal Public
Defender's office in Los Angeles for the joy and tedium (pretty much
evenly distributed) of staying home to care for her new baby, Zeke, and
his older sister, Sophie. Sure that she had made the right decision on the
one hand but on the other hand bored out of her skull, Ayelet began–secretly
at first–to sketch out the first draft of what would eventually become her
first novel, Nursery Crimes.
Ayelet and her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon (author of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,
Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) live in Berkeley,
California with their three children and a Bernese Mountain Dog named Fanny.
Ayelet squeezes her writing sessions into days taken up with driving
carpools, running to piano lessons (Sophie's, not hers) and folding endless
loads of very small laundry.
