Mammamia!

But even with Chabon's contributions, Waldman returned from the office each evening so drained she had little left for Sophie. ''The Lion King every day,'' says Waldman. ''This was my parenting style.'' She considered becoming a professor, because of the flexible hours — but instead of writing a law-review article, she invented Juliet Applebaum. ''I was so embarrassed,'' says Waldman. ''When I finally sent it to Michael's agent, I know she was thinking 'Oh, f---, now I have to reject my most important client's wife.'''

Not so. Nursery Crimes appeared to warm reviews in 2000 and has spawned five sequels. Despite the admittedly modest commercial success of the series, Waldman has pinned her hopes on her more ambitious and literary novel, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, due this January from Doubleday, which explores one woman's ''grotesque and unacceptable'' inability to love her ''insufferable'' 5-year-old stepson. (Happy Endings writer-director Don Roos is already at work on a screenplay.) It probably won't do much to fix Waldman's reputation as a mother. But as she puts it herself — holding 4-year-old daughter Rosie on her lap — ''Maternal ambivalence is why I became a writer.''

30-SECOND BIO

NAME Ayelet Waldman
AGE 40
HOMETOWN Berkeley, Calif., where she lives with her spouse, novelist Michael Chabon, and their four kids
CAREER Harvard-trained public defender-turned-novelist and columnist
ON DECIDING TO APPEAR ON OPRAH TO DISCUSS HER SEX LIFE ''I've had a crush on Oprah since she picked [Ursula Hegi's] Stones From the River for her book club and I was the only person who read it. I've been jonesing for Oprah ever since. I'm not Jonathan Franzen.''
DOES SHE FEEL COMPETITIVE WITH HER PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING SPOUSE? ''I'd be a blithering fool to be competitive. People are going to be reading Michael in 200 years, and if they're reading me at all it will be as a footnote to him.''