Close your eyes. Picture yourself on a train. Your ipod is playing, you have the perfect seat, no one next to you – rush hour is over an hour away – and you’re reading a book. Now look up. You have tears in your eyes and are so fully engrossed you realize you were supposed to get off three stops ago. Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is one of those intense reads that make the world around you simply drop away.

Ayelet Waldman, best known for her Mommy Track mysteries and her controversial New York Times piece regarding her marriage and relationship with her husband, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon, has created an honest and exceedingly human character in Emilia Greenleaf. In a fast-paced first-person voice and with her trademark humor intact, Waldman delves into the mind and heart of Emilia who is attempting to come to terms with the death of her infant daughter, Isabel, to navigate the minefield of step-parenthood, and to salvage the remnants of her once-lusty marriage to Jack.

What separates Love and Other Impossible Pursuits from the rest is of the pack is Waldman’s ability to create a character that isn’t always likable. At times Emilia is infuriating—she can be loving and passionate one moment and self-centered, immature, and impulsive the next. When she pushes Jack too far with her paralyzing grief he says, “it’s not a get-out-of-jail free card, Emilia. Isabel’s death doesn’t entitle you to do whatever the hell you want, to hurt whomever you want.”


At the heart of the novel is Emilia’s relationship with her stepson William—an insufferable preschooler – “an hour with William as generally akin to sitting through a lecture with a very short professor.” At their first meeting in the Central Park Zoo, she imagines falling in love with him as quickly as she had fallen for his father. But that was not meant to be, “had William flung himself to the ground, his legs and arms wind-milling in a tantrum, it would have been easier for me to handle. Had he scowled at me, or turned his back to me, or even kicked me, I would have given Jack an understanding wink and led the way to the through the gates of the zoo... Instead, William reached one long-fingered, limp hand toward me. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.”

Whether William is trying to convince Emilia to sell her dead baby’s things on Ebay, or protesting his purported intolerance to lactose, he is both the eyes and ears for his hostile mother, Carolyn, who is convinced Emilia is unfit to care for her son. When William and Emilia begin keeping secrets from Carolyn—whether they’re exploring Central Park, eating ice cream sundaes together, or experiencing booster-seat-free cab rides through Manhattan—she discovers William is her co-conspirator not her enemy. After ice skating in Central Park William says, “I think today should be another secret. Because of the no helmet. And because I got my jeans all wet. My mother hates when I get my clothes wet.” “I feel a sudden welling of gratitude and affection and I wonder if he realizes that I am the person this silence will protect, not him.”

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is also a love song to New York—for any displaced New Yorker homesick for a walk through Central Park, Waldman’s descriptions are perfect swells of nostalgia. “Central Park is, in this city of steel and glass, marble and asphalt, brick and stone, 843 acres of grace,” she writes. “It is far more lovely, more bedecked with weeping willows trailing into moss-filled ponds, gentle arching bridges, blue-gray gnatcatchers, than any Nasdaq-obsessed stock trader, any taxi driver with a law degree from the University of Karachi, any Upper West Side mother of twins, or any of us eight million different kinds of New Yorkers deserve.”