A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life

Description

'Ayelet Waldman is fearless' Rebecca Solnit 'Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny' Washington Post 'Genuinely brave and human' New York Times 'Wildly brilliant' Elle The true story of how a renowned writer's struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes. When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from 'Lewis Carroll,' Ayelet Waldman is ready to try anything. Her depression has become intolerable, severe and unmanageable; medication has failed to make a difference. Married with four children and a robust career, she 'should' be happy, but instead her family and her work are suffering at the mercy of her mood disorder. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and becomes part of a burgeoning underground group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD. As Waldman charts her experience over the course of a month, during which she achieved a newfound feeling of serenity, she also explores the history and mythology of LSD, the cutting-edge research into the drug, and the byzantine policies that control it. Drawing on her experience as a federal public defender, and as the mother of teenagers, and her research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Waldman has produced a book that is candid, revealing and completely enthralling.

AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter's Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She was a federal public defender and taught a course on the legal implications of the War on Drugs at the UC Berkeley law school. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.

It's a simple, delightful premise: a journal of microdosing. Then Waldman brings so much to the project that it turns into something else, something far more beguiling . . . The result is constantly entertaining, slyly educational, and surprisingly moving . . . I don't know another writer like her." - William Finnegan, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning Barbarian Days Ignoring decades of drug war propaganda, Ayelet Waldman bravely chose to take back her psyche using forbidden medicine. The result is this candid and fearless mental travelogue. Funny, wise, surprising, and all too human, this book about peering through the veil of self may just - if you dare to let it - drive you sane - Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air and Blood Will Out Ayelet Waldman is fearless . . . this is a book about sub-hallucinatory microdoses of LSD but also about marriage and family life, insomnia, addiction, her past as a defense attorney, our insane drug laws, moods and dispositions and afflictions, and a lot of other stuff braided into an informative, amusing, nonchalantly incendiary narrative. You could call this book her war on the war on drugs, but it's so much more, and so much more funny. - Rebecca Solnit In this raw, honest, and ultimately hopeful journey, Waldman takes us deep into the forest of her mind and moods. The success of her story with microdosing reminds the medical and legal communities how much still remains to be understand about the brain. - Dr. David Eagleman, neuroscientist, author of The Brain [The last book that made me laugh] may have been Ayelet Waldman's A Really Good Day in manuscript. It's a nonfiction book about combating depression by way of a daily micro-dose of LSD, and it's Ayelet, so you can imagine. - Zadie Smith, in the column "By the Book," The New York Times Book Review A wildly brilliant, radically candid, and rigorous daybook of [Waldman's] life-changing, last-resort journey. - Lisa Shea, Elle