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

by Ayelet Waldman

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.

Biographical Note: 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 at Loyola Law School and the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she developed and taught courses on the legal implications of the war on drugs. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.

Review Quotes: “Genuinely brave and human… In normalizing the conversation about LSD, she may one day help others feel normal.” –Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

A wildly brilliant, radically candid, and rigorous daybook of [Waldman’s] life-changing, last-resort journey. –Lisa Shea, Elle