A Really Good Day

Starred review from September 26, 2016
Novelist and essayist Waldman (Bad Mother)—mother of four, married to another high-profile writer (Michael Chabon)—worked as a federal public defender and taught at prestigious law schools. After struggling with mood swings and bouts of depression, Waldman becomes a “self-study psychedelic researcher,” taking small doses of LSD on repeating three-day cycles and discovers plenty to exonerate the illicit substance. It’s a major departure for the author of novels and a mystery series, and though the book’s subtitle broadcasts the happy ending, the hows and whys of her journey are the great payoffs. Waldman structures the book as a diary of her microdosing protocol, but each entry is a launchpad for topics on which she speaks frankly and knowledgeably. Her journal tackles drug policy, her days as an attorney, parenting, writing, and marriage maintenance. It’s a highly engaging combination of research and self-discovery, laced with some endearingly honest comic moments. She is exactly the sort of sensible, middle-aged, switched-on, spontaneous woman whom any reader would enjoy taking a trip with. Waldman, by her own account, is firmly in control when it comes to controlled substances: she doesn’t want to feel out of it; she just wants to get on with it.

November 15, 2016
How self-administering tiny doses of LSD abated the disintegration of the author's mental health and family life.Novelist Waldman (Love and Treasure, 2014, etc.) charts a complete month of her experimental journey with subtherapeutic microdoses (one-tenth of a typical dose) of psychedelic drugs. Her engrossing trial-and-error salve for depression was borne out of desperation and the realization she was being "held hostage by the vagaries of mood" from premenstrual dysphoric disorder. When the author's conventionally prescribed treatments failed, her ailment became an increasingly arduous burden for her husband and four teenagers to bear. Clearly suffering, she enlisted the help of Dr. James Fadiman, an aging former psychedelic researcher, and embarked on his renegade trial by imbibing subperceptual doses of LSD on repeating three-day cycles and then recording its physical and psychological effects. Candidly written with vivid detail, Waldman's 30-day diary is compelling and eye-opening from both a medical and an observational perspective. Initially, only her sleep appeared to be negatively affected, while her productivity, listening skills, and sensory awareness increased; her mood incrementally lifted as well. The author provides an informative treatise on drug abuse statistics, a brief history of pharmacological therapies, and her own perspectives on drug decriminalization. As a former federal public defender and law professor who lectured about the war on drugs, Waldman is scholarly on the subject and infuses case study material into her memoir, offering interesting notes on neurochemistry, interviews with psychonauts, and chronicles of successful, pioneering research studies with psychedelics. Throughout, the author shares frank, revealing anecdotes on her family and personal life, including the disclosure that her and her husband's current version of "marital therapy" involves periodic use of the euphoric drug MDMA. The author's controversial and unsubstantiated medicinal intervention with LSD is bravely honest, and the results are mildly promising. Thirty days on LSD therapy makes for a fascinating trip, indeed, and a learning opportunity for readers interested in the past and present therapeutic uses for psychedelic drugs.

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November 15, 2016

After many unsuccessful conventional treatments for a mood disorder affecting her marriage, parenting, and life, Waldman (Love and Treasure) began a 30-day private experiment using microdoses of LSD. In her smart, funny, authentic voice, she tells how the drug taken every third day helped to normalize her ability to handle the travails of a complex marriage, busy family, and creative career. Waldman outlines the supporting research and the therapeutic value of psychedelics (psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, ayahuasca) in treating difficult mental health problems such as alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and bipolar disorder. A diary construct allows the author to careen from the personal to the polemic, touching on subjects such as the failures of the War on Drugs, CIA malfeasance, and common misconceptions about drug safety, then return to a contemplation of self-worth in the context of personal relationships. VERDICT This great read will attract open-minded psychology buffs, contemporary biography readers, and those keen to hear a new voice discuss issues associated with so-called illicit drugs in America.--Janet Tapper, Univ. of Western States Lib., Portland, OR

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016
Waldman, a novelist (Love and Treasure, 2014), essayist (Bad Mother, 2009), and former federal public defender, is smart, outspoken, provoking, and funny. She brings her storytelling chops, penchant for intimate disclosures, and fluency in the abject failures of the unwinnable War on Drugs to this involving chronicle of her attempt to combat her chronic and incapacitating mood disorder, after trying every other conceivable treatment, by taking microdoses of LSD. Waldman shares her 30-day log recording her experience with this new and renegade protocol utilizing subperceptual doses of the psychedelic, and limns a poignant, sometimes hilarious portrait of her under-pressure marriage to fellow writer Michael Chabon (Moonglow, 2016). Her intensely personal revelations are balanced by a clarion history of LSD, from its discovery by Swiss research chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann in 1938 to how it works, clinical studies of its therapeutic potential, the CIA's attempts to weaponize it, and the lamentable consequences of its 1967 criminalization. Buoyed by the benefits of microdosing, Waldman calls for renewed research and drug-law reform in this informative, candid, altogether irresistible quest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)