Ayelet Waldman is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and activist, but to many she is best known as the author of a Times piece, from 2005, in which she stated that she was more in love with her husband than with her four children. (“Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose,” she wrote dryly, about her newborn daughter. “It looked better on him.”) The essay, which inspired her tenth book, “Bad Mother,” was blunt, unapologetic, startlingly candid, and funny. In an age of video baby monitors, it was also heralded as blasphemous, and an awkward fallout lingered. Being contrarian is easy, but provoking the like-minded is a heavy gift. Waldman, whose fans had known her as a parent since she began publishing a mystery series with an overcommitted mother as a sleuth, found herself subject to a gantlet of domestic criticism, hate mail, and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Waldman’s second nonfiction book promises equal controversy but a mellower release. In “A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life,” Waldman describes a monthlong experiment treating her unstable moods with minuscule doses of LSD. Her object was generous: she hoped to make herself a less volatile mother and wife. (Research into psychedelics, as Michael Pollan wrote for The New Yorker, has increasingly been directed toward conditions such as anxiety and depression.) Her experiment, though, challenged a popular image of the drug—dropping out, hallucinating in parks, and other dubious perks of the nineteen-sixties—and Waldman’s thoughts on illicit substances won’t strike everyone as family-friendly. At one point, she explains that when her relationship with her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, comes under strain, they like to take the drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy or Molly, and discuss their love for hours. She suggests that, if young people wish to reap similar benefits, they ought to be sure to test their supply (most of what is sold as MDMA is a dangerous substitute) and wait until they’re in an enduring relationship. “I believe that with whom you do MDMA for the first time might even be more important than with whom you have sex for the first time,” she explains. It is not advice that one expects from Mom.
At fifty-two, Waldman is known for defying expectation, even occasionally at the cost of self-consistency or inner peace. She can appear to be not one person but several, high-achieving and high-strung, tumbled together in a gunny sack and made to wrestle their ways out into the public gaze. There’s Waldman the lawyer, an accomplished former federal public defender and an erstwhile teacher at Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley’s law school, who worked to rescue women from prison and who advocates for drug-policy reform. There’s Waldman the entertaining mystery writer, vying for attention with Waldman the ambitious novelist (the author of, most recently, a generational narrative unfurling in the wake of the Second World War). There’s Waldman the oversharing essayist, Waldman the Israeli who worked on a kibbutz for a spell, Waldman the proud feminist, and Waldman the delightfully loose social-media cannon, who on Twitter famously went after the Times’ “notable books” list for failing to include her own “fucking great novel.” It is rare for someone to live so intensely, and so publicly, by both her strengths and weaknesses, to be a superwoman and a hurricane of flying baggage. That Waldman has managed it for decades is, perhaps, a feat greater than any of her achievements on their own: her creative project isn’t only the work but the struggle of continuing to get it done.
“A Really Good Day”—part searching diary, part stringent drug-policy argument—is a book defined by these uneasy multitudes. The psychedelics at its center don’t entirely ease the paradox, but Waldman insists that she is not in the least a druggy person. She barely drinks, she says, and detests drunkenness. She does not use marijuana recreationally. Aside from the MDMA, various youthful pot smokings, some cocaine experimentation in college, a run-in with magic mushrooms that might have been shiitake, a cannabis pain prescription, and an unfortunate stretch of Ambien intoxication during which she tried to enlist an actress to be a replacement wife for her husband in the event of her death, she is practically a teetotaller, she says. Waldman also disdains “all things countercultural,” though she confesses that, at one point, she hired a hypnotist to lead her into an imaginary vaginal rebirth of her child, in the hope of avoiding a C-section. (The experience made her flatulent.) She has never experienced an acid trip; she loathes Timothy Leary, one of the drug’s exponents. And she is leery herself of techies’ extensively reported interest in microdosing in pursuit of harder, faster, smarter app development. “I think, What did the Internet bring us?” she asked recently. “Yes, I can get my tampons delivered to my house in thirty minutes—but also Trump.”
Waldman thus began her regimen of LSD reluctantly. In her thirties, she was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. Over the years, she was prescribed what she calls “a shit ton of drugs”: Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Topamax, Adderall, Ritalin, Strattera, Xanax, Valium, Ativan, Seroquel, Lunesta, and others. Some had hobbling side effects. Others didn’t work for long. Eventually, she noticed that her moods mapped onto her menstrual cycle, and was rediagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder. For the first time, she found, she could anticipate and manage her symptoms.
Then, on the threshold of menopause, Waldman’s mood began crashing downward. None of her usual chemical or behavioral aids helped. She developed frozen shoulder—a chronic form of acute shoulder pain—which left her unable to get a full night’s sleep. She entered a protracted, spiralling depression. “I had come to feel, even in moments when my mood was fine, a faint sense of peril,” she writes.
Worried about her children, her “long-suffering” husband, and her own safety, she decided to follow a microdosing regimen developed by James Fadiman, a psychedelics researcher in Santa Cruz whose work she’d stumbled on earlier: ten micrograms of LSD, or about a tenth of a trip dose, every third day. Through the grapevine, she made contact with an aging drug aficionado who called himself Lewis Carroll. (Waldman lives in California.) He mailed her, with his compliments, a small bottle with enough dilute LSD solution to follow Fadiman’s regimen for a month. Waldman started out her treatment as her family slept.
At eleven o’clock one recent morning, I visited Waldman in the brown-shingled Berkeley house where she has lived for two decades. Chabon answered the door in a T-shirt and drawstring pants.
“Sorry I’m still in my pajamas,” he said, and led me to the daylight-filled back of the house. A big kitchen opened out onto a dining table where Zeke, their eldest son, was eating breakfast in a bright-white terry-cloth robe. The kids were off school for the holidays. A black labradoodle named Agnes clipped across the kitchen floor.
Waldman, small and energetic, with a cataract of curly red hair, was sitting at the head of the table in jeans and a crisp white shirt that conjured up her lawyerly past. She was in the middle of drafting an op-ed for the Times, about a Palestinian activist facing criminal-justice prosecution in Israel, but she swept aside her laptop as I entered and offered me tea.
“We’re a family of late sleepers,” she explained, dumping water into a teapot. Her youngest son, Abe—the star of Chabon’s recent, much admired GQ piece about men’s fashion week in Paris—popped his head around a doorway, Looney Tunes style. “Oh! You’re not Dad!” he said, and retreated. Waldman returned with mugs, hers bearing the MacDowell Colony seal and mine emblazoned with the Penguin cover for “Pride and Prejudice.” The household was so placidly, sparklingly domestic that I wondered aloud how she broached her psychedelic self-experimentation to her children.
“First it was ‘a medication’—‘Mom is trying a medication,’ ” she told me. “Which for them is old hat. I mean, there was the medication that made me really, really skinny but really, really stupid. There was the medication that made me cry all the time.” In “A Really Good Day,” she lays out her and Chabon’s “harm-reduction approach” to parenting, which amounts to being open about risks and pleasures. “I used it as an opportunity to talk about psychedelics: what they do, what context it’s more dangerous to use them in,” she said. Zeke, who is in college, has A.D.H.D. but hates his treatments. Microdosing interested him. “I have discouraged him from doing any ad-hoc experimentation, but only because it’s illegal. I actually think there’s a real potential for the use of microdoses as an alternative to drugs like Adderall, which has so many side effects.”
“I feel happy,” she writes in “A Really Good Day,” after taking her first LSD dose. “Not giddy or out control, just at ease with myself and the world. When I think about my husband and my children, I feel a gentle sense of love and security. I am not anxious for them or annoyed with them. When I think of my work, I feel optimistic, brimming with ideas, yet not spilling over.” Her frozen shoulder began to dissipate with her second dose and, astonishingly, vanished over the month. (She isn’t sure whether this improvement was related to the acid or not.)
LSD, Waldman points out, appears medically safe: there are almost no recorded cases of death by overdose. (In contrast, there average more than three hundred cases annually of deadly overdose with acetaminophen, a.k.a. Tylenol.) It is nonaddictive, and its known side effects seem nonthreatening compared with those of many attention- and mood-disorder meds on the pharmaceutical market. Waldman explained, “I want people who would never consider psychedelic drugs to read this and think, Wait a minute. Maybe this is not so crazy.”
The project, once conceived as a book, came with exigencies. Waldman hired a criminal-defense firm to help protect herself from prosecution. She still lost sleep after the election of Donald Trump, whose Attorney General pick, Senator Jeff Sessions, is what she calls “an aggressive pursuer of the most outmoded version of the drug war.” At one point, she e-mailed her lawyers in the middle of the night—“I was, like, ‘Ahh! Jeff Sessiooooons!’ ”—and requested a risk calculation for the worst-case jail scenario. “My first thought was, God-damned Piper Kerman already wrote ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ ” she said.
She made a delicate spiralling gesture in her palm with the tip of her index finger. “Michael always does this whenever I’m on a tear,” she explained. “He says it’s like the world’s tiniest tornado tearing up the world’s tiniest trailer park over and over and over again. Here, I’m going to pour your tea.”
Chabon wandered into the kitchen, looking distracted. He was dressed now, in a checked button-down open over a bright-blue T-shirt that said “SILVER WARRIOR,” and flannel-lined pants, turned up at the cuff. (It was misty and drizzling outside, the most ominous of Bay Area weathers.) He had been trying to get Zeke out the door.
“The dude is, like, sitting in his pajamas in perpetuity,” Waldman said delightedly. “I think he plans to spend this entire three-week period in his bathrobe.”
“His Supreme bathrobe,” Chabon corrected.
Waldman laughed. Their patter carries a flicker of collegial sprightliness beyond the substrate of familiarity; since being married, in 1993, they have closely edited each other’s work. In general, they dispense with praise and highlight problems, each in a shorthand: Chabon marks passages with “D.B.,” for “Do Better,” a notation he adopted from Daniel Menaker, for years a fiction editor at this magazine. She favors “YUCK.” Neither takes the criticism eagerly: “The person being edited is, like, ‘Fuck you! You don’t have any idea what I’m trying to do! You’re also stupid.’ ” Then each inevitably follows the other’s advice—“one hundred per cent of the time,” Waldman said. This season, they both have a book out (Chabon’s latest novel, “Moonglow,” has been heralded as one of his best), and their current project is shared, too: they are developing a prospective series, for Netflix, based on the true story of a woman prosecuted for making false rape claims about a man who later emerged as a serial offender.
In “Bad Mother,” which appeared in 2009, Waldman described a long-standing hope to marry a man unlike her father. “I needed a husband who would value my professional identity as much as his own, who would assume half the child-care duties,” she wrote. Her father was eventually diagnosed as bipolar, and was put on lithium; by then, Waldman wrote, she and her siblings had been caught in the churn of his moods: “For years—no, for decades.” In “A Really Good Day,” she speculates that microdosing could have saved him, and her family, from much pain. “I am not naïve,” she writes. “But it is not impossible to imagine my father’s life being different.”
“I was in a really bad place when I started this,” Waldman murmured as Chabon peeled off to gather their kids. “Like, really bad.” She had vented to her husband while he travelled. “I would just be calling him and spewing all this frustration, rage, anger, panic,” she said. “I know that I would have destroyed my marriage. I don’t know whether I would have—” She paused, and then said, “I spent a lot of time Googling the effects of suicide on kids.” The mood improvement that coincided with her microdosing changed her whole view of depression. “It was almost the first time in my life I had perspective on what my moods are. Now, when I slip back into the bad feelings, I know it could get better overnight. And also: there is better.”
Waldman has ceased microdosing since the month described in the book. When her one-month supply ran out, she considered purchasing more from a dealer but backed out, for fear of getting involved in a D.E.A. sting. “I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve never bought drugs,” she said—noting that being able to acquire a free supply, hire a criminal-defense firm, and write about the experience is a consequence of privilege. Waldman can _afford _to experiment, while, even if LSD moved toward legalization, it would be years before the drug was clinically available to the less advantaged mentally ill.
In lieu of using LSD, Waldman has been trying to find balance by other means. She takes nootropics: supplements thought to have cognitive benefits. With Chabon’s help, she has begun practicing dialectical behavior therapy: a treatment program, designed for people with extreme mood swings, that focusses on tolerating distress and changing emotions before they can intensify. When she feels herself getting upset now, she might get an ice pack from the freezer, to lower her heart rate, or sit in front of the TV, to distract herself. She wears a biometric device that buzzes if she hasn’t breathed deeply in ten minutes. “The number of pieces of equipment I have hanging off my bra at this point!” she exclaimed. “I am that person.” Still, extreme options remain. “If it comes down to killing myself or figuring out a way to get illegal LSD,” she said, “I imagine I’ll figure out a way to get illegal LSD.”
When our tea was cold, Waldman and I set out to the Berkeley Art Museum, in Chabon’s gumdrop-like electric car, a bright-blue Fiat 500e. The parking was tight, and we spent a while circling off Shattuck Avenue in search of a space. “Twenty-eight dollars?” Waldman exclaimed on the threshold of a day lot. “Fuck that!” At last, resigned, we entered a parking garage on Allston Way, a few yards down from Dharma College, which has offered courses in subjects that include Knowing Not Knowing and the Poetics of Inner Space.
“That was lucky parking!” she announced with a willful cheeriness that almost made me feel that it was true.
In the galleries, Waldman paused to admire “Truisms,” a famous work by Jenny Holzer based on self-help mantras: “PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE IS ESCAPISM”; “SELF-AWARENESS CAN BE CRIPPLING.” At some point in her microdosing, Waldman said, she decided to start telling her friends about the experiment. She received the most resistance from people of her own generation, in their forties and fifties—possibly, she thinks, because they grew up in a post-acid age and are “busy lying to their children about drugs.” Younger people seemed open, and the older generation was exceedingly receptive, too. “Over and over again, I had the experience of, ‘Oh, my God. I did LSD in the sixties. It totally changed my life,’ ” she said. “We hear about these twentysomethings microdosing, but the actual, real truth of psychedelic drugs is that there are all these people in their sixties and seventies tripping their balls off while their grandkids are at summer camp.”
“Still?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe,” Waldman answered with an easy smile. “I don’t know.”
