Review | A Really Good Day, one woman’s chronicle of microdosing with LSD to control her moods
Ayelet Waldman experimented with tiny doses of the hallucinogen for a month, and reflects on drugs in this mind-opening memoir
by Ayelet Waldman
Alfred A Knopf
Ayelet Waldman is not someone you’d call cuddly, but she is interesting for her take-no-prisoners approach to life. It doesn’t help that she has temper tantrums, finds herself hard to like and revels in being provocative (she once declared publicly that she loved her husband more than her children). In this book, she gives a daily account of her month-long experiment with LSD, tiny amounts of which, she hoped, would end mood swings so violent she feared her beloved husband would leave her. It was during one low point that she chanced on psychologist James Fadiman and his research on LSD microdosing (one-tenth a typical dose; not enough to cause hallucinations). She chronicles her physical sensations daily, in addition to sleep, work, pain (from a frozen shoulder) and disposition: on day 15, “all went to hell” though by the day’s end she’s “a little wistful”. On day 19, she realises that microdosing makes her able to tolerate such irritants as someone eating nuts loudly. While navel-gazing, Waldman, a former attorney, contemplates drugs in general, and raises questions about their (il)legality. A Really Good Day opens the mind.
