Ayelet Waldman

Beautifully and intelligently delivered… A good supply of humor… An incredible perspective on the history of drugs in this country.

Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny… Although hers was a journey few will take, A Really Good Day reads almost like an Everywoman’s experience, because Waldman's fears and reactions are so commonplace. She is so likable in her flaws and her determination that it's a relief to learn that the microdoses (or possibly her therapy sessions or maybe even a placebo effect, she acknowledges) allowed enough of a head shift that her life has become easier, lighter. She had the courage, the credentials and the insight to make this journey and tell us about it. They all add up to a fine read.

Documented with wit and humility… A Really Good Day delivers a mind-bending read.

Crisp, hilarious, and weirdly optimistic, Ayelet Waldman breaks from the convention of mental health memoir the way an acid head breaks from reality. At its core this is a deeply romantic story about the redemptive power of marriage, surprising and easy to celebrate.

An intriguing and thorough look at the therapeutic possibilities of an illegal drug. Waldman really is a nerd (in a good way), and her book is an engaging and deeply researched primer on a taboo subject and a compelling case for more research on it.

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.

Waldman is good company; she is candid, goofy, and beyond knowledgeable about the drugs she takes to stabilize her mood, and the risks she takes in procuring them. Her expertise on the subject is twofold: She is a former federal public defender and a law school professor… Waldman’s honest and intelligent ethos takes the form of a humane, well-reasoned, and absolutely necessary argument for a major overhaul of America’s drug policy. The book triumphantly coheres in a lucid manifesto of how and why the racist, immoral undertaking called the War on Drugs has failed… A Really Good Day is a passionate, persuasive argument for drug decriminalization.”

[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.

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. Her marriage, her family, her formidable neuroses, her years as a lawyer and a law professor, her skills as a journalist, her stand-up comic’s timing, her harrowing gift for self-knowledge—all of these become the main strengths and true subjects of her study. The result is constantly entertaining, slyly educational, and surprisingly moving. You end up wishing desperately for her radical honesty to be rewarded with a greater ration of contentment. I don’t know another writer like her.”

Ayelet Waldman is fearless, which is our good fortune and sometimes hers. That boldness led to her fruitful adventures in mind-altering substances recounted here. Subtly mind-altering; 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.”