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Event
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents: Ayelet Waldman / A Really Good Day
**Note: Online sales have ended. Tickets will be available at the door**
Its 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 comics 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 dont know another writer like her. -- William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days, Cold New World, and A Complicated War
This morning I took LSD. So begins Ayelet Waldmans A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, an expertly researched, and hilariously honest account of the authors firsthand experience taking microdoses of LSD, the effect it had on her, and the ethical problems it presented.
What drove Ayelet Waldman to LSD? It was perimenopause (and years of accompanying treatments with psychiatrists and psychologists, SSRIs and meditation, to little or no avail). When her mood storms became intolerable, she fell down an internet rabbit hole, eventually receiving a vial in her mailbox from Lewis Carroll. Within a month, Ayelet joined the ranks of scientists and civilians successfully using LSD in therapeutic microdoses.
Ayelet took a microdose (ten milligrams under her tongue) a few times each week for one month, and in A Really Good Day she tracks her experience, recounting bursts of productivity, nights of insomnia, and moments of peace. But this isnt just a book about drug use, or a cri de coeur for decriminalization. Ayelets marriage, her role as a mother of teens, her years as a lawyer, journalist, and author -- all are subject to her reflection during the month of self-treatment. She writes, I have felt different and I have been different. Over the past month I have had many days at the end of which I looked back and thought, That was a really good day.
Ayelet Waldman is the author of four novels and the Mommy-Track Mystery series as well and the essay collectionBad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes,Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. She was a federal public defender and taught a course on the legal implications of the War on Drugs at the UC Berkeley law school. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.
Ayelet will be in conversation with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Evan Karp, who is also Booksmith's Events Manager.
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. -- Dr. David Eagleman, neuroscientist, author, creator of the PBS series The Brain
Ignoring decades of drug war propaganda, Ayelet Waldman bravely chose to take back her psyche using forbidden medicine. The result is this candid and fearless mental travelogue. Funny, wise, surprising, and all too human, this book about peering through the veil of self may just - if you dare to let it -- drive you sane. -- Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air
A hilarious, intriguing, and thoroughly persuasive account of how a middle-aged mother of four, a writer and lawyer terrified of drugs, found life-changing serenity by microdosing with LSD. It seems that LSD can not only make walls breathe and worlds become one, but turn grouchy, yelling people into happy, reasonable ones. Ayelet Waldmans terrific book holds out hope to the mood-afflicted everywhere that there is a solution to their misery without the side-effects of anti-depressants -- a solution that doesnt produce mystical revelations but just a really good day. LSD is illegal, but fortunately this book isnt, and it has much the same effect. -- Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
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 its so much more, and so much more funny. -- Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost
**Note: Online sales have ended. Tickets will be available at the door**
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LocationHillside Club, Berkeley, CA (View)
2286 Cedar St.
Berkeley, CA 94709
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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