...a wildly brilliant, radically candid, and rigorous daybook of her life-changing, last-resort journey ... The 30 entries in A Really Good Day range from tales of her professional work supporting legal efforts to decriminalize weed and other drugs, to poignantly personal reveals about spirituality, something missing from Waldman's upbringing.
Her book is both a diatribe and diary. She offers a polemic on a racist War on Drugs that allows her, a middle-class white woman, to use illegal substances with ease, as well as a daily record of the improved mood and increased focus she experiences each time she takes two drops of acid under the tongue ... 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 ... Come for mom’s mental health memoir, stay for the careful and convincing polemic against the War on Drugs ... Eventually, 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 disguised as an accessible memoir about one mother’s zany LSD experiment.
In these pages, Waldman comes off as a combination of an endearingly wired best friend and oversharing malcontent. She spares no detail about her odd neuroses and she cops to often being volatile and irritable. Few are spared from her anger, she tells us, including herself ... push past the sometimes amusing asides and you’ll be rewarded with 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.
It is by no means a remarkable book, but it's thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless, thanks to the irrepressible levity of its author, from whom we get an honest play-by-play of the emotions required for domestic maneuvers and a handy, abbreviated history of the war on drugs. bristled only at passages that read too much like what they actually are—the musings of a middle-aged, middlebrow woman married to novelist Michael Chabon with a knack for alarming housewifely banalities ... If you find her too self-serious to be chic, or in fact cringe at this list as an enormous indulgence, it is perhaps because she does not recoil at any whiff of indignity that emanates from herself. I admit it at first struck me as close to the knuckle, but her relentless depiction of her fallibility, as always, won me over.
Just because she doesn’t have a picturesque version of melancholy doesn’t make it any less real or any less deserving of compassion. And after reading A Really Good Day, you understand just why Ms. Waldman might have been willing to experiment to find relief ... The reader doesn’t have quite as uniformly positive an experience. Part of the problem is aesthetic: Ms. Waldman has a tendency to slide into the prefab language of psychotherapy or self-help. Her sense of humor can be unsubtle...And her observations can be trite ... But then Ms. Waldman will capture you with genuinely brave and human moments, like when she confesses that she yells at people because she enjoys it ... Ms. Waldman’s survey of the history and literature of psychotropic drugs is informative, though it can also, on occasion, be too sloppy and loose ... Whatever her foibles or stylistic lapses, she makes a persuasive case for the therapeutic use of psychedelics.
She has a big personality and acknowledges a 'tendency to overshare.' This trait pops up a few times in A Really Good Day ... But if she sometimes reveals more than you need to know, Waldman is reliably thought-provoking. A Really Good Day is informed by her previous career as a federal public defender. She worked on numerous drug cases and became an outspoken critic of harsh narcotics sentencing guidelines. In these pages, she makes a strong argument that taking a microdose of LSD is 'a crime, but it really shouldn’t be.'
...[a] nervy, funny and thought-provoking new book ... A Really Good Day tells a really good story, one that will make readers think about how drugs get classified and how chemistry alters what we think of as essential personality traits. It's a story that only a woman who's lived most of her life being 'a handful' would be gutsy enough to tell.
The story of how and why LSD and other psychedelics became stigmatized is one of the most interesting parts of Waldman's new book ... Waldman has an unfortunate tendency to complain about pseudo-problems and make strained attempts at humor. The woes of buying an expensive house in Berkeley, Calif., for instance, could have been omitted ... Waldman definitely succeeds in establishing that LSD and other psychedelics should be among the menu of pharmaceutical options available in America...[but] she never seriously considers the potential value of traveling other routes to the same destination ... She's also a bit too quick to blame outside factors for her dissatisfaction.
...[a] wildly entertaining book ... This is precisely why I admire her. She’s not afraid to put her life under a microscope, which is exactly what nonfiction writers should be doing, and it’s necessarily uncomfortable ... Waldman’s prose, crisp and delightful, masterfully weaves personal experience with research ... Reading Waldman’s book, full of passion and integrity and moments of genius hilarity, you’ll want her as a friend, a confidant, a teacher, and — if she still practiced law and you’d been caught with a brick of weed — your lawyer. Like every great nonfiction writer, she uses her personal experience as part of illuminating the larger world, both its beauties and its inequities.
After I got over my surprise that LSD didn’t turn her into a tripping head case, there’s not much about how she improves that’s terribly fascinating ... But two things make this short book more interesting than being merely the story of a self-aware writer who takes steps to get better and succeeds. The first is that LSD is, of course, an illegal drug. Much of the humor and suspense of the book comes from Ms. Waldman’s attempts to secure her initial dosage and her subsequent plan to get more after she’s sure it’s working, not to mention her desire to hide what she’s up to from almost everyone around her...The other thing that will intrigue readers is what the author, an accomplished essayist and writer of mystery novels, always brings to the table in her work. Her husband is the acclaimed novelist Michael Chabon, a man famous enough that some will read his wife’s book just to catch glimpses of him. Ms. Waldman never refers to him by name, but there’s some gossipy stuff here, about their marriage and occasional drug use.
Waldman, who is married to the novelist Michael Chabon, is a smart writer with an easy tone. As a suburban mother of four, she nicely plays up how unlike the archetypal acid tripper she is. The neurological and pharmaceutical science is well handled and she makes a strong case for medicinal LSD. But perhaps what the book does best is demystify the chemical mythology of drugs. Even crystal meth started out as a treatment for depression. As Williams says, there are people who can take it, have an enjoyable time and then continue with their lives. The same is true of heroin and LSD. However, there are also the casualties, those people who should never go near drugs. The sad irony is they are often the ones who are least able to resist them.
A Really Good Day is two parts 'momoir' and one part amicus curiae brief by a woman who taught a course on the legal implications of the war on drugs. It’s an odd combination. She’s funny when revealing that she got her LSD testing kit on Amazon, serious when she makes the point that LSD, an illegal drug, is no more harmful and has far fewer side effects than all those antidepressants she took. But make no mistake, LSD is illegal. Waldman was breaking the law by possessing some, and shut down her experiment when she ran out after 30 days because it was too risky. Microdosing does sound promising for those suffering from depression — but there have been no officially sanctioned studies, nor are any likely in the U.S. given the current political climate. Waldman had some really good days and carved out some psychic space for herself, and got a book out of the experience. That’s a trip worth taking.
Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny (in parts), the book is also an energetically researched history of this drug ... 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.
Thanks to the author’s intelligence, self-awareness and wit, this book is a lot of fun. There’s just one thing — the elephant in the room referred to only as 'my husband'...for many readers, the conviction that they would never need to know another thing about the incredible love of Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon. Those readers must be warned. 'When I gaze at my husband, when I feel his body along the length of mine,' she writes, 'I feel a deep, contented joy, a warmth that begins in my belly, spreads out to my limbs and through the top of my skull.' And: 'For six hours, we talked about our feelings for each other, why we love each other, how we love each other.' Grit your teeth — it’ll be over in a few pages.
