Acid Is the New Xanax
The scene was at once familiar and strange. Ayelet Waldman and I were at the kitchen table of her large old house in Berkeley, California. Her husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Chabon, wandered in from the supermarket and started preparing dinner, something involving salmon. One of their four children, on break from college, came in search of beer, lingering for a few moments to chat about politics.
The strange part was what I was there for: Waldman’s month-long experiment with LSD, which she chronicles in her enjoyably punchy new book, Known primarily for her frank and with a description of her depressive tendencies, which she’d been treating with halting success for years. But prescribed psychotropics offered only itinerant help, and her suicidal ideation began to flourish.
