Published in 2024
3 hours and 41 minutes
Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. In the past, she has been a Head Instructor at Catapult, as well as a Contributing Editor at Catapult’s literary magazine, where she wrote a column on culture, books, and gender called “Wonder Woman.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Guernica, The Cut, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, and many other places, and she has also contributed to a number of anthologies, including The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Planet (2022), Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement (2019), and Can We All Be Feminists? (2018).
Roxane Gay is the author of several bestselling books, including Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the essay collection Bad Feminist, the novel An Untamed State, the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti, and the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness. She is also the author of World of Wakanda, for Marvel, and the editor of Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has launched the Audacious Book Club and a newsletter, The Audacity.
What is this book about?
The third installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay. In this fascinating and literally trippy memoir, acclaimed essayist and columnist Gabrielle Bellot shares the story of how magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and other psychedelics transformed her life for the better.
How does a quiet, cautious trans girl, once even nervous about getting tipsy, find herself cooking a pot of ayahuasca — a powerful mind-altering brew from the Amazon — for nearly ten hours?
If you’ve ever tried psychedelics or are simply curious to know what they really feel like, you’ll be riveted by Gabrielle Bellot’s charmingly honest and immersive memoir about discovering — and being utterly transformed by — mind-altering plants and fungi.
Happily and newly married but plagued by anxiety and professional ennui, Bellot tried magic mushrooms on a whim. The unexpectedly transcendent experience so affected her that she embarked on a personal quest to learn all she could about psychedelics. Little did she know that her research and experiments with psychedelic drug ingestion would have the power of rebirth, helping her shed debilitating self-consciousness, view life and death in new ways, and come to terms with grief, as well as wounds left over from growing up queer in a fiercely traditional Caribbean nation.
“I hadn’t imagined that my life, as a whole, was about to change and, with it, some of my basic ways of conceptualizing and interacting with the world,” she writes. “I was about to sail away on a stream of fairy wine into uncertainty itself — and the ‘I’ I’d been before would never fully return.”
Over the course of her year-long psychedelic journey, Bellot is amazed by the “new, stronger, more wonder-filled” self that emerges. With the sharp senses of a truly gifted writer, she describes what it feels like to try psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, cannabis, and ayahuasca (which she makes from scratch in her Dutch oven). Her visions and the mind-opening serenity she experiences are almost palpable. For those who are hesitant to give psychedelics a go, Bellot’s trips are the next best thing. More than that, she gives a detailed and fascinating mini history of mind-altering drugs and those who use them, from our species’ earliest representatives to the Aztecs to Terence McKenna to today’s consumers looking for a natural fix to what ails them. To that end, Bellot also reflects on the complicated nature of the current-day psychedelic renaissance, focusing both on the great potential and grave pitfalls of the movement.
My Year of Psychedelics is a call for open-heartedness, open-mindedness, and, above all, the courage to face your fears in a world that could sorely use more of all of these.
