Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: My Year of Psychedelics: Lessons on Better Living

Written by Gabrielle Bellot and Roxane Gay

Narrated by Gabrielle Bellot and Roxane Gay

The third installment in the series from Everand and Roxane Gay, the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094471846

Gabrielle Bellot

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). One of her essays for her Catapult column was selected as a Notable essay in Best American Essays (2021), and another of her essays from the same column appears in Macmillan's AP English Language textbook (2023). She has also been a guest on Tin House's podcast about Ursula Le Guin, Crafting with Ursula. Bellot holds both an MFA and a PhD in English from Florida State University, and she has been the recipient of fellowships from Florida State University and Yale. She was a reader at Vulture Fest's Feminist as F*ck panel in 2023, organized by Roxane Gay and Amber Tamblyn, alongside Amber, R. O. Kwon, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Kirsten Vangsness. She was raised in the Commonwealth of Dominica and now lives in Queens in New York City.

Reviews for Roxane Gay & Everand Originals

[Brian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Roxane Gay has been bamboozled by drug war propaganda. She overdosed on marijuana and so she concluded that "drugs were not for her"? That's like a person getting bitten by a snake and concluding that animals were not for her. "Drugs" is a category, not a thing. There are endless kinds of psychoactive substances, many of which humanity has not even discovered yet. How can Roxane say they are not for her? Is she a fortune teller? Drugs inspired the Hindu religion, they brought unprecedented peace to rave concerts, they inspired the Eleusinian mysteries which were attended by such western luminaries as Plato and Cicero. Drugs like MDMA could help end school shootings and suicides. Drugs can change people's lives for the better. Paul Stamets stopped stuttering as a teenager after one afternoon of consuming mushrooms. Don't blame drugs, Roxane, blame ignorance.

Roxane's a control freak?

Many drugs focus the mind, giving one an almost surreal sense of control. Yet Roxane thinks we can judge drugs "up" or "down"? That's a drug warrior lie. Context matters. So she od'd on marijuana: don't blame marijuana -- and definitely don't blame ALL drugs. Blame the drug warriors who refuse to teach safe use. Marijuana is not bad. Drugs are not bad. OVERDOSING is bad.

Roxane would not say that "drugs were not for her" had she gone to Peru's Sacred Valley and drank the tonic from the Huachuma Cactus. These plants were put on earth for a purpose, Roxane, and not merely to lead human beings astray. Our brain chemistry is set up to benefit and even learn from such plants. It's natural. Criminalizing Mother Nature is what is unnatural.

[Luis Raul Marroquin · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

an invasive and useless recomendation, based on the intro and first chapter I got the idea this is a rationalization why is good to use drugs, go to youtube to spread such ideas

[Cris James · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Please stop recommending books from this author. All of everand's recommendations have become the same garbage over and over!

[Elle · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A memoir of mental illness, chronic anxiety, depression and general neuroses. Whiny, pretentious writing by a writer given a platform to normalize and celebrate the writer's mental distress. Silly and boring, I did look forward to emotional, spiritual and practical insights, but this is completely devoid of anything interesting. Drugs have ALWAYS been the escape of those who can't handle being adults through healthier coping mechanisms.