Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we?

Ayelet Waldman: intemperate tweeter, guerrilla oversharer, provocateur, literary exhibitionist, cyclone of sass.

When The New York Times Book Review didn’t select her novel “Love and Treasure” as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2014, she unleashed a tweetstorm of hurt. (Family-friendly excerpt: “there are MANY books on that notable list with reviews that were NOWHERE near as good as mine.”) When she announced in a 2005 essay that she loved her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, more than she loved her children, outraged mothers everywhere clucked and tut-tutted, and when she expressed surprise, the chorus came back — Well, what on earth did you expect?

But here’s my question for those who sneer at or hate-read her new memoir about the possible therapeutic value of LSD, “A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life”: What on earth did you expect?

Here is the truth about Ms. Waldman, which complicates matters for those who don’t like her: She has spent many years struggling with punishing, ungovernable moods. Originally, doctors told her she had bipolar II disorder; years later, a psychiatrist decided premenstrual dysphoric disorder more closely corresponded with her symptoms, and Ms. Waldman agreed. But whatever it’s called, hers is not a mood disorder of the quiet, novelistic variety. It’s big and operatic, often driving her to do the very things for which she’s been publicly shamed: acting out, picking fights, trawling for affirmation.