Ayelet Waldman is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and activist, but to many she is best known as the author of a Times piece, from 2005, in which she stated that she was more in love with her husband than with her four children. (“Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose,” she wrote dryly, about her newborn daughter. “It looked better on him.”) The essay, which inspired her tenth book, “Bad Mother,” was blunt, unapologetic, startlingly candid, and funny. In an age of video baby monitors, it was also heralded as blasphemous, and an awkward fallout lingered. Being contrarian is easy, but provoking the like-minded is a heavy gift. Waldman, whose fans had known her as a parent since she began publishing a mystery series with an overcommitted mother as a sleuth, found herself subject to a gantlet of domestic criticism, hate mail, and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Waldman’s second nonfiction book promises equal controversy but a mellower release. In “A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life,” Waldman describes a monthlong experiment treating her unstable moods with minuscule doses of LSD. Her object was generous: she hoped to make herself a less volatile mother and wife. (Research into psychedelics, as Michael Pollan wrote for The New Yorker, has increasingly been directed toward conditions such as anxiety and depression.) Her experiment, though, challenged a popular image of the drug—dropping out, hallucinating in parks, and other dubious perks of the nineteen-sixties—and Waldman’s thoughts on illicit substances won’t strike everyone as family-friendly. At one point, she explains that when her relationship with her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, comes under strain, they like to take the drug MDMA, also known as ecstasy or Molly, and discuss their love for hours. She suggests that, if young people wish to reap similar benefits, they ought to be sure to test their supply (most of what is sold as MDMA is a dangerous substitute) and wait until they’re in an enduring relationship. “I believe that with whom you do MDMA for the first time might even be more important than with whom you have sex for the first time,” she explains. It is not advice that one expects from Mom.

At fifty-two, Waldman is known for defying expectation, even occasionally at the cost of self-consistency or inner peace. She can appear to be not one person but several, high-achieving and high-strung, tumbled together in a gunny sack and made to wrestle their ways out into the public gaze. There’s Waldman the lawyer, an accomplished former federal public defender and an erstwhile teacher at Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley’s law school, who worked to rescue women from prison and who advocates for drug-policy reform. There’s Waldman the entertaining mystery writer, vying for attention with Waldman the ambitious novelist (the author of, most recently, a generational narrative unfurling in the wake of the Second World War). There’s Waldman the oversharing essayist, Waldman the Israeli who worked on a kibbutz for a spell, Waldman the proud feminist, and Waldman the delightfully loose social-media cannon, who on Twitter famously went after the Times’ “notable books” list for failing to include her own “fucking great novel.” It is rare for someone to live so intensely, and so publicly, by both her strengths and weaknesses, to be a superwoman and a hurricane of flying baggage. That Waldman has managed it for decades is, perhaps, a feat greater than any of her achievements on their own: her creative project isn’t only the work but the struggle of continuing to get it done.

“A Really Good Day”—part searching diary, part stringent drug-policy argument—is a book defined by these uneasy multitudes. The psychedelics at its center don’t entirely ease the paradox, but Waldman insists that she is not in the least a druggy person. She barely drinks, she says, and detests drunkenness. She does not use marijuana recreationally. Aside from the MDMA, various youthful pot smokings, some cocaine experimentation in college, a run-in with magic mushrooms that might have been shiitake, a cannabis pain prescription, and an unfortunate stretch of Ambien intoxication during which she tried to enlist an actress to be a replacement wife for her husband in the event of her death, she is practically a teetotaller, she says. Waldman also disdains “all things countercultural,” though she confesses that, at one point, she hired a hypnotist to lead her into an imaginary vaginal rebirth of her child, in the hope of avoiding a C-section. (The experience made her flatulent.) She has never experienced an acid trip; she loathes Timothy Leary, one of the drug’s exponents. And she is leery herself of techies’ extensively reported interest in microdosing in pursuit of harder, faster, smarter app development. “I think, What did the Internet bring us?” she asked recently. “Yes, I can get my tampons delivered to my house in thirty minutes—but also Trump.”

Waldman thus began her regimen of LSD reluctantly. In her thirties, she was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. Over the years, she was prescribed what she calls “a shit ton of drugs”: Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Zoloft, Cymbalta, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Topamax, Adderall, Ritalin, Strattera, Xanax, Valium, Ativan, Seroquel, Lunesta, and others. Some had hobbling side effects. Others didn’t work for long. Eventually, she noticed that her moods mapped onto her menstrual cycle, and was rediagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder. For the first time, she found, she could anticipate and manage her symptoms.

Then, on the threshold of menopause, Waldman’s mood began crashing downward. None of her usual chemical or behavioral aids helped. She developed frozen shoulder—a chronic form of acute shoulder pain—which left her unable to get a full night’s sleep. She entered a protracted, spiralling depression. “I had come to feel, even in moments when my mood was fine, a faint sense of peril,” she writes.

Worried about her children, her “long-suffering” husband, and her own safety, she decided to follow a microdosing regimen developed by James Fadiman, a psychedelics researcher in Santa Cruz whose work she’d stumbled on earlier: ten micrograms of LSD, or about a tenth of a trip dose, every third day. Through the grapevine, she made contact with an aging drug aficionado who called himself Lewis Carroll. (Waldman lives in California.) He mailed her, with his compliments, a small bottle with enough dilute LSD solution to follow Fadiman’s regimen for a month. Waldman started out her treatment as her family slept.

At eleven o’clock one recent morning, I visited Waldman in the brown-shingled Berkeley house where she has lived for two decades. Chabon answered the door in a T-shirt and drawstring pants.

“Sorry I’m still in my pajamas,” he said, and led me to the daylight-filled back of the house. A big kitchen opened out onto a dining table where Zeke, their eldest son, was eating breakfast in a bright-white terry-cloth robe. The kids were off school for the holidays. A black labradoodle named Agnes clipped across the kitchen floor.

Waldman, small and energetic, with a cataract of curly red hair, was sitting at the head of the table in jeans and a crisp white shirt that conjured up her lawyerly past. She was in the middle of drafting an op-ed for the Times, about a Palestinian activist facing criminal-justice prosecution in Israel, but she swept aside her laptop as I entered and offered me tea.