Sex, Drugs, and Transcendence

For fans of Educated and The Glass Castle comes an epic memoir of love, loss, revolution, and resilience that reveals the hidden cost and enduring legacy of one family’s pursuit of utopia.

At eighty, Annie would like one last trip—and she doesn’t mean to Europe. Once an avid part of the love-ins and consciousness-expanding movements of the 1960s, she wants to drop acid one more time before she dies. Despite having spent a lifetime cleaning up after her mother’s chaos, her daughter, Gabriella, says yes.

So begins a memoir that moves between an Oregon farm in the present and a childhood spent nowhere and everywhere—foster care and kidnapping, communes and cults, Hell’s Angels and Amsterdam’s red light districts, an international drug bust that made headlines, and a mother who handed her children psychedelics before they’d lost their baby teeth. In this unreliable environment, Gabriella came of age fast, forming her own fierce ideas about sex, freedom, and family along the way—and eventually going on to found a sex-positive movement spanning three continents.

Sex, Drugs, and Transcendence is a daughter’s reckoning with a mother who was equal parts visionary and wrecking ball, a woman chasing utopia while her children paid the price. Unflinching and tender by turns, it asks what we owe the parents who both damage and awaken us, and whether love and forgiveness can survive even the wildest childhoods.