Death Trip: A Post Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir

About Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir

A marriage story, a search for meaning in the wake of the World Wars, and a struggle to release the weight of ancestral trauma, Death Trip takes readers from the ayahuasca basements of Portland’s psychedelic underground to the darkest days of 1945. By turns wrenching and hilarious, it asks whether trauma can be inherited and, if so, if psychedelics can help us heal. Haunted by the omissions in his family’s backstory, Seth Lorinczi is just trying to get through life. But when a midlife crisis threatens his marriage and an openminded therapist suggests he try MDMA, he learns just how trippy a search for meaning can get. Eventually, the quest to exhume his family’s ghosts will take him halfway around the world. Above all, Death Trip is a richly transformave memoir about finding worthiness and purpose in troubled times.

Seth Lorinczi:

As a memoirist and culture writer, Seth Lorinczi brings a sly humor and a probing eye to the topics of psychedelics, ancestral and intergeneraonal trauma, and popular culture. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in Washington, D.C., Lorinczi was part of the punk scene centered around Dischord Records in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Aer touring internaonally with Modest Mouse, Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney and other arsts, he turned towards wring as a creave pursuit. Now based in Portland, Oregon, Lorinczi’s wring appears in The Guardian, DoubleBlind, Narravely, Portland Monthly, and other periodicals and print anthologies. Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir, published in May 2024 by Spiral Path Collecve, is his rst book. Lorinczi has presented on “Death Trip” at Yale University, UC Berkeley and American University (upcoming), the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Educaon, and many other venues. He was also the co-founder of “Judaism & The Psychedelic Renaissance,” a rst-of its kind live event in Portland, Oregon.

Madison Margolin:

Madison Margolin is an author, journalist, editor, consultant, educator, and guide to all things Jewish-Psychedelic. She is the author of Exile & Ecstasy: Growing Up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground (Hay House Publishing, November 2023), and two more psychedelic books forthcoming with Ayin Press and Artisan Books/Hachette Book Group. Drafted and re-drafted in Tzfat and in Brooklyn, her first book is a memoir of gonzo journalism about the intersection of Jewish and psychedelic consciousness, written from the perspective of growing up in both the cannabis legalization movement and in the Ram Dass community.

Advance Praise for “Death Trip”

“Death Trip has the potenal to open big conversaons about ancestral histories —what we carry, as a family or an idened ‘people’—along with all the things we don’t know. In this moment of what Joanna Macy called ‘The Great Turning,’ the courage to view stories with nuance and compassion, to take them in and let them go, is essenal to our survival. We're going to have to repair history if we want a future.”

-Vanessa Veselka, Zazen; The Great Oshore Grounds

“In this deeply researched, beaufully wrien, and passionately lived memoir of intergeneraonal trauma, Lorinczi leads the reader on a double journey: Into the harrowing bloodlands of 20th-century fascism and, almost as scary, the miasmic inner life of 21st-century, post-punk manhood. This is a good trip in the most profound sense.”

-Jon Raymond, Denial; Freebird; and others

“Seth Lorinczi’s journey through MDMA therapy takes him into a labyrinth of family secrets and ancestral trauma. The story of what he nds there—and how it changes him—is as gripping and propulsive as a crime novel. I was capvated the whole way through.”

-Leni Zumas, Red Clocks; The Listeners; Farewell, Navigator 5

“A very unique, courageous, and deeply moving book; I have personally never seen anything else like it….a journey through our individual and collecve trauma in order to nd the hidden treasure enfolded within the darkness—our creave self. Bravo!”

-Paul Levy, Undreaming Weko; The Quantum Revelaon; and others

“[A] clear-eyed and tender invesgaon of family history, intergeneraonal trauma, and the power of psychedelics to help transcend the past.”

-Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land; Kickdown

Host or Publisher The Psychedelic Assembly