MOTHERSHIP: A MEMOIR OF WONDER AND CRISIS
Release Date: March 26, 2024
🌍 ​PRE-ORDER HERE! 🌎
At least 10% of Mothership's profits will go
to the Nature Conser​vancy
“Wrenn’s memoir is a brave, beautiful testament to love both past and present, a meticulously-researched account of our relationship to ourselves and the world. Mothership does for coral what Richard Powers’s The Overstory does for trees. I can’t wait to assign this to my students.”
—Garrard Conley, New York Times-bestselling author of Boy Erased
“The ecological is personal," Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, ​"and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother. 

Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not only a queer coming-of-age story. It's a deeply researched account of Greg turning to endangered coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca to heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, Greg takes his readers on a journey across the globe. In his search for healing from personal and ecological trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche, and finds they have a lot in common. He awakens to the need for us to heal the planet as well. 
 
Mothership is one man’s audacious search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late—and what well-being means in a fracturing society on a dying planet.
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Mothership is forthcoming in 2024 from Regalo Press, a new standalone imprint distributed by Simon & Schuster, founded by Big Five-publishing veteran Gretchen Young. On publication, Regalo will make a donation to an environmental charity, and Greg has committed to donating at least 10% of his book profits to the Nature Conservancy.
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Mothership speaks to trauma, body shame, addiction, the climate crisis, nature as a mental health resource, and, most controversially, the therapeutic use of psychedelics. After the 2018 release of Michael Pollan’s New York Times-bestselling How to Change Your Mind, there is an urgent need for trustworthy, non-kooky follow-up books to demonstrate the efficacy and safety of psychedelic therapy for PTSD--Greg's book will be one of the first. 
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What's more, his memoir will the first extended mainstream literary look at Ayahuasca, the psychedelic tea that Greg drank in the Amazon rainforest.  The last third of Mothership is devoted to it. The trauma of the pandemic has caused many people to look for mental health treatments that actually work--the laws around psychedelic use are quickly changing, and so are many minds.

Mothership will also be the only mainstream literary account of coral reefs. Greg takes readers underwater to some of the most pristine coral reefs left on earth as pollution and warming ocean temperatures threaten their survival. 
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Represented by Wendy Levinson at the Harvey Klinger Literary Agency.

​SAMPLE PUBLISHED ESSAYS

 
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