The actor tells about drinking ayahuasca, a hallucinatory tea, in the Amazon with a shaman.
Josh Radnor, the star of CBS' How I Met Your Mother, is writing One Big Blissful Thing, a memoir that goes from his childhood in suburban Ohio to his experiences taking ayahuasca in the Amazon valley. The book is expected to be published this year by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, but no firm date has been set.
Little is known about the book beyond the brief catalog copy:
"The story of one man’s unlikely spiritual awakening — this is Eat, Pray, Love for those who would rather be reading McSweeney’s. Josh Radnor grew up in Ohio. He was driven to school in a big yellow bus. He watched The Cosby Show and John Hughes movies. He also went on to become a successful actor in Hollywood. How then, in 2007, did he end up drinking an indigenous plant medicine called ayahuasca with a shaman in Brazil?"
Ayahuasca is a thick brown tea that combines the ayahuasca vine, tree bark and other plants. It is said to taste terrible and be hard on the stomach but produce hallucinations and a trancelike state. Amazonian people have drunk it for centuries for religious reasons. Sting, Tori Amos and Paul Simon have confessed to trying it. Beat novelist William Burroughs wrote that he threw up and tried to hurl himself at a tree after drinking it in the early 1960s.
Radnor has starred as the lead character Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother since 2005. He is debuting his latest movie, Liberal Arts, at this month's Sundance Film Festival. Radnor wrote, directed and stars in the story of a 35-year-old man who returns to his alma mater and falls in love with a 19-year-old student played by Elizabeth Olsen. His directorial debut happythankyoumoreplease captured the 2010 dramatic Audience Award at Sundance.
