Gorilla and the Bird

A deeply affecting memoir of a young man's fight to regain his sanity after a devastating psychotic break, with the help of the one person who refuses to give up on him - his mother. Zack McDermott, a 25-year-old Brooklyn public defender, wakes up one morning with the conviction that he is being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. After a manic spree around Manhattan, during which he frantically tries to anticipate what "the producers"… (more)

A deeply affecting memoir of a young man's fight to regain his sanity after a devastating psychotic break, with the help of the one person who refuses to give up on him - his mother. Zack McDermott, a 25-year-old Brooklyn public defender, wakes up one morning with the conviction that he is being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. After a manic spree around Manhattan, during which he frantically tries to anticipate what "the producers" want him to do, treating every encounter as a performance, he is arrested on a subway platform in Brooklyn and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins Zack's journey to the edge of insanity and back, rendered with raw power in this propulsive and poignant memoir.

It's a journey that will take Zack from New York City back to his Kansas roots, from hospital waiting rooms where he believes the television is talking to him to prison-like mental wards. Shuttled between doctors and medications that wreak havoc on his moods and his wits, Zack, a young man with big dreams, all but loses himself in the prime of his life. His co-pilot on this psychological roller-coaster ride is his mother, nicknamed "the Bird," whose vigilant and steadfast love might be the one thing that can help Zack find his way back to himself.

By turns terrifying, tender and darkly funny, GORILLA AND THE BIRD is a bravely honest account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.