McDermott’s book reveals his transition from the courtroom to the asylum, which happens covertly, as if the disease had cloaked itself in ambition. After a police confrontation inside an L-Train subway station, his next stop is a week-long stay at Bellevue’s psych ward, pumped full of enough medication to sedate a horse. In a disturbing scene, McDermott stops to rap-battle with a group of performers on the corner of Houston and First, crashes a beer-league soccer game, and races on all-fours with a pack of mutts in a dog park. For twenty-four-hours he prowls the East Village, convinced he’s starring in his own reality TV series, documented Truman Show-style by hidden cameras capturing the gritty details of his life. Then the attorney ironically experiences the unthinkable: his own tortuous break from reality. When the narrative begins, he’s a public defender at the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, struggling to keep his mentally ill clients out of jail. Zack McDermott’s poetic and powerful debut, Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love (Little, Brown), chronicles the now-thirty-four-year-old lawyer’s battle to cope with his lifelong bipolar disorder. Now, a brave new first-person book of madness enhances the candid category, further redefining our modern concept of “crazy.” Whether it’s Allison Britz, Abby Sher, and David Adam’s OCD, Jaime Lowe’s lithium journey, Ron Powers’s son’s schizophrenia, John Elder Robison’s Asperger’s or Daphne Merkin’s depression, important health memoirs are flooding the literary market.
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