He clearly had been doing this for hours. I walked by a guy on the street yesterday and he was taking bits of newspaper, ripping them into small pieces, and putting them in a sack. JENNIFER PARKER: D o you believe that, as a society, we ignore the mentally ill? McDermott spoke to me from his home in New York City. His title refers to his mother, Cindy, who called him a hairy gorilla and whom he nicknamed The Bird “because of her nervous habit of poking her head.” Yet it’s her deep concern for her son’s well-being that makes McDermott’s story so emotionally charged. McDermott writes about all this in an irreverent yet candid style. After two subsequent hospitalizations and a visit to his hometown of Wichita, Kansas, McDermott came to realize that practicing law was not conducive to healthy self-care. His book asks us to de-stigmatize mental illness by familiarizing us intimately with the issue.Īfter the incident on the subway platform, McDermott checked himself into Bellevue Hospital, where he was diagnosed as bipolar and heavily medicated. Yet for McDermott, success is measured by his own sense of personal balance.
McDermott, now 34, has written a poignant memoir about his experience of mental illness, Gorilla and the Bird, the TV rights for which have been sold to Channing Tatum. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world.AFTER YEARS working as a public defender, 26-year-old Zack McDermott found himself on a subway platform half-naked and crying, overtaken by the delusion that he was the star of his own reality TV show. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often hilarious struggle to claw his way back to sanity. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital.
Every passerby was an actor every car would magically stop for him everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot.
Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath." a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita. Glorious.one of the best memoirs I've read in years. Join us for our next event to discuss our latest read: The Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love by Zack McDermott. MWO's Heart-to-Heart Series continues with its monthly book club.
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