McDermott spends much of the narrative trying to avoid Uncle Ed’s tragic fate and the social stigma that comes from being labeled “crazy,” whose effects he’d seen firsthand so often during his law career. Its most recent victim had been McDermott’s Uncle Ed, whose schizophrenia and drug abuse had remanded him to state mental institutions for his entire adult life. Mental illness runs in McDermott’s family, the specter looming in the corner, ready to pounce. McDermott is at his best when describing his twisting descent into mental collapse, the reckless, nearly suicidal behavior, the cryptic messages he pens in red marker over the walls of his apartment ( 36 Chambers + 5 =), and the adamant belief that the cameras are trained on him-and always rolling. Like a real-life nightmarish scene from Fight Club, Myles and Zack vie for power and control.

There’s one big problem: the more McDermott allows Myles to take control, the more of Zack he’s forced to give up. Myles is a devil-may-care hipster who literally says or does anything-strips down to his underwear at a happy-hour work function, wears a mohawk to court, barks at the moon. Moonlighting as a standup comic, McDermott meets a producer friend who floats the idea of working with him on a pilot about his life and his invented character, Myles McD. 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.

Gorilla and the Bird by Zack McDermott