Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. 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. 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. Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review 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. can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath. Glorious.one of the best memoirs I've read in years.a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita.

Zack mcdermott gorilla and the bird