He uses that empathy to construct a deeply compassionate portrait of his mother - a resilient woman whose love helps ground him in the real, even in moments when his reality is at its most friable. His work as a public defender grows out of a deep sense of empathy for the stigmatized and marginalized that's evident on every page. One of the main reasons his book differs so starkly from Lowe's is McDermott's background: He grew up working class in Wichita, Kan., perpetually hovering just above the poverty line, as opposed to Lowe's sun-drenched, thoroughly middle-class L.A.

('I could not believe I was considered manic and this wasn't.') Following that first manic episode, for example, she's pressured into trying out for the spring musical, Pippin, and she's appropriately withering about that show's excesses. Throughout, she's grapples with questions of identity: Who is she, without the mania? Where does her personality end, and the condition begin? It's heady stuff, but told with a sardonic humor that keeps things grounded. Lowe uses all those stats and data points to supplement her account of experiencing her first manic episode in high school, and to document what she sees as the nigh-miraculous power of lithium to return her to herself. The result is a sweeping, expansive survey of the history of bipolar disorder, of psychiatric and pharmaceutical attempts to treat it, and - especially - the history of lithium itself (which she traces, with some help from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, to a few seconds after the Big Bang). The two books have been published within a week of each other, and both writers paint compelling portraits of a day-to-day existence limned by concerns the rest of us will never know: living with the low, persistent, wet dread that another episode lies in wait, and the knowledge that, however terrifying the mania may be after the fact, it also represents the purest, most intense high the human body can experience.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Mental Subtitle Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind Author Jaime Lowe Writer Jaime Lowe also lives with bipolar disorder she shares her story - and a great deal more - in Mental: Lithium, Love and Losing My Mind. Zack McDermott should know he's been through a few stints at mental institutions as a consequence of his bipolar disorder, which he chronicles, with an affable and often rueful wit, in Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love. It's a good line, and one that has the added benefit of being true. 'Regaining sanity in a mental hospital is like treating a migraine at a rave.' Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Gorilla and the Bird Subtitle A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love Author Zack Mcdermott

Gorilla and the bird by zack mcdermott