June 27, 2011
Depression and mood swings nearly crippled Zeman's promising journalistic career, which took him from Newsweek and Sports Illustrated to Vanity Fair, where he is a contributing editor based in L.A. In this memoirâtold cheekily in the second personâMichigan native Zeman recounts his gradual descent, involving stupendous prescription-drug cocktails, years of successive shrinks and hospital stays, and even electroconvulsive therapy, which robbed him of short-term memory. In 1997 Zeman first started at VF, eager to follow in the footsteps of his literary heroes Capote and Mailer and not be outclassed by the trappings of what Zeman calls the "Media-Industrial Complex"; plunged into editing a forbidding roster of writers, Zeman began losing sleep, not returning calls, and growing homesick. While his depression worsened, he also drew some inspiration from characters he researched for the magazine whose bipolar conditions drove their creativity: Bruno Zehnder, a photographer who perished with his beloved emperor penguins in Antarctica in 1997; Hollywood super agent Jay Moloney, who could not kick his cocaine addiction and hanged himself in 1999; and numerous "shockheads" who underwent ECT as a last resort. Ensconced in L.A., nurtured by a cadre of caring friends, Zeman experiments with psych wards, pharmacological cycles, and shock treatments by turns frightening and enlightening, and conveys his "melancholic demeanor" with tremendous wit and verve.
August 1, 2011
An amnesiac's memoir ought to be a brevis narratio.Yet Zeman's haunting second-person narrative remarkably details his descent into a self-described madness that culminated in electroshock therapy, which many regard as maddening in and of itself and that was supposed to cure what ailed his flailing psyche. Rather than relieve Zeman of the double demons of depression and psychosis, the technique in fact caused amnesia. Though it is not so stated, it seems that, if he could just forget his past, he might be healed. Hmm. But what then does a journalist, a professional reporter for goodness sake, do without his memory? Why, he reports. Intriguingly, Zeman set out to compose a profile of himself as if he were profiling an actor or a statesman and include his profiles of previous subjects who may or may not have suffered from similar mental illnesses. The result is a mirror held in front of another mirror, in which Zeman sees his reflection and thereby reclaims a portion of his own life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)