Zack McDermott and the book ‘Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love’

While the name for the condition has changed over time, bipolar disorder remains incurable. As stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica, “There are several types of bipolar disorder, in which the states of mania and depression may alternate cyclically, one mood state may predominate over the other, or they may be mixed or combined with each other.” The memoir Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love by Zack McDermott offers a firsthand account of the experiences the author has experienced with his early life and the onset of the illness.

(From left, Cindy Cisneros-McGilvrey (the Bird) and Zack McDermott (Gorilla), significant members within the memoir Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love written by McDermott).

The story of Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love begins with Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old public defender in Brooklyn, New York experiencing what we as the reader recognize as a mental break. The break has McDermott believing he’s starring in a reality television show without direct contact with a producer or director. The decline takes startling turns that lands him in a psychiatric hospital where a first diagnosis with Bipolar 1.

(A pair of alternate book covers for the Zack McDermott book Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love).

We are given a lucid, candid and, at times, heartbreaking look into the difficulties Zack McDermott, nicknamed the Gorilla by his mother, experiences. The careful details of McDermott‘s familial past, and the difficulties in Wichita, Kansas experienced by his mother through her own history with difficult husbands and tough luck outcome with a third love interest, are plenty for Cindy Cisneros-McGilvrey, nicknamed the Bird, to have lived through. The unfolding of their intertwined lives, the struggles for self-improvement and acceptance professionally, interpersonally, and in their collective romantic and employment goals throughout the course of this memoir are compassionately told, richly detailed, and compelling in their human interest perspectives.

(Zack McDermott wrote the book Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love, first published in 2017).

The journey of this book is one that I recommend. The sharing of a firsthand experience along with bringing in secondhand experiences of others responding to him, along with others interacting with him as well as others suffering on the bipolar / schizophrenia spectrum, can take some of the taboo and stigma away from a complex mental health problem that needs not be so challenging. I give Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother’s Love as written by Zack McDermott 4.5-stars on a scale of 1-to-5.

Matt – Monday, August 22, 2022