God Head

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Overview

In God Head, Scott Zwiren boldly and courageously records the terrifying, destructive experience of manic depression. From a promising young college student to mental hospitals to a confined, out-of-control, roller-coaster life on New York City's Upper West Side, Zwiren's narrator traces from the inside the horrors of an existence that swings between numbing depression and exalting highs.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The manic-depressive narrator of this edgy novel offers an inside look at mental illness. The one problem is that the reader has to spend so much time inside the mind of a manic depressive to get it. "I am waiting to know what I am because I don't know," begins the narrator, but as the novel progresses (and time recedes), the narrator recalls the time when he concluded he was God, sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son. The details of the narrator's life and what serves as the plot are deeply buried, thereby re-emphasizing the narrator's disconnectedness. Each development turns into a comment on his mental state. After torturing himself over when to tell the woman he is dating that he is God, he finally works up the courage only to blurt out, instead, that he is manic-depressive. At one point, while hospitalized, the narrator lies in bed attempting to strangle himself in his own sheets. At another he muses: "I can't distinguish between a condom and a sock." He believes he can stare down a light bulb and makes plans to create an antigravity suit, jumping from one idea to the next with little warning. The value of Zwiren's novel is in its ability to convey the overwhelming constancy of mental illness through episode after horrifying episode. Where it fails is in finding some way to pull those episodes together into something beyond a character study. (Nov.)

Library Journal

This harrowing account of the horrors of severe manic depression might be more accurately called an autobiography or case study than a novel, but in any case it is a powerful, fascinating work. Zwiren, who suffers from manic depression, takes you into his reeling mind, literally walking you step by painful step through mental hospitals, mean streets, and botched suicide attempts. The manic highs seem as disturbing, delusional, paranoid, and disabling as the depressive lows: Death becomes a new anxiety. The powerful writing is not meant to entertain but to enlighten. God Head is recommended for medium to large academic and public libraries and probably should be required reading for psychology students, mental health practitioners, and the families of severe manic depressives.-Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico

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Kirkus Reviews

Autobiographical first novel about manic-depression.

Given that he takes as his subject here the murky corners of the mind, Zwiren is remarkably clear. The story begins with the record of an ongoing episode, in the summer of 1991, as Zwiren walks through Manhattan, deftly exposing the reader to the narrator's mercurial obsessions—with numbers, with colors, with sex, but most of all with God. He thinks he's Jesus. The opening episode ends in an emergency room. Then Zwiren flashes back to the winter of 1982, when as a scholarship student he tries to negotiate college for the first time. A simple episode in a bookstore is illustrative: Zwiren stands in line, changes his mind and gets out of line, gets in line, fears the line, fantasizes about the line, runs from the bookstore. Delusions of grandeur coalesce with rank paranoia as Zwiren takes the reader through the 1980s; sometimes he functions reasonably well, holding down jobs and even entering into brief relationships, but sooner or later reality slips away from him and he's back on the ward. Zwiren ends his account in the summer of 1990; enrolled in a support group, and taking various medications, he can mostly manage, but he has had to accept the fact that his condition is incurable. His novel, meanwhile, is repetitive, boring, heartbreaking, and quite beautifully written. That is, while the narrative tends to circle around the same points over and over again, Zwiren spins image after striking image, all the more remarkable for being his authentic view of the world rather than some literary experiment: "The insides of my eyelids are unsafe," he notes in passing; in another passage, attempting to explain the allure sleep holds for him, he writes that "the aim is to get to the threshold of sleep, a gluey sleep, a cheese melt."

A must for anyone interested in the nature of mental illness as seen from the inside.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781564781307
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publication date: 9/28/1996
Pages: 134
Sales rank: 1,178,230
Product dimensions: 5.51 (w) x 8.01 (h) x 0.39 (d)

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God Head

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