The Rules of the Tunnel: A Brief Period of Madness

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The Rules of the Tunnel: A Brief Period of Madness Pub. Date: 8/4/2011 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Overview

A journalist faces his toughest assignment yet: profiling himself. Zeman recounts his struggle with clinical depression in this high- octane, brutally funny memoir about mood disorders, memory, shock treatment therapy and the quest to get back to normal.

Thirty-five million Americans suffer from clinical depression. But Ned Zeman never thought he'd be one of them. He came from a happy Midwestern family. He had great friends and a busy social life. His career was thriving at Vanity Fair where he profiled adventurers and eccentrics who pushed the limits and died young.

Then, at age thirty-two, anxiety and depression gripped Zeman with increasing violence and consequences. He experimented with therapist after therapist, medication after medication, hospital after hospital- including McLean Hospital, the facility famed for its treatment of writers, from Sylvia Plath to Susanna Kaysen to David Foster Wallace. Zeman eventually went further, by trying electroconvulsive therapy, aka shock treatment, aka "the treatment of last resort."

By the time it was over, Zeman had lost nearly two years' worth of memory. He was a reporter with amnesia. He had no choice but to start from scratch, to reassemble the pieces of a life he didn't remember and, increasingly, didn't want to. His girlfriend was gone; friends weren't speaking to him. His life lay in ruins. And the biggest question remained, "What the hell did I do?"

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, profane and hopeful, The Rules of the Tunnel is a blistering account of Zeman's twisted ride to hell and back-a return made possible by friends real and less so, among them the dead "eccentrics" he once profiled. It's a guttural shout of a book, one that defies conventional notions about those with mood disorders, unlocks mysteries within mysteries, and proves that sometimes everything you're looking for is right in front of you.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

When it all began, in the late nineties, Ned Zeman was sitting pretty. This busy Midwesterner was thriving as a staff journalist for prestigious Vanity Fair; with previous credits including GQ and Sports Illustrated. Even when he was profiling troubled cultural icons, he never imagined that he too would become a victim of psychological maladies himself. The Rules of the Tunnels maps out the ever-changing terrain of a talented young man confronted with his own mental disintegration. As the subtitle notes, the madness was relatively brief, but it devoured two years of his memories, leaving the stranded writer patching together his own story. Vivid; frightening; unforgettable.

Publishers Weekly

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 memoir—told cheekily in the second person—Michigan 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. (Aug.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781592405985
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Publication date: 8/4/2011
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 484,107
Product dimensions: 8.30 (w) x 5.86 (h) x 1.07 (d)

Meet the Author

Ned Zeman is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he has covered a wide range of subjects: crime, politics, Hollywood, and outdoor adventure. He has also written for Newsweek, Spy, GQ, Outside, and Sports Illustrated. Two of his articles have been finalists for the National Magazine Award, and he cowrote the screenplay for Sugarland, the forthcoming film starring Jodie Foster. He lives in Los Angeles.

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9646619

Posted September 20, 2011

Impossible to classify! Just read it!

Is it an adventure story, a fantasy, a tell all of writers/editors and self-revelation? Yes, it is all this and more. "The Rules of the Tunnel - My Brief Period of Madness" is a compelling, witty, and at times, heartbreaking ride with Ned Zeman and his true and very plausible reality-trip toward sanity. My hope for him is safe, stable mental health, but to leave room for his gift of manic magic.
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Anonymous

Posted September 4, 2011

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