The Rules of the Tunnel:My Brief Period of Madness

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%E2%80%94told cheekily in the second person%E2%80%94Michigan 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.)