The Rules of the Tunnel: My Brief Period of Madness

A journalist faces his toughest assignment: profiling himself as he struggles with mood disorders, memory, shock treatment therapy, and the quest to get back to normal.

Twenty-five million Americans suffer from clinical depression. But Ned Zeman never thought he’d be one of them. He had a great life and thriving career at Vanity Fair.

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.

By the time it was over, Zeman had lost nearly two years’ 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.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, profane and hopeful, The Rules of the Tunnel is a guttural shout of a book that defies conventional notions about mood disorders, unlocks mysteries within mysteries, and proves that sometimes everything you’re looking for is right in front of you.