Zig-Zag Boy: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood

In 2009 a nineteen-year-old called Zach, once bright and promising, was in the middle of a psychotic crisis, and his mother Tanya Frank was left trying to understand a world that made no sense to her. Overnight she was pulled into his perception, where phones were bugged, his friends were in the Mafia and helicopters were watching the family.

The years that followed brought a run of shifting psychiatric diagnoses. Frank fought to find the right answer, medication and doctor, and she struggled with mental healthcare systems she describes as archaic, first in California and later in London during lockdown. Meanwhile the son she raised, a chatty dog lover and a UCLA student, was himself going through all of it.

The book is a memoir of a mother's effort to accept her son's path through psychosis. Edition note: published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2023, 210 pages, ISBN-13 9780393531886.