Skip to main content

Tanya Frank

Biography

Tanya Frank

Tanya Frank received her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of California, Riverside. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. She lives in London with her wife.

Tanya Frank

Books by Tanya Frank

Zig-Zag Boy: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood
by Tanya Frank - Memoir, Nonfiction

One night in 2009, Tanya Frank finds her 19-year-old son, Zach, in the grip of what the psychiatrists would label a psychotic break. In the years following Zach’s shifting psychiatric diagnoses, Tanya is desperate to find the right answer, the right drug, the right doctor to bring him back to reality. She struggles to navigate archaic mental healthcare systems, first in California and then in her native London during lockdown. Meanwhile, the boy she raised suffers the effects of multiple hospitalizations, powerful drugs that blunt his emotions, therapies that don’t work, and torturous nights on the streets. Holding on to startling moments of hope and seeking solace in nature and community, Tanya learns how to abandon her fears for the future and accept the mysteries of her son’s altered states.