He is the author of Tortured Artists: From Picasso and Monroe to Warhol and Winehouse, The Twisted Secrets of the World's Creative Minds.
Critic and psychiatrist Jacob Appel heaped praise on the volume in a 2012 review, describing the book as "a surprisingly sophisticated and oddly brilliant work—part popular science and part cultural criticism—that blends comic observation and trenchant insight into a literary treasure as difficult to put down as it is to classify.
[7] In his memoir, Uneducated, he describes himself as a poor student with behavioral problems, and writes that he was classified with an emotional disturbance by the school system.
[9] Zara entered professional journalism through an unpaid internship in New York City at Show Business Weekly, later becoming the newspaper’s managing editor.
[10] He made the jump to digital media as an editor for International Business Times, an online news startup, and was working there when the company purchased Newsweek in 2013.
His credits include Average Community (2009), which won the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary from the 2009 CMJ Film Festival.