Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story
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"I had nightmares, flashbacks. I dissociated... Changes in self-perception and hallucinations-those are some of my other symptoms. You are poison, I chanted silently to myself. And your poison is contagious."
So begins Mac McClelland's powerful, unforgettable memoir, Irritable Hearts.
When thirty-year-old, award-winning human rights journalist Mac McClelland left Haiti after reporting on the devastating earthquake of 2010, she never imagined how the assignment would irrevocably affect her own life. Back home in California, McClelland cannot stop reliving vivid scenes of violence. She is plagued by waking terrors, violent fantasies, and crippling emotional breakdowns. She can't sleep or stop crying. Her life in shambles, it becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her bewilderment about this sudden loss of control is magnified by the intensity of her feelings for Nico, a French soldier she met in Port-au-Prince and with whom she connected instantly and deeply.
With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families. McClelland discovers she is far from alone: while we frequently associate PTSD with wartime combat, it is more often caused by other manner of trauma and can even be contagious-close proximity to those afflicted can trigger its symptoms. As she confronts the realities of her diagnosis, she opens up to the love that seems to have found her at an inopportune moment. Irritable Hearts is a searing, personal medical mystery that unfolds at a breakneck pace. But it is also a romance. McClelland fights desperately to repair her heart so that she can give it to the kind, patient, and compassionate man with whom she wants to share a life. Vivid, suspenseful, tender, and intimate, Irritable Hearts is a remarkable exploration of vulnerability and resilience, control and acceptance. It is a riveting and hopeful story of survival, strength, and love.
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Mac McClelland. (2015). Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story. Flatiron Books.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Mac McClelland. 2015. Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story. Flatiron Books.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story. Flatiron Books, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Mac McClelland. Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story. Flatiron Books, 2015.
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- bioText: MAC MCCLELLAND is an award-winning journalist and author of For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story From Burma's Never-Ending War. She's appeared on major national and international media outlets such as MSNBC, PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, the BBC, CBC, and Deutsche Welle. She's won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Hillman Foundation, the Online News Association, and the Society of Environmental Journalists; she's been nominated for two National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing; and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and Best Business Writing.
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"I had nightmares, flashbacks. I dissociated... Changes in self-perception and hallucinations-those are some of my other symptoms. You are poison, I chanted silently to myself. And your poison is contagious."
So begins Mac McClelland's powerful, unforgettable memoir, Irritable Hearts.
When thirty-year-old, award-winning human rights journalist Mac McClelland left Haiti after reporting on the devastating earthquake of 2010, she never imagined how the assignment would irrevocably affect her own life. Back home in California, McClelland cannot stop reliving vivid scenes of violence. She is plagued by waking terrors, violent fantasies, and crippling emotional breakdowns. She can't sleep or stop crying. Her life in shambles, it becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her bewilderment about this sudden loss of control is magnified by the intensity of her feelings for Nico, a French soldier she met in Port-au-Prince and with whom she connected instantly and deeply.
With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families. McClelland discovers she is far from alone: while we frequently associate PTSD with wartime combat, it is more often caused by other manner of trauma and can even be contagious-close proximity to those afflicted can trigger its symptoms. As she confronts the realities of her diagnosis, she opens up to the love that seems to have found her at an inopportune moment. Irritable Hearts is a searing, personal medical mystery that unfolds at a breakneck pace. But it is also a romance. McClelland fights desperately to repair her heart so that she can give it to the kind, patient, and compassionate man with whom she wants to share a life. Vivid, suspenseful, tender, and intimate, Irritable Hearts is a remarkable exploration of vulnerability and resilience, control and acceptance. It is a riveting and hopeful story of survival, strength, and love.- reviews
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- source: Sonia Faliero, The New York Times Book Review
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"Mac Mc Clelland has reported from crisis zones like Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but in her memoir Irritable Hearts she chronicles a crisis she can't leave behind. McClelland learned she had post-traumatic stress disorder only hours after her return from Haiti, where she covered the aftereffects of the devastating January 2010 earthquake. She quickly came to understand the true cost of working in a zone of catastrophic hardship--even those who are not directly affected are damaged...In search of answers, McClelland executed an inward dive into her own history....In the process she draws a valuable portrait of what it is like to live with PTSD...When McClelland brings the subjects of her interviews into the frame of her book, it is then that Irritable Hearts reveals its own warm, beating heart... Irritable Hearts striking candor will win McClelland the empathy she deserves."
- premium: False
- source: Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of AN UNTAMED STATE and BAD FEMINIST
- content: "That we are as strong as we are frail is the most profound of many truths rising out of Mac McClelland's astonishing Irritable Hearts. In her unforgettable memoir, McClelland begins to unravel her experience with PTSD while falling in love, traversing the globe and trying to understand both how the mind breaks and what it takes to heal in a world where all too often, we are constantly faced with how terribly vulnerable we are."
- premium: True
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March 2, 2015
This raw look at life with PTSD begins in Haiti in September 2010, where an earthquake has just shaken the very fabric of society. McClelland (A Twisted Trail) is one of the journalists who comes to Port-au-Prince to cover femicide and hate crimes, and she witnesses "something." She does not provide details, only writing that it has to do with rape, and that watching the "something" is the closest she's ever been to someone else's terror. Immediately afterward, she feels "a disembodied version of myself hovering somewhere behind me and to the left." This dissociation and a psychological numbnessâso severe that she felt no emotion when her boyfriend, Nico, placed a rose on her chest and fed her strawberries in bed one dayâare symptoms that strain her ability to function. McClelland pulls herself away from drinking binges with the help of Nico's steadiness, a somatic therapist's expertise, and the affirmation she receives from PTSD survivors who thank her for reporting on the illness. McClelland is writing this memoir for those survivors. She asks readers who haven't experienced dissociation and numbness to empathize with psychological conditions that they won't fully understand, and makes it easy to grant that request.
- premium: True
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December 1, 2014
Sprawling memoir of an adventurous journalist's experiences with PTSD.National Magazine Award-nominated writer McClelland (For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War, 2010) considered herself accustomed to tough environments. However, on the ground in Haiti to cover the chaotic reconstruction following the 2010 earthquake, she witnessed acts of sexual violence (left largely unspecified) that instilled in her a severe case of PTSD, manifesting in jolting physical symptoms: "[f]lashbacks of the screaming incident I witnessed in Haiti burst into my head and I lay there, soft and failed, choking on instant hard sobs." Yet on the same trip, she had begun an improbable romance with Nico, a youthful French soldier. When she was back in the United States, they kept in touch via Skype, but McClelland's PTSD symptoms and attendant depression became more debilitating. When she first published writing about her experience, she was condemned for solipsism, yet she also heard from many fellow sufferers, ranging from women who'd encountered domestic violence to a growing community of PTSD-afflicted combat veterans and their families: "They were the collateral damage that didn't end with veterans, that everyone pretended didn't exist...." As McClelland tried to hang on to her relationship with Nico, she realized that her experiences were representative of a large, undiagnosed demographic of suffering. She discovered that an extensive, therapy-based treatment regimen (involving the examination of every trauma in her past, including the explosive dissolution of her parents' relationship) allowed her to move forward gradually, into accepting Nico's impulsive marriage proposal. The author takes a maximalist approach, focusing exhaustively on her own experiences and grim sensations (as well as those of the people she encounters), so the narrative feels progressively less focused while remaining compassionate and perceptive regarding this elusive malady. McClelland's candor and empathy are admirable, but this would have benefited from more editorial shaping.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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December 1, 2014
Human rights journalist McClelland returned from Haiti a changed woman. She was no stranger to horror, having witnessed disaster after disaster in war-torn countries, in refugee camps, and at sites of environmental disaster. But this was different. In this searing memoir and medical tale, McClelland recounts how she coped with her damaged mind, trying to overcome violent fantasies, emotional breakdowns, insomnia, and endless crying jags in the most unexpected places and under the most unexpected circumstances. She meets with other PTSD victims, researches PTSD, and writes articles about PTSD as well as this devastating memoir, even as she is still coming to terms with her condition. She talks to experts who have conducted comprehensive studies of combat stress, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. She examines the history of psychological trauma and reveals that natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, are another reliable source of PTSD. In all, an important addition to the growing literature on PTSD and its destructive effect on the human mind.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
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September 1, 2014
This book will quickly follow publication of David J. Morris's The Evil Hours: A Biography of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (Houghton Harcourt, Jan. 2015), which attests to our growing recognition of how pervasive and serious PTSD is. Returning home from covering the 2010 Haitian earthquake, award-winning human rights journalist McClelland began suffering bouts of sleeplessness, sobbing, and the vivid conjuring of violent images. Recognizing PTSD when she saw it, she set out to understand its history and consequences while learning to heal through love.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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"I had nightmares, flashbacks. I dissociated... Changes in self-perception and hallucinations-those are some of my other symptoms. You are poison, I chanted silently to myself. And your poison is contagious."
So begins Mac McClelland's powerful, unforgettable memoir, Irritable Hearts.
When thirty-year-old, award-winning human rights journalist Mac McClelland left Haiti after reporting on the devastating earthquake of 2010, she never imagined how the assignment would irrevocably affect her own life. Back home in California, McClelland cannot stop reliving vivid scenes of violence. She is plagued by waking terrors, violent fantasies, and crippling emotional breakdowns. She can't sleep or stop crying. Her life in shambles, it becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her bewilderment about this sudden loss of control is magnified by the intensity of her feelings for Nico, a French soldier she met in Port-au-Prince and with whom she...- sortTitle
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