Irritable Hearts

Book excerpt: An award-winning journalist explores the pain of bearing witness: “A valuable portrait of what it is like to live with PTSD . . . striking candor.” —The New York Times Book Review Back in California after reporting on Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, Mac McClelland can’t stop reliving vivid scenes of horror. She’s plagued by waking terrors, violent fantasies, and crippling emotional breakdowns. She can’t sleep or stop crying. It becomes clear that she’s 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. In this book, the foreign correspondent tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind. She probes the depths of her illness, explores our culture’s history with PTSD, delves into the latest research, and spends time with veterans and their families. She learns that while we associate PTSD with wartime, it is more often caused by other types of trauma, and can even be contagious. Irritable Hearts is a searing, personal medical mystery that unfolds at a breakneck pace. But it is also a love story, as McClelland fights desperately to repair her heart so she can give it to the kind, patient, and compassionate man with whom she wants to share a life. Ultimately, it is a remarkable exploration of vulnerability and resilience. “Unforgettable.” —Roxane Gay, New York Times–bestselling author of Hunger “[A] deft, emotionally engaged memoir . . . As much as the love story at the heart of the book is a great romance, it’s also a very funny one. McClelland is not the sort of person who needs to idealize either herself or the man who became her husband. It’s a grown-up relationship story. And as a bonus, Irritable Hearts has a section on trauma and triggers that adds useful context to many of our present debates about discourse on the Internet.” —The Washington Post “McClelland pulls back a dark, heavy curtain on the costs paid by those who travel to the far corners of the planet to gather difficult news on difficult subjects . . . Writing like this takes courage, perhaps as much—or even more—than reporting from a war-ravaged land.” —San Francisco Chronicle