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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Mac McClelland is the author of For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. She has written for Reuters, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the New York Times Magazine, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the Online News Association, the Society of Environmental Journalist, and the Association for Women in Communications. Her work has also been nominated for two National Magazine Awards for Feature Writing and has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing 2011, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and Best Business Writing 2013.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 numbness-so severe that she felt no emotion when her boyfriend, Nico, placed a rose on her chest and fed her strawberries in bed one day-are 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. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE AMERICAN JOURNALIST Mac McClelland 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 to San Francisco 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. She was blindsided by nightmares and flashbacks and "changes in self-perception." Peering into the mirror, instead of seeing her reflection, she imagined that she saw a boy: "A flat, weak, castrated, insubstantial fragment of a boy." This episode occurred during the day. The nights were worse, spewing such graphic dreams that just reading about them sparks horror. "I'd been going through a spate where I was the one torturing and murdering people," she writes. "I'd tied two people down to the floor, or someone else had. They were alive, and I was whipping a grappling hook into their faces." At the time of her illness, McClelland was working as a reporter for the magazine Mother Jones, and she had access to what must be blindingly expensive treatment. But therapists, yoga sessions and even the attentions of a French peacekeeper she met in Haiti, with whom she started a love affair, offered only temporary respite. On assignment in Ohio she tried to numb herself by watching the television show "Toddlers and Tiaras." She drank heavily. This widely traveled journalist, who otherwise had demonstrated diamond-hard nerves, was unraveling. She says she felt like a "disgusting person" who had "made bad decisions, and hurt people and was a failure." In search of answers, McClelland executed an inward dive into her own history, and she shares with readers a pattern of sexual entanglements and infidelities. She describes how violent sex became a form of therapy. In the process she draws a valuable portrait of what it is like to live with PTSD. Still, even for a memoir, McClelland's tone is so relentlessly candid that it recalls the show-all, tell-all confessional essay form endemic to the Internet. And too often her experiences appear like a window into the life of a privileged Western journalist, who, unlike her subjects, can enter and exit conflict at her own choosing. In one discomfiting paragraph, McClelland goes from Uganda, where she had just met with members of the threatened underground gay community, to Paris in order to decompress. She rented an apartment owned by the son of Jonas Salk, the man who developed the polio vaccine. Her French boyfriend was waiting there for her, and seemingly without irony, McClelland writes, "In the curtain-filtered morning light of Jonas Salk's apartment, my sweater draped over Claude Picasso's childhood desk, there was Nico with his sweetness and his bowl of perfect strawberries." Yet there are moments of luster in this memoir, as 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. In Haiti, for example, McClelland met Daniel, who was living in a nightmarish tented camp notorious for gang violence and sexual assaults. His shelter was leaky and fashioned out of a piece of tarp. The awfulness of his circumstances didn't escape Daniel, but he chose to dig deep. "Fortunately," he told McClelland, in a moment of heartbreak for this reader, "it's not that hot in here right now." Voices like Daniel's infuse McClelland's memoir with poignancy. They urge reflection on the lives of those whose rescue from trauma is determined - or undermined - by the circumstances of their birth. The themes in "Irritable Hearts" will be familiar to readers of a widely circulated essay that McClelland published in 2011 in which she first addressed her PTSD. That essay, in the magazine Good, was controversial, in part because she spoke of a rape victim she met in Haiti. She first mentioned the meeting in a series of tweets. After reading them, the victim's lawyer got in touch with her, asking that she not write about the person again because the tweets had identified her and put her life in danger. McClelland included her in the essay anyway, and it appears here that she is still trying to apologize for that mistake. And so in "Irritable Hearts" McClelland sometimes writes likes a flagellant: There is nothing they can say about me that I haven't already said about myself, she seems to be telling us, as she puts herself down again and again. But she also quotes letters of support from "fellow sexual deviants," as she wryly puts it, to show that her essay did help some people. At the same time, she crowds in names of wellness gurus and somatics pioneers and quotes trauma literature to explain her choices. Such dutifully collated information leaves a reader with the feeling that she is striving for acknowledgment that her mistakes should be forgiven. McClelland can stop worrying. "Irritable Hearts" has hits and misses, but its striking candor will win McClelland the empathy she deserves. The author felt like a 'disgusting person' who had 'hurt people and was a failure.' SONIA FALEIRO is the author of "Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars" and a co-founder of the journalists' collective Deca.
