And after the first 100 pages, after she convinced me that staging rough sex with a male friend, and writing about it for Mother Jones, actually helped her with her PTSD, a change in my attitude occurred. Also, it took work to get used to her writing style, a jumble of convoluted sentences, moving back and forth in time, imparting far too many ideas all at once.īut I didn't quit reading. Her breathtaking disregard for her own safety made my hair stand on end. As far as I was concerned, Mac violated the major commandment of women who travel alone: First, invite no harm. And she was surprised to be exposed to trauma? Seriously? As a woman who has traveled widely by herself, I judged her all over the place. She presented herself right away as hard-drinking and heavy-smoking. She began an immediate affair with a French soldier she met in the hotel swimming pool in that previously-described country. She hired male guides and taxi drivers she hardly knew to go visit rape shelters.
This woman went by herself to a country that was without a functioning police, government, or infrastructure. I become absorbed by any memoir far more quickly if I immediately find the narrator reliable and likeable. I call the book itself "irritable" because I found the author, her story, and her writing completely annoying for the first 90 pages.
"Irritable Hearts" is a name given in 1871 by a doctor named Da Costa to the battle fatigue found in soldiers after the American Civil War. The book narrates the two-plus years of disregulation in emotion, thought and behavior that resulted in the awful loneliness, roiling emotions, disconnection, and overwhelm that every trauma victim suffers. During that visit, she saw something so horrific (even in the book, she does not give details), that it significantly rearranged the neurons in her brain in the way all trauma does. She went to Haiti in 2010 to cover the rape epidemic encouraged by the island's deeper dip into lawlessness and poverty caused by the monster earthquake earlier in the year. Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story is an irritable but utterly fascinating memoir by Mac McClelland, a journalist in her young thirties, who specializes in stories about breaking crises in chaotic and dangerous environments.
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