Irritable Hearts

Irritable Hearts is a powerful memoir about a young journalist’s painful battle with PTSD and her arduous road to recovery. But it is also a passionate and beautifully rendered love story. The way McClelland weaves together these two disparate tales makes this book a brilliant and captivating read. Mira Bartok, author of New York Times bestseller The Memory Palace

”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.“

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. Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

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 Journalists, 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. Visit her at mac‑mcclelland.com or on Twitter at @MacMcClelland.