What do readers think of Irritable Hearts by Mac McClelland? Write your own review.

I really wanted to like this book but reviewing this book was a difficult task. On the positive side I admired the author's writing and her raw openness about her condition and its effect upon her life. However, I couldn't help but question her credibility. Being somewhat familiar with her work, I found it very hard to understand how she was dissociating and crying maniacally and at the same time going undercover to write a piece about working in an Amazon warehouse. In addition, she starts the book by vague comments about being traumatized by an event she observed without specifics to make us understand what specific dangers she had been exposed to. Apparently, the person involved and her lawyer expressed that she had no authorization to speak about what happened to her, as she had reported specifics in an earlier article. However, that very lack of information undermines the rest of the book. She does present a great deal of valuable information about PTSD and self mutilation but doesn't build enough of a case to make her exposure believable. She did have a very troubling childhood which in itself could have led to severe emotional difficulties but I could not help judging the means and methods she went through to accomplish her goals. Her self portrayal was not very likable...and I had a hard time being sympathetic..I wish I could have been.

Irritable Hearts is a memoir that is lost in vague textbook talk. The first half is painfully slow going with a mostly unexplained major event that triggers the author's PTSD. The rambling tale seems disjointed and I found myself rereading pages constantly to try to stay on track. The book evolves into a sort of autobiographical textbook saga which I found uninteresting and consistently difficult to read. While I certainly empathize with the author's struggle to find peace with her diagnosis, I found this to be an underwhelming psychological case study.