Explosive People
On behalf of: Kathy Robbins – The Robbins Office, Inc.
An investigative memoir by MacArthur scholar and critically acclaimed author of Against the World that explores rage—its affects and effects—through the diagnosis known as Intermittent Explosive Disorder, the most widespread mental illness you’ve never heard of.
We all know someone who has inexplicable bursts of anger—rage that is impulsive, unpredictable, and has no apparent goal. For Tara Zahra, it was her father. But beginning in adolescence Tara also experienced her own blinding anger. Consumed by fury, she would explode, lose all sense of decorum and then succumb to tears of shame. Years later, when she considered having children, she feared passing down this wrath. Wanting answers, she embarked on a quest to understand how much of her anger was hereditary, environmental, cultural, or something else?
In Explosive People, Zahra chronicles her search for answers in interviews with neuroscientists, psychiatrists, sociologists, criminologists, sufferers of explosive anger, their family members, and the mental health professionals who treat them. She looks at the politics of rage and asks who gets to be angry and who does not? She examines cultural stereotypes shaping the diagnosis and its potential for misuse. Every outburst of rage, however misdirected, harbors a history; personal experience contributes, but so do political and social forces, including gender, class, and racial inequality.
With the combination of her own lived experience and her determination to dig deep for answers, Zahra seeks most to help us find a way through—whether explosive rage is coming at us, or from us.