THE COMPLICATIONS: ON GOING INSANE IN AMERICA, my 2024 book of personal, reported, and other essays on madness, is now available.

Buy it on Amazon, Indiebound, directly from HarperCollins, or anywhere else books are bought.

“It is an incredible thing to watch Emmett Rensin dismantle the incoherent, platitudinous beliefs well meaning Americans hold around the subject of what they will call, with delicate distance, 'mental illness.' The Complications is so brilliant, fresh, and resistant to cliché it eventually led me back to that most familiar idea: the thin line between madness and genius.” — Kerry Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

"In this raw debut memoir, essayist Rensin interweaves an account of his struggles with schizoaffective bipolar disorder with a cutting examination of American attitudes toward mental health. While the unremitting darkness can be tough to stomach, it’s a rousing rebuke to more placid treatments of similar subject matter." — Publishers Weekly

“An absorbing debut memoir. Rensin’s historical overview of psychiatry, examination of the vagaries of diagnosis and therapy, and stark depiction of his own visceral experiences offer unique insight into the meaning of madness.” — Kirkus

“[Rensin's] book is caustic and incisive, never more so than when his readers, curled up neurotypically on our couches, are in his sights: ‘You want to know what madness feels like. Why do you believe that I could tell you?’” — Harper's Magazine

"Remarkably eloquent and deeply felt, The Complications is an irrepressibly beautiful debut that rounds the wounded psyche of the self and society with a deftness so visceral and yet also so subtle it will remind that art is still one of the greatest salves."   — John D'Agata, author of The Making of the American Essay and About a Mountain

“Someone gives you a road map and says, 'Go.' But what if it's a trick map? What if it leads you to crash your car on purpose and to see the nurses helping you as actually intent on killing you with knives? What happens when you find out the map maker is you and always will be you? If you are Emmett Rensin, you write the brilliant and terrifying The Complications. Rensin is walking Didion territory here, with sentences, and fates, as quietly lacerating. And while he himself doesn't put much stock in the madness/genius theory, both are evident here.” — Nancy Rommelmann, author of To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder