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Jan Lars Jensen is the author of Nervous System.

Jan Lars Jensen grew up in the Fraser Valley of B.C. and currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, with his wife Michelle. His first novel, Shiva 3000, was published by Harcourt in North America and Macmillan in the UK. His short fiction has appeared in Descant, Prairie Fire, Geist, and other periodicals around the world.

“A darkly comic cautionary tale for the aspiring novelist and an unnerving exploration of writing and madness.”
—Lynn Coady, author of Saints of Big Harbour

Jan Lars Jensen noticed that when his writing was going well, it felt as if something came unhinged in his mind. The rush of ideas and language felt like losing, wilfully, a little mental stability. But true madness didn’t come until he published his first book.

A few months after selling his novel to a major American publisher, he woke in a psych ward bed, only to find the ideas that had inspired him now roamed through waking nightmares. And just as literature prompted Jensen’s slide into psychosis, so did it help him rebuild and recover. Whether he was trying to comprehend James Herriot’s vet stories through a haze of anti-psychotic medication or attempting to steer his mind toward sleep with a history of logging, books and writing defined Jensen’s world.

This book recounts his extraordinary experience. Gripping and upsetting, darkly comic and deeply moving, Nervous System is a journey into a creative mind’s near-collapse, and an exploration of art and madness.

Reviews:
“As a brave, unflinching look at mental illness, Nervous System is revelatory; as a candid, conflicted view of the creative process, it is a revelation.” —Robert J. Wiersema, The Vancouver Sun

“[A] weird and brilliant memoir ... Jensen’s writing is smooth and elegant, his narrative suspenseful, his sensibility witty ... he delivers a smart and sympathetic narrator-himself-whose personal adventure, as terrifying as any in the thriller rack at the drug store, captures the catastrophes of the present, the ones lurking much closer to home.” —Nancy Wigston, Toronto Star

“Nervous System is not just a compelling memoir, it’s an important one. Mental illness manages to be both glamorized and stigmatized in our culture. What is often missed is what Jensen shows us convincingly: the moment-to-moment unhappiness of losing your mind ... Both harrowingly authentic and poignantly understated. This is, if we’re lucky, as close as most of us will get to going really crazy.” —Joel Yanofsky, The National Post