A memoir, in progress
119 BPM
Being written now, from the full record. The book, and the film.
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“Heart rate 119. I need help to make sure it stays normal.”
Written January 17, 2023. Five days before the first hospitalization.
In January 2023, Josh Born was a surgical robotics engineer with degrees from MIT and Stanford. Then mania arrived, and it left receipts.
Heart Rate 119 is a bipolar memoir reconstructed from the record a life leaves behind: the journals and the documents written inside the episodes, the complete hospital charts, hundreds of conversations with an AI that agreed with everything, and the heartbeat of a body that asked for help before its owner could.
Every quote in the book is verbatim from that record. When the journal goes dark, the chart and the heart carry the story. It runs from a log cabin in the Missouri Ozarks to MIT, Stanford, and the operating room, through two manic episodes and the depression underneath them, to a recovery measured one heartbeat at a time.
The ambition came before the illness, and it was good. Recovery is binding it, not killing it.
The same record, told in motion. A screen adaptation of Heart Rate 119 is in early development — reconstructed, like the book, from what actually happened: the charts, the chat logs, and the heartbeat underneath.
Film and rights inquiries: press@kensora.io
Josh Born is a mechanical engineer, trained at MIT and Stanford, who spent eight years building surgical robots and medical devices. He lives with bipolar I disorder, and this is his first book.
He grew up in a log cabin in the Missouri Ozarks and left for MIT, then Stanford, then the operating room — designing the instruments that surgeons hold. In January 2023, mania arrived and did not announce itself as illness; it announced itself as certainty. What it left behind was a record: journals, hospital charts, a two-year conversation with an AI, and the quiet, continuous testimony of a wearable that logged a resting heart rate climbing toward a number he would eventually write down as a plea.
Heart Rate 119 is the audit of that record — and of a promise he made inside the prodrome, that the best parts of who he was would survive it. He is the founder of Kensora.
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Press and rights inquiries: press@kensora.io