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What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma
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About This Book
A deep examination of what happens after life-altering events--from devastating car accidents to yearslong incarceration--and how we forge new identities when our lives are cleaved irrevocably."What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," the adage--adapted from Nietzsche's famous maxim--goes. But how much truth is there to that ubiquitous, inexhaustible saying? Tracing the lives of six people who have experienced profoundly life-changing events, journalist Mike Mariani explores the nuances and largely uncharted territory of what happens after one's life is severed into a before and after. If what doesn't kill us does not necessarily make us stronger, he asks, what does it make us? When his own life was transformed by the onset of a chronic illness, Mariani turned inward, changing his bustling, exuberant lifestyle into something more contemplative and deliberate. In this ambitious work of narrative reporting, he uses his own experience, as well as lessons from psychology, literature, mythology, and religion, to tell the stories of people living what he describes as "afterlives." His subjects' harrowing episodes range from a paralyzing car crash to a personality-altering traumatic brain injury to an accidental homicide that resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment. Their "afterlives," Mariani argues, have compelled them to supercharge their identities, narrowing and deepening their focus to find a sense of meaning--whether through academia or religion or ministering to others--in lives sundered by tragedy. Only then can these people truly reinvent themselves, testifying to their own unseen multitudes and the valiant mutability of the human spirit. Delving into lives we rarely see in such meticulous detail--lives filled with struggle, loss, perseverance, transformation, and triumph--Mariani leads us into some of the darkest corners of human existence, only to reveal our endless capacity for kindling new light.
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Reviews
"Journalist Mariani debuts with a heart-rending examination of surviving trauma...penetrating wisdom on the nature of suffering, positing that whether tragedies make someone stronger is less important than how they shape one's identity, and that 'positive and negative are all but impossible to disentangle in most people's lives'...The author's superior storytelling abilities shine throughout and portray his subjects with compassion and nuance...The result captivates, offering a poignant exploration of how humans make meaning out of tragedy."
"In 'What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us'—the title itself suggests that things are open-ended—Mike Mariani tests Nietzsche's maxim through the tales of six men and women who underwent horrific traumas in early adulthood...Mr."
"An exploration of the work of tragic events on the psyche, which can be corrosive but also offers the possibility of reinvention...As Mariani notes, many traumatized people remain vulnerable, a condition that 'manifests itself as a heightened exposure to not only concrete physical sequelae like injury and infirmity but also social issues like unemployment, marginalization, and poverty'...The reality, writes the author, is that 'our tragedies and traumas saw through the ropes connecting us to what we love, setting us adrift and unmoored in faceless waters oblivious to our suffering'...What remains is to rebuild and reconnect—if that's possible...Repetitive but with a strong message of hope in the face of life-altering trauma."
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