What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma

Journalist Mariani debuts with a heart-rending examination of surviving trauma. The author describes how chronic fatigue syndrome flipped his life upside down and led him to question the maxim “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” To investigate, he tells the stories of six individuals who “each endured a catastrophic experience” that fundamentally altered their lives, and details how they dealt with the consequences. Mariani describes how Sean Taylor became involved with the Bloods gang and fatally shot a teenager when Sean was himself only 17. He received a life sentence but found redemption after converting to Islam. Another subject, Gina, was raped while in her early 20s and years later suffered the unrelated trauma of going almost completely blind overnight due to a degenerative eye condition, but she maintained that the “adversities she’d been through had added depth to her relationship with her own life.” Mariani concludes with 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. (Aug.)