What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us

March 1, 2022

In The Mamas, Andrews-Dyer--a senior culture writer at the Washington Post and author of Bitch Is the New Black --relates her experiences as a Black mother in a predominantly white mommy group and asks whether Black and white mothers can truly be not just mom mates but real friends. Productivity expert Forte explains that as we deal with all the information swamping us, we can think, work, and live better by Building a Second Brain (75,000-copy first printing). Journalist Mariani draws on personal experience with chronic fatigue syndrome to show how people deal with life disruptions by creating new identities in What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us. Author of the New York Times best-selling The Impossible First and a multi-record-holding explorer, O'Brady explains how to push beyond self-imposed limits and become a better you in The 12-Hour Walk (125,000-copy first printing). Well connected in both English- and Spanish-language media, MSNBC reporter forMorning Joe Pierre-Bravo can identify with feeling like The Other in business meetings, and she gives women of color and children of immigrants advice on overcoming that head-down feeling (50,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from June 20, 2022
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.

September 15, 2022
An exploration of the work of tragic events on the psyche, which can be corrosive but also offers the possibility of reinvention. Mariani, a journalist and former English professor, has grappled with both the psychological burdens of a motherless childhood, raised by "a father who loved my sister and me but who was also aloof and alone, forever at a wraithlike remove," and the physical malady of chronic fatigue syndrome. Though he tends to linger too often on his own troubles, most of the subjects he profiles in the book have had it worse--e.g., a woman who was raped, two men who were incarcerated, another woman whose personality was transformed by a brain injury, and a man who suffered amputations after an accident. By Mariani's account, none were strengthened by the experience, at least not at first; instead, they suffered from initial diminishment, people "whose very continuity of self had been ruptured forever." Yet there is a progression among those whom trauma has forced to live "afterlives." Not all, but many, experience a strengthening that comes from piecing together the shattered fragments of their former lives. However, is a glass glued after breaking stronger than one unbroken in the first place? The answer is unclear. 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." All this is less easy to parse than the conventional wisdom that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. 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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