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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Marie Arendt |
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WHAT DOESN'T KILL US MAKES US
Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma
A cross between Far From the Tree and The Body Keeps the Score, WHAT DOESN'T KILL US MAKES US looks at how we build new identities following events that cleave life irrevocably into a before and after, drawing on individual stories, the lessons of neuroscience, literature, and religion, as well as the author's personal experience of loss and diagnosis with a chronic illness.
"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," the saying goes. But does it really? Tracing the lives of six people who have experienced catastrophic, life-changing events, journalist Mike Mariani explores the nuances of what happens after one's life is cleaved into a before and after. If what doesn't kill us doesn't necessarily make us stronger, he asks, what does it make us?
When his own life was transformed by the diagnosis of a chronic illness, Mariani turned inward, changing his active existence into a more pensive one. In this ambitious work of reporting, he uses his own experience, as well as the lessons of medicine, literature, mythology, and religion, to tell the stories of people living what he terms "afterlives." Their experiences 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 supercharged their identities, forcing them to narrow and deepen their focus to find their sense of purpose - whether through academia or religion or helping others - in identities that have been struck by tragedy and then dramatically reinvented.
Delving into lives we rarely see in such detail - lives filled with struggle, loss, perseverance, and triumph - Mariani brings us to the darkest aspects of human existence, only to show us just how much we are capable of becoming.
Since graduating with his MA in English literature, Mike Mariani has worked as a freelance journalist, writing feature articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Newsweek, GQ, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Atavist and essays for The Believer, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, and Hazlitt. Some of the topics Mike has written about include the ethical quandary of expert witnesses in criminal cases involving mental illness, the opioid crisis and its impact on mortality rates, and the neuroscience of inequality. Mike currently resides in Northern California with his fiancée, where he enjoys hiking, road trips, and catching the latest indie dramas nobody's heard of.
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Book
Published 2022-08-30 by Ballantine |