What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us

The introduction opens with a personal scene of the author: he goes to a «family constellation» therapy session conducted with three women and three chairs. His mother died of breast cancer when he was in nursery; his father mourned in cigarettes, a torn shirt and a second-hand television; and in 2012 a new, chronic illness befell the author. In the constellation the woman representing him is pinned from two sides — by the illness and the chair in the father's role — and cannot move. At first he feels vindicated, then «self-doubt» rises: perhaps his personality is a «mural» painted to hide a loss.

This session shakes his faith in Nietzsche's «what does not kill me makes me stronger». He quotes Rachel Cusk — «suffering has always seemed to me an opportunity» — and compares the idea with scientific evidence on chronic illness, childhood trauma and brain changes. The question changes: how do catastrophes change people? The author admits too that he tried to give his mother's death a deep meaning: the need to explain the loss as an «existential redeeming grace» has come with him to this day.

The author explains the method of the book: not the story of «unqualified loss» that statistics tell but the «grey zones» after catastrophe. He takes Chernobyl as an example: once a city of futuristic promise, in the decades after 1986 it became a «half-erased and rewritten» parchment where bison, bears, wolves and wild horses live. He chose the stories of six people: Sophie, who had a traumatic brain injury; Gina, who lost her sight; Jason, imprisoned for opiate addiction; JR, who lost his legs in a car accident; Valerie, paralysed; and seventeen-year-old Sean, given a life sentence. All of the roughly 150 people he spoke to had lived a «before-and-after» experience.

The introduction also draws limits: childhood trauma, poverty and intergenerational problems are outside the book, because the child's identity is an «unfinished painting» and poverty is a separate systemic matter. The author gives American statistics on consequences such as paralysis, amputation, PTSD and imprisonment and shows how popular culture fits them into the «always category» and pushes them into the «never category». The weakness is that the introduction is long and the statistics and analysis are sometimes repeated; the strength is that the author joins his own pain to the stories of others.

• The book consists of an introduction, six people's stories and a conclusion; the introduction joins the author's personal story with the general question
• Reportage style: interviews, detailed field descriptions and the author's own reflection
• The notion «before and after» is the common thread of the stories
• Scientific research and philosophical quotations (Nietzsche, Cusk) give the stories a frame