Mike Mariani in Conversation with Sally Haldorson | Author Interview - Porchlight x Boswell Books

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Previously live-streamed on September 7, 2022: Boswell Books and Porchlight Book Company present an interview with Mike Mariani, author of What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us: Who We Become After Tragedy and Trauma.
ABOUT THE BOOK
"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," Nietzsche's famous maxim goes. But how much truth is there to that omnipresent statement?
Tracing the lives of six people who have experienced catastrophic, life-changing events, journalist Mike Mariani explores the nuances and largely uncharted territory 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 a chronic illness, Mariani turned inward, changing his bustling existence into a more contemplative one. In this ambitious work of reporting, he uses his own experience and the lessons of psychology, literature, mythology, and religion to tell the stories of people living "afterlives." Their experiences range from a paralyzing car crash to a personality-altering traumatic brain injury to an accidental homicide and a sentence of life imprisonment. Their afterlives, Mariani argues, supercharge their identities, forcing them to narrow and deepen their focus to find their sense of meaning-whether through academia or religion or helping others-in identities that have been struck by tragedy and then dramatically reinvented. Delving into lives rarely seen in such detail-lives filled with struggle, loss, perseverance, transformation, and triumph-Mariani leads us through the darkest aspects of human existence, only to show how much we can become.
→ Purchase a copy of WHAT DOESN'T KILL US MAKES US from our event partners, Boswell Book Company: www.boswellbooks.com/book/978...
→ Learn more about Porchlight and our services for authors, publicists, publishers, and readers: bit.ly/3sPUWBX
Since graduating with his MA in English literature, MIKE MARIANI has worked as a freelance journalist, writing for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Newsweek, GQ, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, The Believer, Slate, The Guardian, and more. Mike has written about the ethical quandary of expert witnesses in criminal cases involving mental illness, the opioid crisis and its impact on mortality rates, the neuroscience of inequality, and other topics. He lives in Northern California with his wife.
Mike was in conversation with Porchlight Managing Director Sally Haldorson.
SALLY HALDORSON's mission as Porchlight’s Managing Director is to make Porchlight a great place to work for employees, and a consistently high-performing service organization for everyone in or orbiting the publishing industry. After 25 years working in book retail, she has developed a penchant for business strategy, both as a socio-economic force and a literary genre. Happy to put her English and Creative Writing degrees to work, she helped craft three editions of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, and she reads, writes, and reviews for the company’s marketing team.