What Doesn’t Kill You: 15 Stories Of Survival by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska – Book Review

PUBLISHERS BLURB 

Contributors include Cathy Rentzenbrink, Rory Bremner, Melanie McGrath (a Mail on Sunday best British writer under thirty-five), Irenosen Okojie (a Betty Trask Prize-winning novelist) David Owen (a Carnegie Medal nominee), Lily Bailey (author of Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought) and Kate Leaver (writer for Glamour UK, Vice and the Guardian)

– Their rich and varied stories show that our struggles need not define us, and can even become the grounds for future success.

– This is the latest groundbreaking anthology from the publishers of The Good Immigrant, Repeal the 8th and Common People.

– For fans of Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail, Cathy Rentzenbrink’s A Manual For Heartache.

‘A stellar cast of writers and thinkers’ Nathan Filer

An explorer spends a decade preparing for an expedition to the South Pole; what happens when you live for a goal, but once it’s been accomplished, you discover it’s not enough? A successful broadcast journalist ends up broke, drunk and sleeping rough; what makes alcohol so hard to resist despite its ruinous consequences? A teenage girl tries to disappear by starving herself; what is this force that compels so many women to reduce their size so drastically?

In this essay collection, writers share the struggles that have shaped their lives – loss, depression, addiction, anxiety, trauma, identity and others. But as they take you on a journey to the darkest recesses of their mind, the authors grapple with challenges that haunt us all.

MY REVIEW 

What Doesn’t Kill You is a collection of 15 essays written by a wide range of people who share the struggles with mental health they have had, and still do have as part of their lives. Edited by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska.

There are stories of depression, anxiety and panic, of ADHD, anorexia, OCD, alcoholism and more. Tales of people at their lowest ebb, at times desperate and how the authors have accepted these conditions as part of their everyday lives. These are not light reads, but full of honesty and emotion and bring a realisation that we never know what is going on with people behind their smiles!!

I found each of these essays to be incredibly moving, to read people’s inner thoughts and how they find different ways of coping and accepting their condition, it made me think of my own health issues and how I deal with it internally….Truly inspiring and thought provoking. 

Thank you to Anne Cater and Random Things Tours for the opportunity to participate in this blog tour,  for the promotional materials and an eARC of the book. This is my honest, unbiased review.

 

You can buy a copy here : https://amzn.to/3dJaiz5 

 

AUTHOR DETAILS

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska went from stock investing in Washington DC to a technology incubator in south-east Asia, then joined the rat race in London and promptly burned out while building a tax software business. To avoid actually getting therapy, she spent the next two years interviewing therapists,