Damon Young is known for bringing his authentic voice to his work. He is funny, he is observant, he is smart, he is Pittsburgh, and he is Black. All of this can be said as well, for his new book What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker. Young takes apart his life and reconstructs the most important and formative stories, people, and ideas into essays. And instead of telling us all the whats in his life, he is clear that he wants to show us the whys. We get glimpses of what it means for Young to be alive as a Black man in America in 2019. He shares his anxieties, insecurities, victories, and tragedies with us.

There are four essays in this book that really stand out. They all engage with Young and his relationship to women in some way. Weather it be the health care system and his mother, his unconventional love story with his wife, the hopes he holds for his daughter, or his own reckoning with the kind of man he once was in the face of Rape Culture, Young is grappling with his humanity in relationship to those around him and society at large. Thus, these essays take on an urgency that isn’t found elsewhere in the book. You can sense Young’s anxiety around diving so deep, and luck for us he writes these essays anyway, because they are truly impactful.

The other essays in What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker cover a variety of topics from Black anxiety, use of “n-word”, homophobia, and gentrification. These essays are solid but don’t always strike the same thrilling balance between humor, insight, and vulnerability that are present in the above mentioned essays.

Damon Young is powerful voice in Black culture, as the co-founder of Very Smart Brothas and Senior Editor at The Root, and he is a voice that is unpretentious and relatable. He is speaking of his own experiences and observations inn this book, and because of his ability to articulate the whys behind so much of his life you leave the reading experience with a lot to digest. I don’t know that this book changes your life, but I do think it will make you stop and reflect about how you can live a little better.

We had Damon Young on The Short Stacks and he talked all about What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker and you can hear that conversation by clicking HERE. He drops so many gems throughout the episode, you won’t want to miss it.

The Short Stacks 12: Damon Young//What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker

• Hardcover: 320
• Publisher: Ecco; 1st Edition edition (March 26, 2019)
• 3/5 stars
• Buy What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker Amazon or IndieBound

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