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Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer, journalist and activist whose work has been at the center of mine. Her now-classic, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger lit me on fire—not only for the deftness of her arguments but also because she is a meticulous researcher. What she gave air to in the pages of that book blew me away. She figures prominently in the endnotes of On Our Best Behavior.
Her new book, The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma, follows a similar path. Soraya takes something we’ve been served as an ideal—develop resilience—and flips it on its head, both widening and undermining this definition. She challenges our cultural myths about this concept and urges us all to shift and expand our perspective on the trait, moving from prioritizing the role of the individual to overcome and conquer to focusing on what’s really at work, which is collective care and connections with our communities. As she proves in these pages, resilience is always relational.
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Your books are so good. And they're so important. I mean, because you're also an exceptional researcher. So, thank you, because you really are exquisite at finding incredible research. I feel like the timing, as delayed as it may have been for this book, feels a little right? Because I think that we're, and maybe this is just me looking through the same lens at the world as you, because I feel like we see things quite similarly and are interested in many of the same things, but that there is this crisis of masculinity, which obviously has been evolving and growing for, we could say but it feels like it's reaching this point where It's breaking into the mainstream and now people are saying things what I see very curious for your thoughts is like somehow the cure for this crisis and masculinity is more masculinity...