What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker chronicles Young's efforts to survive while battling and making sense of the various neuroses his country has given him. It's a condition that's sometimes stretched to absurd limits: creating the farce where, as a teen, he wished for a white person to call him a racial slur just so he could fight him and have a great story about it; provoking the angst that made him question if “being straight” was something he could practice and get better at, like a crossover dribble; and generating the surreal experience of watching his Pittsburgh neighbourhood gentrify from predominantly Black to “Portlandia … but with Pierogies.” And, at its most devastating, it provides him a reason to believe that his mother would be alive today if she were white.