Here's the Bright Side: Of Failure, Fear, Cancer, Divorce, and Other Bum Raps

Do clouds truly have silver linings? Betty Rollin answers with a resounding yes in this wise, moving, and funny book about the surprising upsides to life’s most challenging, painful, and seemingly insurmountable low blows. Rollin has been there. After being diagnosed with breast cancer more than thirty years ago–and again nine years later–she managed to find an astonishingly bright side to the darkness. She shares her often zany and unpredictable personal experiences of turning the worst into the best, and shows how others have done the same–thriving in adversity to a remarkable degree and coming to recognize their various blessings in disguise.
Steve Jobs describes how being fired from Apple, the company he founded, was one of the best things that ever happened to him. Homemaker Sally Fleming made a better life for herself and her family after a fire. Only when workaholic CEO Eugene O’Kelly was diagnosed with a terminal illness did he really begin to live his life to the fullest. Bill Clinton, Charles Colson, and others describe life changes after adversity.
Rollin reveals the science behind the theory of adversarial, or post-traumatic, growth. This paradox is not about denying hardship but about finding a way to benefit from it. Seeing the bright enables us to find the good, whatever form it takes, within the bad and proceed from there.
Poignant, timely, universal, and inspiring, Here’s the Bright Side proves that amid life’s struggles and losses, there is much to be gained–wisdom, strength, and, perhaps most important, gratitude. “Try feeling gloomy and grateful all at once,” says Rollin. “You can’t. Gratitude picks you up and puts you in a place where gloom cannot thrive.”

Betty Rollin is a writer and an award-winning TV journalist. A former correspondent for NBC News, she now contributes reports for PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. Once a writer and editor for both Vogue and Look magazines, she has written for many national publications, including The New York Times. She is the bestselling author of six previous books, including First, You Cry and Last Wish. She lives in New York City with her husband, a mathematician.