HOW TO SURVIVE A MASS SHOOTING

Hanley recounts her mental health struggles after surviving the Columbine mass shooting.

The author, an artistic junior at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, during the 1998-99 school year, always felt like an outsider. A year and a half before the shooting, she made some new friends at a Halloween party. This group of friends was known jokingly around Columbine as the Trenchcoat Mafia, “half a dozen junior and senior guys who wore those black dusters to school” and who had “a strange, nonconformist appeal.” After the shooting, the media latched on to the moniker because the killers had also worn black dusters, although, as Hanley writes about her principal explaining the situation on the news, “the Trenchcoat Mafia isn’t a real gang, it isn’t anything. These kids weren’t involved. They don’t know anything.” The author reveals that while she didn’t know the killers well, she was tangentially associated with them, especially one on whom she had a crush. (Hanley discusses how the fact that she knew the killers better than she knew most of the victims has been a significant struggle.) She begins her memoir in media res, crouching with her friends on the floor of the cafeteria, where she later learned defective bombs had been planted. The structure of the memoir is effective and engaging, moving around in time from the day of the shooting to flashbacks to the weeks, months, and years following the incident. Hanley makes effective use of lists interspersed between chapters with such titles as “Things You Should Know Before Reading Further” and “How To Date a Mass Shooting Survivor.” The author doesn’t explicitly advocate for gun control, and in fact only uses the term once, but the memoir begins with a heinous school-shooting statistic: “Since Columbine, over 398,000 students have experienced gun violence in over 435 school shootings.” Hanley’s journey to address her mental health struggles and accept her status as a survivor is moving and compelling as she recalls grappling with imposter syndrome and survivor’s guilt. The memoir effectively invites empathy for anyone affected by similar events.

An emotional chronicle of a mental health journey tied to an infamous national tragedy.