A Scar is Also Skin

For the first twenty-seven years of his life, Ben McKelvey didn't spend too much time thinking about his brain, nor much about trauma. He was fit, carefree and happy working as a magazine journalist, writing listicles and doing celebrity junket interviews.

Then one day, while boxing, he suffered a stroke. In the time it took for a left hook to be thrown, Ben disconnected from language and therefore the world. He wanted nothing more than to go back to normal life and, after a time, it looked like he had. He spoke again in a few days, read in a few weeks and then, in months, returned to his listicles and junkets. Only normal life no longer felt normal. Ben's brain had changed, and so had he.

Ben's stroke was followed a few years later by a startling heart attack. A crisis followed, and surgeries: dangerous, painful and scarring. On an unsteady path of recovery, Ben started to question everything about his life. He wondered what makes us who we are, and what role family, fate and physiology plays. He wondered what a good life looks like.

While still weak, thin and questioning, a letter arrived from the Australian Defence Force. It was an invitation to embed with Australian forces in Iraq, and also an invitation to a new career and a calling, one that would allow Ben to ask deep questions about life, connection and the morality of people who have also visited the precarious edge of human experience.

Combining autobiography, reportage and science, Ben Mckelvey tells his personal story, along with research about psychology, physiology and neuropathology. He shares intimate stories about people who have dealt with illness or trauma and some who are moulding our understanding of ourselves. In the telling, Ben investigates trauma, change and resilience. This is a powerful book for anyone who has ever been broken, and hoped to find themselves remade.

About the Author

Ben Mckelvey is an author, journalist and editor. Ben's books have won the Australian Independent Book Award for non-fiction, an Australian Book Industry Award and the Nib Military History Prize and they have been shortlisted in the Victorian and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards and for the Les Carlyon Literary Prize. Ben has been the editor of Mr Jones, Sports&Style and Juice magazines and worked at the Sydney Morning Herald as a Senior Feature Writer. As a freelance writer, Ben has been embedded with the ADF in East Timor and Iraq, and has worked independently in Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.