On a rainy April evening in 1993, a serial killer responding to a Craigslist ad for Heather Callahan’s used car attacked her on the street in front of her Denver home and left her for dead. Heather didn’t die. She refused to, thinking, as her blood pooled in the rain-soaked street: This is wrong. I am not going to die, not now, not this way.

Heather not only survived in the aftermath of this terrible attack, she thrived, her indomitable spirit a testament to her physical, emotional, and psychological recovery. She came to understand this unexpected and powerful blossoming as Post Traumatic Growth.

A Drop of Rain, her extraordinaire memoir, demonstrates in no uncertain terms that life doesn’t stop when you become a victim. Indeed, she is living proof that the most horrific traumas we face may also, in the long run, be the most significant turning points in our lives.