Jennifer Gilbert was brutally attacked in 1991 when she was 22-years-old.  The attack was so gruesome, she should have died. But she didn't and eleven years after the attack, she has written about that horrible day and how she found the strength to live a happy life. She writes about this in "I Never Promised You A Goodie Bag," her first book.  Given her life and what she's done with it, the book is aptly subtitled, "A Memoir of a Life Through Events--the Ones you Plan and Ones You Don't. 

Gilbert was new to New York when the attack took place.  It was just days after she had moved to the city from London to start a new life. She was on her way to visit a friend when she was followed from the subway and stabbed 37 times with a screwdriver by a stranger in the hallway of her friend's apartment building and later in that friend's living room. 

Suffice it to say, it was a major turning moment in Gilbert's life--one that she says rendered her then before and after Jen. She writes in a blog on Huffington Post,  "At 22, the Jenny I had been my whole life was gone. So was my joy. I lost any dreamy notion I'd once had of a storybook life. I went into a dark hole and tried to make sense of a world where something like that can happen. My heart was beating, I could see and hear, but I felt nothing."

Yet, choosing not to be a victim of the tragedy, Gilbert starts her own event planning company and entrenches herself in making it a success.  She also finds that by being around other people's celebrations and joy, she felt more alive.  She writes, "Then something started happening to me while I was planning all those happy experiences for other people. It started as a glimmer of longing inside of me. Eventually it grew to a tingling, like pins and needles in sleepy limbs, and almost by osmosis, I started to come back to life and have hope. I began to believe that I actually deserved, and could have, the life that I had recreated for myself."