Any Ordinary Day: Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens After the Worst Day in Your Life, Leigh Sales

Staff review by Chris Saliba

Leigh Sales has written a deeply humane book about loss and suffering. 

How do people cope when a sudden disaster hits? It’s like any ordinary day, nothing could go wrong, but out of nowhere a freak accident happens and you’re plunged into the most extraordinary circumstances. Tragedy strikes, a loved one is killed and your world is turned upside down. ABC journalist and 7.30 presenter Leigh Sales has often pondered the question of how people cope when random events tap them on the shoulder. In 2014, Sales herself came close to death when she was hospitalised with complications from her second pregnancy. Such a major life changing experience prompted her to face one of her major fears: the fact that we are not in control of life and cannot protect ourselves from random events.

Any Ordinary Day is Sales’s quest to find out how we cope when tragedy suddenly claims the lives of those we love. It is also the author’s attempt to confront her personal fears about life’s terrifying uncertainty.  The book mainly focuses on interviewing famous survivors of Australian disasters, events we have all watched horrified on our television sets. People like Stuart Diver, Thredbo landslide survivor; Walter Mikac, who lost his family at the Port Arthur massacre; and Louisa Hope, who was held hostage by Man Horin Monis at the Lindt Cafe siege. There is also plenty of interesting interview material with first responders, priests, police and other professionals who provide help and assistance to the bereaved.

What the interviews mostly reveal is that, despite thinking we could never cope with extreme and unexpected tragedy, cope we do. Not only that, but with suffering often comes growth. Those who have been through so much learn the value of kindness and try to enjoy every day for its own sake. Long term planning can be futile, as we will all have to face the death of a loved one at some stage.

Leigh Sales has written a wise, gentle, insightful and humane book. It’s a book of great honesty, as Sales confesses to journalistic mistakes she’s made in the past and reveals her own biases during the interview process. This mixture of thoughtfulness, vulnerability and a striving to be earnest, makes for an unexpectedly transformative read. Any Ordinary Day takes for its subject grief and suffering, yet its major revelation is that people are kind, we are more resilient than we think and that the sun continues to shine despite so much darkness. Leigh Sales confronts the hardest challenges that we all face in life, yet leaves the reader feeling light and at peace.

Any Ordinary Day, by Leigh Sales. Published by Hamish Hamilton. ISBN: 9780143789963  RRP: $34.99

Release date 1st October

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