THE BACKSTORY: My brain tumor turned me into a thriller writer
In the wake of the 2008 economic crash, psychotherapist A.F. Brady (inset) was working at a clinic in Brooklyn. Things were not going well; the clinic was losing funding, and the facility was filling up with patients from other clinics that were being closed down. “Everyone was overwhelmed,” says Brady, a lifelong New Yorker who now lives in Westchester. “I said, ‘You have to be crazy to work here!’ That thought generated the idea of someone working in a mental-health institution who is losing it themselves. There are misunderstandings of mental illness, and there isn’t an easy divide between OK and not OK. We’re all both.” Brady’s first novel, “The Blind,” (Park Row Books, out Tuesday) is a thriller set in a psychiatric institution. When psychologist Sam James meets Richard, a mysterious patient that no other therapist wants to treat, she takes on his case as a welcome challenge, determined to help him. But as Sam gets pulled into his dark past, the mind games start and she begins to analyze herself as well.
The dark side of life is not difficult for Brady to envision; in 2000, a month before her 18th birthday, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It was noncancerous, but the placement and rate of growth made it extremely dangerous. She was told college was off the table, that she would have to relearn to walk, that she would lose hearing in one or both ears and that she would lose her facial nerve function. After 12 hours of surgery in Boston, she was told to stay out of school for six months to recover. She showed up at school two weeks later.
“Being told ‘I can’t’ is horrible to me,” says Brady, who then proceeded to earn her bachelor’s degree from Brown and two master’s degrees from Columbia despite a grueling recovery process that took years. But the experience informed her career choice. She wanted to become a psychotherapist to help all the people being told, “you can’t.”
“Having been in a situation where I needed help, I gained an appreciation for the helpers, and that helped me in my career,” says Brady. “If I could take it all back, I would give myself the brain tumor every single time. Without it, I wouldn’t be the me that I am now.”