The Brady bunch

Joan Brady’s new novel BLEEDOUT — a damn good one, btw — was borne of very peculiar and harrowing circumstances, as she details to the Independent:

Brady had been living in the quiet Devon town of Totnes for over 30

years when, in 2000, South Hams District Council granted planning

permission for a small shoe factory in a building adjoining her house.Apart

from the noise, she thinks the fumes from the chemical adhesives were

so toxic that they affected her health, and when she protested, the

council found a reason to indict her instead. She fought back and over

the next two years attended court 15 times. Unable to concentrate on

anything much except the legal battle, she abandoned the literary novel

she was writing and poured her fury into a tense and ingenious legal

thriller called Bleedout..

But that pales in comparison to Brady’s biography, which is filled with dancing, intrigue, and romantic subterfuge:

Brady has led an extraordinary life. She was born in San Francisco, and

brought up in Berkeley where her father was a blacklisted economics

professor. Her mother was a brilliant consumer economist and both

parents were writers. It was an unstable marriage and Brady, against

parental opposition, became a dancer, first with the San Francisco

Ballet and then, in 1960, with George Balanchine’s New York City

Ballet. At 21, she gave it all up to study philosophy at Columbia, and

in 1963 married the writer Dexter Masters, with whom she says she fell

in love at the age of three.

Masters had written the anti-nuclear novel The Accident in 1955,

and had been her mother’s lover before their marriages. He became a

family friend, earmarked by Brady’s mother as the “husband of her old

age”. But when Masters’s wife died, it was Joan who comforted and won

him. There were 32 years between them. Her mother never forgave her.

Their son, Alexander, has recently published his own debut novel, which has made for some additional press coverage as well.