About
My Life, by Joan Brady
Both my parents were writers. My father wrote several important books on economics while teaching at the University of California at Berkeley; my mother was an eminent journalist, largely responsible for the US Truth in Lending bill. But I was bad at school; I couldn't even read until I was eight years old. The only thing I was good at was ballet, so it's probably not surprising that I wanted nothing else until I was twenty; I danced with both the San Francisco Ballet and the New York City Ballet.
When the shift away came, it was because I fell in love with yet another writer, Dexter Masters. I married him, bore a son—Alexander Masters, author of the celebrated Stuart a Life Backwards—picked up a degree in philosophy, moved from New York to Totnes, Devon in the UK, kept house, typed Dexter’s manuscripts and finally published some of my own short stories when I was about 35. My first novel came out a few years later; not long after that came an autobiography called the Unmaking of a Dancer in the US and Prologue in the UK.
Then came a ten-year period during which I wrote draft after draft of a novel that won a US National Endowment for the Arts fellowship - Joyce Carol Oates was the judge—but nobody else seemed to like. I put it aside when Dexter’s health failed. After he died, I spent another year on it and renamed it Theory of War; it won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award - I was the first woman as well as the only American ever to win—as well as France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger.
After that I wrote two more novels, Death Comes for Peter Pan that revolved around a US medical scandal and a comic thriller called The Émigré.
I was at work on a fifth novel when a local industry began polluting the air in my Devon house. I complained bitterly. Instead of addressing the problem, my local Council trumped up some charges and brought a private criminal prosecution against me.
They threatened me with prison and summoned me to court 15 times over the course of 2 ½ years. In the end, they had to withdraw and pay me compensation, but I was so outraged at the injustice of it all that I wanted to line people up against a wall and machinegun them. My novel suddenly seemed irrelevant. I put it aside and began work on violent thriller called Bleedout.
The local industry’s pollution wasn’t just unpleasant. It caused permanent nerve damage. I brought a personal injury suit against them, and in January 2008, I won it. A few months later, I finished a second thriller, tentatively called Venom to be published in the spring of 2009.
I’m not sure what comes next. Another thriller to complete the trilogy? Or maybe a biography of a man I knew who spent his life fighting one of the greatest injustices ever inflicted on an individual by the US government.
Maybe one day, I’ll calm down enough to finish the novel my local Council’s prosecution forced me to drop. I’d like that. I still think it was a very good idea.
Family
My son is Alexander Masters, author of Stuart: a Life Backwards. He wrote the television adaptation of the book—a joint BBC/HBO venture from Sam Mendes’ studio—which was screened last September in the UK and is scheduled to show in the US in the next few months. Stuart and Bleedout were published on the same day.
My husband was Dexter Masters author of The Accident, the first novel to deal with nuclear issues, so controversial in its time that the US banned the movie version of it. Dexter was also editor of the recently reissued One World or None, with articles by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Szilard and Bethe among others
My son’s partner is Flora Dennis, Curator of At Home in Renaissance Italy, the extremely successful exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in January 2007, and editor of the book—with the same name—that accompanied it.
If you’ve ever heard people say that what they really need is a wife, they’re quoting my sister, Judy Brady, who wrote “Why I Want a Wife” for the first issue of Ms. magazine in 1972. It has become feminist classic. She lives in San Francisco and has written on many subjects including abortion, education, the labor and women's movements and most particularly the politics of cancer.
My mother was Mildred Edie Brady, co-founder of Consumers Union, economist, journalist, author of articles so influential and so controversial that she is still widely attacked for them half a century later. Harpers Magazine is right now re-posting her “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy”, but the one that upsets so many people is “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich”.
My father was Robert A. Brady, economist, author of the first book to recognize the Nazi threat in Germany, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism, which was published in several countries and sold more than 40,000 copies in England alone, and is still readily available in both the US and the UK.
By Spirit & structure available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com
My husband’s first wife was Christina Malman, a New Yorker artist of great talent. She drew 26 covers for the magazine and hundreds of spots, those small black and white illustrations that still pepper the pages. I have dozens of originals. The original of the cover shown is hanging on my living room wall. Several, including this one, are available from The New Yorker, available from Cartoonbank.com.
My husband’s uncle was the major American poet Edgar Lee Masters, eminent enough to rate a US stamp of his very own. His Spoon River Anthology has never been out of print since it was published in 1915. It is downloadable from the Guttenberg Project.
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