'At least you can kill people in a book'
Award-winning novelist Joan Brady was enjoying her life as a writer in a sleepy Devon town - until she started being poisoned by fumes from the shoe factory next door. So began an eight-year struggle for justice - and her health. But then, she tells Stuart Jeffries her life has been far from uneventful ...
Source: Guardian
Joan Brady never did finish writing her novel Cool Wind From the Future. One day eight years ago, the first woman to win the Whitbread book of the year award looked up from the writing desk at her home and noticed something. The Elizabethan beam above her head was trembling. A nearby staircase was shaking. The noise was unbearable. It was the summer of 2000 and her new neighbours in the quiet Devon town of Totnes had set up a small factory next to her study. Victoria Wine had moved out and a firm called Conker had moved in. What had once been a wine store had become a shoemaking workshop.
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If her new neighbours had only been noisy, Brady might have finished the book. It was the fumes from glues used in shoe manufacture wafting into her study from the workshop that made her give up. "The glues included chemicals that kids sniff to get high and which kill one child a week in the UK," she says. "They are glues that make workers in third-world sweatshops into paraplegics. The fumes were contaminating my house 24 hours a day." She abandoned the novel, and spent the next eight years fighting Conker, and the local council, in an extraordinary story of small-town life that pits one woman against the system and which quite frequently beggars belief.
The poisoning had an extreme impact on her health. "I really would have been in a wheelchair if I hadn't done something," she says. "I started to go numb in my legs. I could stick needles into my shins and feel nothing. I couldn't drive because my legs were so numb. I was terrified."
Doctors from the medical toxicology unit of Guy's Hospital in London later diagnosed that Brady was suffering from toxic peripheral neuropathy and also suspected that prolonged exposure to chemicals in the glues was very likely the cause of the nerve damage.
Brady's fears were compounded when she did an online search and found that Bill Bowerman, Nike's co-founder, was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy after experimenting with glues in the development of trainers. "He wound up having to use leg braces. I thought: 'This could happen to me.'"
Last week, Brady, who is 68, accepted an out-of-court settlement from Conker. But her health is still affected, and doctors say she is unlikely ever to recover fully.
The episode is only the latest incident in a diverting, action-packed life. As a teenager in the US, Brady was a ballet dancer, first with the San Francisco Ballet and then in 1960 with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. Her memoir, The Unmaking of a Dancer (published in the UK as Prologue: An Unconventional Life), details the diets of yoghurt and hard-boiled eggs, huge blood-filled blisters, and her admiration for Balanchine. But, aged only 21, she retired. Why? "My mind was turning to mush. So I enrolled at Columbia and took philosophy." The bookshelves in her Oxford living room (lots of well-thumbed, intimidating physics books) disclose a woman whose mind has not been turned to mush, neither by ballet nor glue fumes.
Her personal life has been still more interesting; according to her memoir, she fell in love with her future husband when she was only three, even though he once had an affair with her mother. "When I was three," she says by way of clarification, "there were three choices of lover for me. There was my cousin. There was Robert Oppenheimer [the theoretical physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb for his work on the Manhattan Project and a great friend of Joan's parents, both brilliant Berkeley economists]. Or Dexter." Dexter Masters was a novelist who, in 1955, had written an anti-nuclear novel, The Accident. Before she married Joan's father, her mother herself had had an affair with Dexter and even contemplated spending her declining years with him. Instead, Joan, by now 21, comforted Dexter, 30-odd years older, after the death of his first wife, and her youthful charms proved seductive. Either she knows how to tell a good story about herself, or Joan Brady is not very aware about how strange this story sounds.
In 1963, she married Dexter. Did the marriage alienate her mother? "Oh, it was hard for her - after all, I was his junior by three decades. When I was 21 I was a slight little thing, and I looked 14. A mother would have been upset, setting aside her own feelings for him." Nor, she suggests, was it easy for Dexter: "If you have a pretty young thing adoring you, it's not altogether easy." In 1965, the couple left the States. They had a baby son, Alexander, who himself would later become an award-winning writer (Alexander Masters' biography of a psychopathic homeless man, Stuart: A Life Backwards, won the Guardian first book award in 2005). Eventually, the family came to England, settling in Devon. Why? "He was going to write and I was going to adore him." Did she? "Yes, I adored him. I thought of him as a great writer. But only after his death, I kind of realised he had had one book in him and he had written it before we came here."
Ultimately, Brady rather than her husband would become the feted writer. She had already published her first novel, The Imposter, and her memoir of her dancing years, but it was her third book which made her name. Theory of War, a richly textured historical novel drawn from the story of her own grandfather, Alexander Brady, a white child who was sold into slavery after the American civil war, won the Whitbread award (now sponsored by Costa) in 1993.
"Dexter read the manuscript of Theory of War and changed it. You see, I think he loved me very much towards the end, if not at the beginning, and he didn't want people to think badly of me, so he cut all the modern sections, thinking they would embarrass me." He did not live long enough to see her win the Whitbread: Dexter died in 1989, aged 80, from a degenerative illness. Whatever else her beloved husband's death did, it gave her literary autonomy: "After he died I put all the modern sections back. Without them the book wouldn't have worked. Without them it loses its driving force."
She has lived on her own ever since and believes that this has something to do with the nature of what happened to her during her legal ordeal. "I think they thought they could get away with it because I was a woman living on my own," she says. "I have never been cornered before and, in that sense, it was an interesting experience."
Brady finally convinced her local council's environmental health officers to do tests on her house. Concentrations of 600 parts per million of butanone were drifting into her home: the safe limit for household exposure is two parts per million. "They thought that the readings were so off the scale there was something wrong with their equipment," says Brady. "But there wasn't. Volatile organic compounds were coming into my house. They included n-hexane, butanone and toluene - all of them are hazardous to the health of people exposed to them on their own, but they are more toxic when combined. And all these vapours are heavier than air, so they rolled down into my house."
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This post was last edited by Book News, 29 Jan 2008, 13:21
Award winning writer's poisoning
29 Jan 2008, 13:19
