By Glenda Winders
SDUN Book Critic
“If this controversy weren’t so wasteful, it would almost be funny,” Brady said in an interview. “It just doesn’t matter. God doesn’t need two slabs of concrete to prove his existence. Why aren’t we using all that energy to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf or housing homeless people or adopting orphans? It’s so frivolous.”
Brady said she thinks the spot atop Mount Soledad is inherently sacred.
“People would be surprised how holy that place would feel if there were no cross,” she said. “It’s so respectful of our military.”
Brady has had some previous experience with interpreting what God might say. She penned her first book, the best-selling “God on a Harley,” while she was working as a registered nurse at a hospital in New Jersey. She had lost her faith after seeing her patients suffer, but she noticed that the ones who believed in a higher power were happier than those who didn’t, and the subject intrigued her.
“I thought if I were God and wanted to convince somebody like me of my existence, how would I do it?” she said. “I’d only listen if he was a cute guy on a Harley-Davidson.”
Once the idea was born, she used every spare moment to write, but when she sent the finished manuscript to publishers, she got rejection letters in return. Other parts of her life were going wrong, too. She was burned out on the politics of her nursing job, she wasn’t in a relationship and she was tired of the bitter New Jersey winter.
“I knew there had to be more,” Brady said. “On an impulse I resigned from my job, put everything that would fit into my Toyota, took my money out of the bank, pointed my car west and decided to follow the sun.”
In Gila Bend, Ariz., she had a choice to make: whether to follow Interstate 10 to Los Angeles or Interstate 8 to San Diego. She decided on Los Angeles, but a driver in the slow lane wouldn’t let her over to take the exit.
“I thought, ‘OK, I guess I’m going to San Diego,'” Brady said.
She rented an apartment in Pacific Beach but quickly used up her savings and was close to eviction when she took a Learning Annex class titled “How to Get Published.” The teacher, writer Nancy Taylor Rosenberg, encouraged her to get an agent.
“I literally scraped the change from the bottom of my purse for the postage,” Brady said. “I told myself this is the last time I’m sending this out.”
The agent signed her and sold the book within days to Simon and Schuster for $250,000. Mimi Polk Gitlin (co-producer of “Thelma & Louise”) bought the film rights.
“My life changed on a dime,” Brady said. “It wasn’t because of the money. It was because I had validation for the first time. Someone was actually paying to hear what I had to say. I had felt my entire life that I had no voice. In Catholic school we weren’t allowed to ask questions, and in nursing it was the same thing—you never challenged a doctor.”
The sequel, “Heaven in High Gear,” didn’t sell well in the United States, but it and several other of her books have been successful in Spain and Latin America, where they are published by Ediciones B in Barcelona. Brady also wrote “I Don’t Need a Baby to Be Who I Am” before she parted company with Simon and Schuster.
In addition to offering a solution to the cross contention, her self-published “The Ghost of Mount Soledad” is a character study and a love story. Brady, 59, says it is no accident that Margaret is a middle-aged freelance writer who is coming to terms with living her life alone, just as the main character in “God on a Harley” was a burned-out New Jersey nurse who had lost her faith.
“All of my characters are a piece of me,” she said. “Everything I write about is something I’ve struggled with and somehow found a solution to by writing. My stories are always about an underdog—usually a wounded woman who rises above all the obstacles and is victorious.”
A passage in which Margaret’s guest spot on a national TV program is pre-empted by news of the Sept. 11 attacks is also based in fact. In real life, Brady’s planned appearance on “The View” was derailed by a breaking news story.
This latest book is also a message of encouragement to other writers. In one scene, Margaret, who teaches a writing class, tries to explain to her students that “… there must be a burning desire in the gut to express something of importance, a fire that can only be extinguished by the flow of ink onto the blank, parched page.”
“I know the terrible price of loneliness we all pay to be any kind of artist,” Brady said. “But I think that’s where creativity stems from, and that’s the price you have to pay if you want to express yourself.”
Today Brady lives with friends in Pacific Beach, where she is at work on her next book. She says she often writes on the patio in her pajamas with her dog, Harley, at her side.
“Creativity is on its own schedule,” she said. “I just make myself available when it calls.”
She said while she might not be at a computer eight hours a day, she is always working.
“Even if I’m floating on a raft in the ocean, I’m constructing and crystalizing what I’m going to write next,” she said.
“The Ghost of Mount Soledad” is available at joanbradybooks.com, sunbeltpub.com, amazon.com, Upstart Crow in Seaport Village and Mysterious Galaxy in Clairemont. Brady has faith that eventually it will be discovered by a major publisher and reach a wider audience.
“I know it’s a good story,” she said. “I know it will find its wings and fly.”
