Author Q&A

Readers questions answered as fully as possible—without spoilers!

Is this book based on a true story or real-life people?

I’m glad to say this book isn’t based on real-life events or people, though in some places it’s inevitably a ‘sense autobiography’, imagined events and characters infused by personal emotional experience.

Where did you get the idea for this book, narrative therapy and how it unfolded and everything?

I don’t know how I stumbled on the idea of someone trying to heal themselves with a specific story, though obviously the very reason stories evolved was to serve as a tool for humans to come to terms with troubling complexities and uncertainties and unknowns. I then discovered that Narrative Therapy (NT) is an actual thing, and I was fascinated by the history and experiences my research turned up. I don’t know where the idea of adding hypnosis to narrative therapy came from either, but having found out that narrative therapy was real, I was surprised to find that hypnosis-enhanced narrative therapy wasn’t a real thing too. I’ve experienced hypnosis as part of psychiatric treatment—it was a very good psychiatrist—so I’ve had some personal experience of that, but I decided not to cross the line and become a fake narrative therapy client just to find out how this kind of therapy works in practice. Quite apart from questions of ethics and wasting a therapist’s precious time when so many people need help, I didn’t want reality to limit how far the use of narrative therapy might go in my imagination.

The idea about writing a father and son story obviously isn’t an idea, it’s a conscious choice that presumably arises from personal issues. I didn’t really have the full story in my head when I started, just a sense of where I wanted it to go. After about a year of researching and writing, though, I was getting bogged down, and the story being told by the main character in the ‘narrative therapy’ had become such a fun thing in its own right that I decided to put the rest of the book aside for a while and just work on that inner story, which actually found its inspiration in some sketches drawn by a good friend.

Louise Loh

I finished that ‘therapy story’ as a gift to my daughter, who was nine, then decided to see if I could find a publisher. (I didn’t tell anyone that it had started out life as part of an adults’ book about serious mental health issues.) For the homespun kids’ book, another good friend drew some really charming sketches of the hedgehog who’d appeared as the foil for the self-important rabbit.

Alan Budgen - budgefunk.com

As you might expect, the feedback from publishers was that animal characters are for kids up to five years old (at the oldest), whereas the story and themes were pitched a little older. This was exactly what I’d intended in the book for adults—a story about a teenager who, like many of us, has been infantilised in one way or another—but it made for a kids’ book that fell between two stools. For me, the interesting thing is that it wasn’t until this therapy narrative story had been fully explored as a kids’ book and developed into a family feature animation that I knew how the main book was supposed to unfold and end. In other words, writing the therapy narrative story was in itself an act of narrative therapy. I imagine this is exactly why most people write. After that, I couldn’t hold the adults’ book back and its story flowed easily.

For you, what are the themes in The Making of BRIO McPRIDE and are those what you set out to write about?

The search for Brio’s dad presumably represents the question what is a father? And that seems to be quite a pressing question, because whereas there’s never been much debate about what makes a good mother (save that nowadays a mother is also expected to be a joint breadwinner), men have become very uncertain about their role in the family. The question people are naturally asking is whether we’ve reached an age, in the West at least, where there really is (or should be) no difference between a mother and a father? Is the question now simply, what is a good parent?

So to me, the main themes around this central question concern the nature of gender and identity, of belief and story, and how those concepts all form an essential unity. But there are also related social themes, like, what is story in an age where we seem written out and religion is fading from our imaginations, and where ChatGPT appears dispassionately capable of offering many people an adequately engaging yarn? And in a world of AI and VR, what’s the nature of creativity, imagination and emotion? What’s the role of the human, and what’s the place of imagination? And what is functional mental illness? Is there even such a thing? And, taking as a given that autism currently stands defined as a function of both genetics and external influences, is the book’s main character autistic or simply the victim of events that would scramble even the most robust or insensitive of minds? And what of suicidal ideation? Is suicide ever a valid response to the nature of life? Is it subliminally promoted by all the world’s major religions? And does this abused and over-exposed word ‘love’ actually mean anything in practice, or is it, as the evolutionary biologists have long proposed, nothing more than a species of mutually beneficial altruism? If that’s all it is, then, great, we can let the AI take over. If not, is there anything that story can do to elevate unconditional love into a new and true religion that enables people to see how it can improve their life?

Within all this hand-wringing is the question of how you heal someone whose mental illness is caused by some kind of core narrative or belief? Is it correct to say that you can only heal such a person by changing their founding story, and that this can only be done on the subconscious level? On a conscious level, we’re surely resistant to any change that threatens our core identity and tribal affiliation. And just as it’s stories that serve as the core cohesive force that enables humans to function as large groups and societies—the shared belief in a common story, generally a religious one / is there anything more powerful than a shared belief in something absurd?—it’s also stories that have the power to harm us as individuals and lead whole societies or cultures into subjugation or self-destruction. Either way, the more powerful the story, the larger the society it can support or bring down.

Beyond fiction, or perhaps entering Foucault’s theatre and its double, it might actually be said (in this age of parallel quantum states and virtual reality, of science fiction and magical realism as quasi religion, of fake news, fluid gender identities, social media, widespread use of psychedelics, fundamentalist belief, gaming role play and the willingness to believe open presidential lies in preference to uncomfortable truths) that alternative realities have become the default collective mind-set. What can this mean for the way we interact with each other, or achieve stable societies? What or who does it preference as the ultimate authority in any given society or the world at large? The renegotiation has hardly begun and already almost everyone has fallen victim in one way or another. No one seems to know who they are, and the identity options are legion. All the world’s a stage, but gone are the days when you just had to put on a uniform and do your job.

There’s arguably no irony in the way that, even as science appears to make our understanding of nature and existence more certain, and also improve the quality of life for an ever-increasing number of people, humans in more prosperous countries seek refuge from reality as never before. Perhaps it’s simply that we’ll continue to seek refuge from reality until we understand the nature of existence (which we most likely never will), and that at the same time science and technology have created new ways for us to escape from reality that are ‘real’, attainable and believable. We simply haven’t caught up with the complexity that’s been created, and at a time when we most need the comfort of certainties, we no longer believe our own core stories. In the same timeframe, we begin to see how authoritarian governments, AI, the increasing circumvention of parliamentary (and congressional) processes and traditions, the narrowing ownership of core algorithms and the unwillingness of people in Western democracies to listen to unpalatable viewpoints all begin to look alarmingly kindred. And where does a timid but testy little hedgehog fit into all this?

In answer to the second part of the question, no, I don’t think I set out to write about all these issues. I had a core idea of someone healing themselves with a guided narrative, I could see how this was in much the same ground as mainstream religion, but the connection with other themes and issues emerged as I worked up through the drafts, a process that should by rights result in progressively deeper roots.

The book says it was the inspiration for a movie called Spiked but that’s a kids’ movie and this is an adults’ book. Is Spiked a movie adaption of The Making of Brio McPride?

No, it’s a movie based on a ‘therapy’ story that’s told within the book. The background is that when I took the ‘therapy narrative’ story to publishers as a potential kids’ book, two of them suggested that it would make a good family animation movie. It was taken on by a London-based American screenwriter, David Freedman, who brought some fabulous new angles to the story and wrote a screenplay that was acquired by a consortium of producers. I stepped out of the family animation movie at that point, the producers won an EU financial award to develop the script further and the project eventually came together as a co-production funded by several parties including the Luxembourg Film Fund. It’s been made at the European studio Fabrique d’Images, and at time of writing this reply it’s in post-production for a 2025 release.

The screen rights to The Making of Brio McPride (ie the whole book, not just the inner ‘therapy narrative’) have been sold to a media investment company called LMI, which is now developing a movie adaption of the whole book for an adult audience.

The book mentions donations to mental health charities. Which ones exactly?

The preferred charity is Mind, which addresses issues around gender dysphoria in the context of a person’s wider context and mental health.

Is this an LGBTQ+ book?

I’ve never intended The Making of Brio McPride to be genre LGBTQ+ fiction, but I know from reader feedback that it has a lot of resonance for people who identify in these ways. I hope it’s a book for everyone that doesn’t exclude anyone.

How would you yourself describe what this book’s about?

The Making of Brio McPride is the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who’s lost his mum and his bearings and everything he knows. He must battle forces (both external and within himself) to gain an understanding of what he already knows, and he must learn the forgiveness that will enable him to accept and give love. He needs to find either his place in a new story or seek certainty in the only way that earthly certainty can be absolutely guaranteed. I’d call it an unashamedly naïve cry for innocence and recalibration in a world that’s become numbed by porn and dumbed down by formula everything. Like many books that have come before, it craves the viable fiction of a world governed by love and true imagination. That would be my own take on what it’s about, but I’ve been really (and pleasantly) surprised to hear what the book means to other people.

What genre is The Making of Brio McPride?

Some people have called it literary fiction or experimental literary fiction. I’m not sure I agree with that though, because it’s a very accessible book about emotional confusion. I think of it myself as simply ‘thoughtful modern fiction’.

Is there really a kind of psychotherapy called Cognitive Hypnosis-Augmented Narrative Therapy (CHANT)?

To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t. But Narrative Therapy is certainly real and there’s more information about this in the ‘The World of BRIO McPRIDE’ on this website. Given that there are hypnosis-augmented variants of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) in the real world, I don’t think it’s fantastical to merge hypnotherapy with narrative therapy. And isn’t that exactly what’s supposed to happen at every kind of narrative-based, heightened-state spiritual gathering?

Why am I going to want to keep reading?

I’ve been very relieved to see that readers become fully engaged in Brio’s increasingly manic search for his dad, and we’re never sure which of the growing range of possible explanations and stories will turn out to be true. Perhaps it’s none of them, or some combination, or something totally obvious and logical that neither Brio nor the reader consciously expected. It might even be that we never find out what really happened, but this would still mean that Brio has to come to an accommodation with uncertainty and a higher truth. Whatever it is that Brio never expected, the observant reader will be a little ahead of him in seeing what he will sooner or later be forced to confront. In the end, Brio may not find what he’s looking for, but don’t we have to have faith that he’ll find what he (and we all) need?

What other books is it like?

I’d like to say that The Making of Brio McPride is unique and not even ‘like’ anything else, and that’s a comment that’s been very generously made by many readers. But I must surely acknowledge an unconscious debt to Hilary Martel’s Life of Pi and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, both of which I read when they first came out. Every time a reader says, ‘This is like such and such,’ I panic and rush off to read that book. Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness is a good example, and Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. But apart from the fact that I hadn’t read those books—in the case of Form and Emptiness, I hadn’t even heard of it—they’re not that similar at all.

Well-known books aside, the narrative arts have long given us characters who experience alternative realities that go beyond the idea of a play-within-a-play. In children’s literature it’s generally a dream state; Alice in Wonderland is the classic example, and Narnia. For adults, it might be A Midsummer Night’s Dream or A Christmas Carol. Where the revelatory deception flows specifically from mental derangement, we have Kafka, The Crying of Lot 49, and The Bell Jar as good and well-known examples. More recently, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. For a collective madness complete with brilliant linguistics to suit, there’s Anna Burn’s Milkman. In film and TV, we have everything from Yellow Brick Road to The Matrix series and Black Mirror.

In The Making of Brio McPride, though, our character’s altered mental state does not take him into a dark fantasy realm or on a drug-fuelled ride. Nor is his alternative reality some kind of spinout from an avatar gone awry. The alternative reality in The Making of Brio McPride is a seemingly infantile story drawn up from the subconscious by a semi-fictitious form of therapy, and that fairytale is intended to beguile the reader into a world of putative innocence. Like all fairytales, of course, it has some difficult truths to tell.