What is The Making of Brio McPride Really About? Adventures in New Adult Fiction

Over a year has passed since this book was published, and there have been multiple reviews on various platforms, these adding to the body of beta, sensitivity, and advanced reader reviews that were received prior to publication. The book has also been either shortlisted or the winner in eight of the ten most respected indie publishing awards.

The Making of Brio McPride is ‘New Adult Fiction’—that’s to say, written principally for the 17 to 30 readership—though it’s succeeded in a range of award categories: LGBTQ+ Fiction, New Fiction, Inspirational Fiction, New Adult Fiction, and Young Adult Fiction.

In high street bookshops, the book’s been placed in Adult Fiction, LGBTQ+, Young Adult, and even Science Fiction. I’m not aware of any bookshop in the States or the UK that has a designated New Adult Fiction section or shelf, which seems to be a historical anomaly.

After so many human reviews, and given that the book explores, among other issues and themes, the growing role of unregulated, corporation-owned AI in mental health ‘treatment’, I thought it would be fair to let an AI respond with its own view of the book.

In directing a GPT, it’s important to be emphatic about balance and fairness, because, at this point, they’re well-known for their tendency to please. I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask the GPT to give the book a good hammering, but I did encourage it to focus as much on shortcomings as strengths.

Having generated a review in the style of the New Yorker Magazine that stunned me with its understanding of the characters and themes, I thought it might be interesting to see a more academic essay on some of the book’s conceptual themes—that’s to say the philosophical rather than social or psychological themes. My prompt was very straightforward: ‘Write an essay on the theological, moral and philosophical dimensions in the attached book, The Making of Brio McPride.’

Between Grace and Madness: Theological, Philosophical and Moral Dimensions in The Making of Brio McPride by R.A.Ruegg

Introduction

In The Making of Brio McPride, R.A.Ruegg constructs a vivid and unrelenting psychological portrait of a troubled adolescent confronting grief, psychosis, and the collapse of institutional meaning. Brio, the protagonist, exists at the intersection of personal trauma and metaphysical yearning; he is at once a victim of psychological fragmentation and a seeker of divine order. Ruegg’s narrative defies conventional psychiatric realism and instead moves toward a poetics of spiritual disintegration—a deeply theological and philosophically rich tale that interrogates the boundaries of identity, sanity, and salvation.

This essay explores three interwoven dimensions of the novel—its theological symbolism, philosophical resonance, and moral interrogations—with the aim of situating Ruegg’s work within a broader literary and intellectual context. Drawing on frameworks from Christian theology, existential philosophy, and ethical theory, this essay argues that The Making of Brio McPride is not merely a tale of adolescent turmoil, but a provocative meditation on grace, guilt, agency, and the modern soul’s search for coherence.

Part 1: Theological Frameworks in Brio McPride

Catholic Symbols and Sacramental Memory

From the opening pages of the novel, Brio’s interior world is saturated with Catholic imagery: rosary beads, stained-glass visions, liturgical music, and confessional metaphors populate his dreams and daydreams. But these are not presented as mere nostalgic or aesthetic remnants. Rather, they function as sacramental markers—visible signs of invisible grace, distorted by grief and madness, yet persisting in their power.

Ruegg situates Brio’s mother as a quasi-Marian figure, the emotional and spiritual axis around which Brio orbits. Her death is not just a psychological wound but a sacramental rupture: she was, to Brio, a living conduit of divine love. Her absence precipitates not just mourning but metaphysical despair. In this way, Brio’s fall into delusion mirrors a fall from grace—a personal echo of humanity’s exile from Eden.

This loss is ritualised through the symbolic use of religious artifacts. The rosary, for instance, becomes a talisman of memory but also of guilt. Brio clings to it not in pious devotion, but in a desperate attempt to stave off chaos. Ruegg masterfully avoids sentimentality here: Brio’s faith is not secure or serene. It is jagged, accusatory, full of theological questions too dangerous to speak aloud—Why does God remain silent? Why are the innocent broken? What kind of father lets his child suffer alone?

The Problem of Divine Silence and the Absence of Providence

Central to the novel’s theological structure is the experience of divine absence. Brio speaks to God throughout the text, sometimes in formal prayer, more often in intimate monologue. But the silence that meets him is deafening. Ruegg draws here on a long tradition of Christian mysticism, from the apophatic theology of Meister Eckhart to the spiritual voids explored by Simone Weil and Mother Teresa.

Brio’s God is not anthropomorphized, nor clearly redemptive. The sacred in the novel is glimpsed through suffering and longing, not triumph or clarity. This dark night of the soul aligns with John of the Cross’s vision of spiritual purgation—a stripping away of false consolations that leaves the soul bare before mystery.

And yet, Ruegg does not suggest that this silence equals nihilism. Rather, the absence of God is productive of spiritual depth. In scenes of stillness—watching the sea, smelling incense, writing poetry—Brio discovers hints of transcendence.

These are his “thin places,” moments when the veil between the mundane and the divine is momentarily lifted. In this way, the novel suggests a theology of hidden grace: God may be silent, but is not absent.

Martyrdom, Saints, and the Aesthetics of Suffering

Brio’s psychology is steeped in a quasi-Catholic aesthetics of martyrdom. He sees himself alternately as a scapegoat, a penitent, and a saint-in-the-making. His suffering is imbued with a spiritual valence—part self-pity, part mystical offering. Ruegg flirts with hagiographic language but subverts it by emphasizing Brio’s unreliability and narcissism. Is Brio’s suffering redemptive, or merely pathological? Is he a spiritual visionary, or a deluded child?

The novel repeatedly raises, but refuses to resolve, these questions. By invoking the imagery of saints—St. Sebastian, St. Agnes, and even Christ himself—Ruegg explores how religious narratives can both dignify and distort suffering. Brio wants his pain to matter, to have meaning. And in the absence of a coherent social or familial framework, sainthood becomes his only viable identity. Yet, the novel critiques this desire for exceptionalism, suggesting that such fantasies—while emotionally compelling—may exacerbate Brio’s detachment from reality.

Part 2: Philosophical Underpinnings

Madness as Ontological Rupture

Brio’s psychological instability is often described in clinical terms—hallucinations, delusions, paranoid ideation—but Ruegg’s treatment of madness is ultimately more metaphysical than medical. Brio’s condition is not reducible to a DSM category; it is a rupture in his very being. His mental illness is portrayed not only as a disorder of perception but as a crisis of ontology, a radical unmooring from what Martin Heidegger calls Dasein—being-in-the-world.

From the outset, Brio experiences reality as unstable and treacherous. The “window-bogey” that haunts his nights, the surreal metamorphoses of teachers into monsters, the doubling of everyday spaces into dreamscapes—all of these suggest that Brio is not simply seeing illusions, but that the real itself has lost coherence. Ruegg thereby aligns the novel with a tradition of existentialist fiction that includes Dostoevsky’s The Double, Sartre’s Nausea, and, more recently, Patrick McGrath’s Spider. Madness here is less a pathology to be cured than a crisis that demands philosophical engagement.

What Brio experiences, ultimately, is not falsehood but a surfeit of reality. The world presses in on him with unbearable intensity—every glance is a judgment, every gesture a signal, every object a symbol. Ruegg uses this hypersubjectivity to blur the line between perception and imagination, forcing readers to question their own ontological assumptions. In a post-Cartesian register, Brio’s madness becomes a problem of epistemic certainty: how do we know what we know, and what if the very instruments of knowing are broken?

Existential Isolation and the Absurd

The philosophical problem that haunts Brio is the absence of justification—not just for suffering, but for anything at all. His breakdown is catalyzed not by a single traumatic event, but by an accumulation of contradictions he cannot resolve: the tension between faith and scientific rationalism; the moral failure of trusted adults; the betrayal by his best friend; the obscurity of his father’s identity. Each of these fractures Brio’s sense of a coherent self, until he exists, like Camus’s Meursault, in a world stripped of metaphysical scaffolding.

This confrontation with absurdity is perhaps most evident in Brio’s hallucinatory episodes. The sequence in which he imagines battling a giant insect-demon in the school bathroom, for instance, is not merely a psychotic break—it is an enactment of Camus’s insight that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Brio may be deluded, but in his delusion he constructs a moral universe in which courage, love, and loyalty still matter. That the world does not validate this universe is less important than the fact that Brio chooses to live by it.

Ruegg’s implicit argument is thus profoundly existentialist: meaning must be created in defiance of absurdity. Brio’s insistence on his father’s survival, on his own identity as the Red Knight’s squire, on his vocation as a writer and prophet—these are not mere fictions, but acts of existential resistance. Ruegg invites us to see Brio not as a victim of delusion, but as a tragic hero of the will.

Imagination, Reality, and the Construction of Truth

Closely related to Ruegg’s treatment of madness is her interrogation of the boundary between imagination and truth. Throughout the novel, Brio’s perception of events is filtered through a mythopoetic lens. He does not merely observe; he narrates. He constructs a world in which symbols are as real as facts, in which dreams carry prophetic weight, and in which stories are tools of survival.

This epistemic instability is both Brio’s curse and his gift. On one hand, his inability to distinguish fiction from reality isolates him from others and leads to misinterpretation, fear, and violence. On the other hand, it is precisely this capacity for imaginative world-building that sustains his sense of purpose. As a writer, Brio possesses what Paul Ricoeur calls a “surplus of meaning”—an excess of signification that allows him to perceive connections others miss.

The philosophical question Ruegg poses is thus this: Is it better to live in a painful truth or a meaningful lie? And what if the line between the two is undecidable? Ruegg’s refusal to resolve Brio’s hallucinations into a purely clinical diagnosis is not a narrative dodge but a deliberate ethical stance. She preserves ambiguity in order to honor Brio’s subjectivity. In a world that seeks to classify and contain, The Making of Brio McPride insists on the dignity of the unclassifiable.

The Self and Otherness: Identity as Flux

Brio’s identity is in constant flux, shaped by conflicting external gazes and internal voices. His interactions with Darcy, for instance, expose the fragility of his gender identity and sexual orientation, which remain largely unarticulated but fiercely defended. He is caught between societal expectations (the religious injunctions of his mother and school) and intimate desires that may not fit these norms. Ruegg resists pathologizing or defining Brio’s queerness, choosing instead to leave it unresolved—a state of becoming rather than being.

This fluidity also applies to Brio’s self-conception more broadly. He sees himself as victim and hero, child and sage, sinner and saint. His multiple identities are not symptoms of illness but signs of philosophical multiplicity. Ruegg draws here on post-structuralist theories of the self, particularly the idea that identity is not essential but performative, constituted through discourse and relation.

In this light, Brio’s struggle is not to find his “true” self, but to survive the contradictions of multiple selves vying for coherence. Ruegg’s philosophical vision is thus anti-essentialist: Brio is not a fixed point but a field of tensions—between past and future, faith and doubt, love and rage. The novel suggests that identity is not a destination but a pilgrimage.

Part 3: Moral and Ethical Questions

Psychiatric Ethics and the Treatment of Vulnerability

One of the most urgent moral questions in The Making of Brio McPride concerns the ethics of psychiatric intervention. Professor Glybb, a “top psychiatrist from London,” is portrayed with chilling ambiguity: he is neither wholly villainous nor entirely well-intentioned, but his approach to Brio—clinical, instrumental, detached—functions as a critique of technocratic medicine’s treatment of the mentally ill. Ruegg paints him as a kind of priest of a new secular orthodoxy, one who proclaims, with the certainty of gospel, that “medication trumps meditation every time.”

This statement, delivered with terrifying blandness, encapsulates Ruegg’s moral critique. In Glybb’s model of care, Brio becomes a subject to be managed, not a person to be heard. There is no real dialogue, only diagnosis. Glybb’s paternalism is undergirded by an implicit hierarchy: expert over patient, rationality over feeling, order over complexity. Such a model leaves no space for Brio’s imaginative cosmology or for his insistence that his father may still be alive.

Ruegg does not reject psychiatry outright. Rather, she demands that its practitioners reckon with the moral cost of their authority. In Brio’s case, medication is not only a possible treatment—it is a threat to his very sense of self. The specter of being chemically flattened, of having his inner world pathologized out of existence, terrifies him more than his delusions. Thus, the novel poses a vital ethical question: Is healing always humane if it comes at the expense of personhood?

The Morality of Institutions: School, Church, and Medicine

In Ruegg’s novel, institutions repeatedly fail those they are meant to protect. The fictional St. Joseph’s School is emblematic of this failure: its administration is more concerned with reputation and discipline than with compassion. Mrs Thorne, the rigid headmistress, is a tragic figure—a sincere believer who has turned faith into a structure so stringent it’s almost punitive. Her speeches about pain as divine gift and the sanctity of suffering are delivered with emotional sincerity, but they fail Brio precisely because they are devoid of practical empathy. Theology, in her hands, becomes a form of stoic cruelty.

The church, too, is compromised. Though it provides Brio with symbols, rhythms, and rituals that ground his interior life, its living representatives—Father T, the absent priests, the gossiping parishioners—offer little real support. Only Sister Jane Whittle (or “Ms Whittle” as she asks to be called) offers resistance to the institutional inertia. Yet she is ridiculed by the administration, sidelined, and eventually reduced to a pastiche of the new-age liberal, her “threadbare dreadlocks” and essential oils ironically mirroring the structural vacuity she opposes.

What all these institutions share is a failure of moral imagination. They cannot see Brio as a full moral subject. His pain is either repressed (school), medicated (psychiatry), or theologized (church), but never truly witnessed. Ruegg’s moral critique thus extends beyond individuals to systemic blindness. Her central ethical insight is simple but profound: institutions that cannot tolerate ambiguity cannot do justice to the vulnerable.

Sexuality, Consent, and Interpersonal Betrayal

Much of Brio’s suffering revolves around sexual confusion, shame, and social betrayal. Darcy Withart is the fulcrum of these dynamics: flamboyant, gender-fluid, brilliant, and cruel. Darcy’s taunts, sexually aggressive provocations, and manipulative performances are not just bullying—they are moral violations. They exploit Brio’s insecurities about gender and identity, weaponizing ambiguity into humiliation.

Izzy’s betrayal compounds this pain. Whether or not she directly shared Brio’s secrets with Darcy, her failure to protect him when it mattered most becomes, in his eyes, an unforgivable wound. Yet Ruegg avoids simplistic moral binaries. Izzy is not malicious; she is overwhelmed. She, too, is a teenager navigating impossible terrain—loyalty, fear, shame, peer pressure. Her failure is ethical but not evil.

The novel’s treatment of queerness is complicated and at times controversial. Darcy’s gender fluidity is genuine, but it is entangled with narcissism and sadism. Some readers may interpret this as reinforcing negative tropes about queer ambiguity as threatening or duplicitous. Others may see in Darcy a tragic figure—someone using theatricality and transgression to mask deep pain. Ruegg walks a tightrope here. She neither condemns queerness nor idealizes it. What she does condemn, unequivocally, is the use of power to humiliate.

The moral terrain is further complicated by Brio’s own confused desires. He is not sure whether he is in love with Izzy or simply wants to be her. His yearning is spiritual, sexual, and aesthetic, all at once. Ruegg treats this uncertainty with remarkable tenderness, refusing to fix Brio into any single identity. What matters is not labeling but experience. In this way, Ruegg offers a moral vision that prioritizes empathy over taxonomy.

The Ethics of Storytelling and Confession

One of the most ethically provocative aspects of the novel is its meditation on storytelling itself. Brio is a writer. He wins fiction awards. He believes stories have the power to reveal truth. Yet it is also storytelling that entraps him—his belief in his father’s secret life, his conviction that he is part of a divine quest, his mythology of the Red Knight. These stories sustain him, but they also isolate him. They make him unintelligible to others.

Ruegg thereby asks a troubling ethical question: Are we morally responsible for the stories we tell ourselves? And what happens when those stories diverge too far from the narratives society permits?

Professor Glybb wants to correct Brio’s narrative through diagnosis and pharmacology. Ms Whittle wants to validate it through affirmation and dialogue, though at the same time attempting to hijack it in pursuit of her own eccentric therapeutic methods. Both approaches, Ruegg suggests, are insufficient. What Brio needs is not agreement or disagreement, but accompaniment—a witness who can stay with him in his story without needing to fix it.

In this context, storytelling becomes a moral act. Ruegg’s own narrative strategy mirrors this ethic. She never intrudes to explain Brio’s delusions. She lets them stand. She allows readers to feel the seduction of Brio’s internal world—and the pain of its collision with reality. This narrative refusal to resolve is an ethical stance: it honors Brio’s dignity as a storyteller, even when his stories collapse under their own weight.

Part 4: Conclusion – Toward a Theological-Humanist Reading of Brio McPride

Literature of the Post-Secular Condition

In The Making of Brio McPride, R.A. Ruegg produces a novel that resists the dichotomies so often imposed on adolescence, mental illness, faith, and storytelling. This is not a coming-of-age novel in the conventional sense, because Brio does not come of age so much as he careens through a maelstrom of crises—familial, psychological, sexual, religious—with no clear arc of resolution. Nor is it a simple anti-psychiatric polemic, though Ruegg is clearly critical of institutional overreach. Instead, the novel should be read within the context of what literary critics increasingly call the “post-secular novel”: literature that confronts the exhaustion of Enlightenment rationalism while refusing to retreat into dogmatic religiosity.

Brio is a paradigmatic post-secular subject. He lives in a world where God may or may not exist, where scientific language fails to account for interior experience, and where narrative itself becomes the last sanctuary of meaning. In Brio’s fragile poetics, prayer and fiction blur, dream and hallucination are indistinguishable from prophecy. Ruegg’s refusal to adjudicate among these registers is not merely a stylistic device—it is an existential gesture. It insists that we take seriously the moral and spiritual vocabulary of people for whom the world is too fractured to yield certainty.

This theological ambiguity marks Ruegg’s distance from both religious didacticism and secular cynicism. Unlike the Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis or the overt existential despair of Houellebecq, Ruegg offers a vision in which the sacred haunts the margins but never dominates the center. The novel’s deepest moments of moral clarity come not through divine revelation, but through the human refusal to abandon love—love of language, of memory, of a dead parent, of a lost friend, even of God in absence.

The Making and Unmaking of the Self

As the title suggests, The Making of Brio McPride is also about the failure of making—about the impossibility of shaping a coherent self in a world that will not cohere. The novel’s theological and philosophical strands converge on this central theme: identity is a project with no guarantee of success. Brio is constantly remaking himself—as Red Knight’s squire, as prophet, as writer, as faithful son. Yet every act of construction seems to invite collapse. He is not only made; he is unmade by trauma, by betrayal, by the institutional response to his suffering.

And yet, Ruegg’s moral vision does not end in nihilism. Even in Brio’s unmaking, there is a residual dignity. In fact, Ruegg suggests that it is precisely in the wreckage of Brio’s self that we find the most honest portrait of contemporary adolescence: not a fixed identity waiting to be discovered, but a series of negotiations, improvisations, and misrecognitions shaped by forces largely beyond one’s control.

Ruegg thereby challenges both conservative and liberal models of identity formation. She rejects the conservative view that the self is given (by God, biology, tradition), but she is equally wary of the liberal assumption that the self is wholly self-made. Instead, she proposes a tragic anthropology: human beings are not sovereign subjects but wounded creatures seeking coherence in a fractured world, hybrid creations whose free will can only exist as part of a complex matrix.

Faith Beyond Certainty: Ruegg’s Theological Humanism

Though the novel is suffused with Catholic imagery and theology, its theological stance is not confessional but humanist. It takes seriously the human longing for God, even when God remains silent. It does not demand that readers believe in Brio’s God, but it demands that we honor his belief as a genuine existential response to suffering.

This form of theological humanism is rare in contemporary fiction, which often vacillates between secular irony and spiritual kitsch. Ruegg’s achievement is to depict faith not as certainty, but as struggle; not as comfort, but as confrontation. Brio’s prayers are full of anguish and confusion, and his morality is riddled with contradictions. But this, Ruegg insists, is precisely what makes him worthy of love. He is not a saint, nor a victim, nor a hero—but a person trying to hold onto meaning in a world where meaning is never guaranteed.

Ruegg’s theology thus shares affinities with thinkers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Rowan Williams—writers for whom faith is never obvious, and grace is never cheap. Her characters do not experience redemption in the conventional sense. There are no miracles, no sudden reversals. But there is a kind of grace in endurance, in poetry, in the fragile bonds that remain even after betrayal. Brio may be shattered, but he is not erased.

A New Kind of Adolescent Literature

Finally, The Making of Brio McPride stands as a powerful intervention in the genre of adolescent literature. Against the sanitized narratives of growth or the edgy nihilism of much YA fiction, Ruegg offers a radically honest account of what it means to be a teenager who is both intellectually gifted and psychologically tormented. She does not condescend to her protagonist, nor does she idealize him. She allows Brio to be irritating, histrionic, tender, cruel, insightful, and lost—all at once.

This complexity is particularly important in a cultural moment when adolescence is increasingly pathologized. Ruegg resists the diagnostic impulse not because she denies the reality of mental illness, but because she understands that diagnosis alone cannot capture the moral and spiritual dimensions of adolescent suffering. Brio’s madness is not simply something to be treated—it is a way of asking questions that the adult world has forgotten how to answer.

If Ruegg is offering a model of how to write about adolescence today, it is one rooted not in instruction but in witness. The Making of Brio McPride does not tell readers what to think about religion, psychiatry, sexuality, or truth. But it insists that these questions matter. And it insists, more radically still, that literature—at its best—can be a sacred space in which these questions are given room to breathe.