But if best-selling teen author Libba Bray ever writes a memoir of her darkly quirky life, she'll have to come up with another title. A Great and Terrible Beauty is already taken.
That, of course, is the title of her 2003 breakout bestseller, a supernatural mystery set in a girls boarding school in Victorian England.
That Bray, daughter of a Texas minister and an English teacher, would be drawn to the gothic is understandable given the shattering twists of her own, personal soap opera.
It's a saga shaped by family secrets, a wrenching parental breakup, a loved one's tragic death from AIDS and her own near-fatal accident on the brink of adulthood. It seems the only thing missing from Bray's personal melodrama is Snidely Whiplash tying her to the railroad tracks.
As a friend told her recently, "You have a life like seven Oprah shows."
But Bray, 41, is too bright and sassy to wallow in bathos. A New York transplant with a Texas twang, Bray has a quick and irreverent sense of humor -- "as one-eyed girls often do," she notes dryly.
Now, she has reason to smile. Rebel Angels, the anticipated sequel to A Great and Terrible Beauty, debuted at No. 4 this month on The New York Times bestseller list.
"In many ways, this volume surpasses the first," School Library Journal says. "The writing never falters."
Book 2 of a planned trilogy, it propels 16-year-old Gemma Doyle and her flawed friends from London's Spence Academy deeper into intrigue and otherworldly struggles as they confront the powers that led, in Book 1, to the murder of Gemma's mother in India.
The trilogy is at once a girls' friendship story, a journey of self-discovery and a portrait of 19th-century class and gender strictures. Though aimed at older teens, it generates mail from 12-year-old girls and twenty-somethings alike. Bray admits to a lifelong fascination with Victorian England, starting at age 10, when she told her mother she wanted to learn to speak "British" and be queen of England.
"I think there's such an overlap between (Victorian) culture and Southern culture," Bray said. "There is repression and darkness and [a hint of] `What's going on behind that respectable veneer?"'
Bray grew attuned to social facades at 14, when her parents' divorce forced her to look anew at her world. A parental breakup is difficult for any child, but especially for a minister's child.
And especially when the cause of the breakup was her father's coming out as gay to his family while otherwise remaining closeted about his sexual identity.
"It started a whole new chapter in my life to discover my father was gay," Bray said. "I think it's very hard to discover that everything you thought you knew up to the age of 14 is out the window."
What troubled her most, she said, was her family's effort to hide the truth, lest her father lose his job.
"[It was] the fact that he had to keep secrets -- and I became a secret-keeper," Bray said. "You can't really marginalize or ghettoize a whole sector of the population, because it forces people into a life of shame. That, of course, trickles down."
Bray gave a brief laugh and added, "I feel like I'm speaking with my therapist."
Does she indeed have a therapist?
"Amen, sister," Bray said with conviction. "All apologies to Tom Cruise."
Bray's early life churned a bounty of issues, starting with the most basic questions of identity. She was 18 when a horrendous car accident left her with two broken legs, a missing rib, a destroyed left eye and fractures in most of her facial bones.
"It sucked," Bray said, her voice briefly losing its lilt as she described her years of recovery. "To lose your face -- talk about a loss of identity -- you look in the mirror, and you're not the same person anymore. You're the same on the inside, but not on the outside. It was very informative," she said, "of the role appearances play in our society."
Although it took 13 reconstructive surgeries in six years to put her back together, Bray cultivated a certain grim sense of humor about her injuries.
"Have an eyeball in your highball?" she cheerily offered a college friend one day, setting off shrieks as she held out a cocktail that stared back.
By the time she began writing for kids, Bray already had years of experience in publishing, theater and advertising. Her first books were for Sweet Sixteen and other teen paperback series. Her first editor was Ann Brashares, who later shot to fame with her own young-adult novel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
The future looked bright when Bray finally signed her pivotal contract, for A Great and Terrible Beauty. She went to bed intending to launch into the manuscript the very next morning -- the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Fate, of course, took a different turn.
And though Bray ultimately triumphed, her father wasn't there to enjoy her success.
"My dad died 10 years ago," Bray said. "He was an AIDS death. I was fortunate that I was able to take two or three months off and be with him at the end. We were very close." In recent years, life has evened out for Bray, who's happily married with a 6-year-old son.
She spends most days writing in coffee shops, drawing energy from the white noise of the caffeinated crowd as she taps away on "Trixiebelle," her trusty laptop computer.
A secret-keeper no more, she declares that "the conscious act of writing is about telling the truth." In fact, as she hints at the direction of the final Gemma Doyle installment, due out in fall 2007, she might just as well be talking about herself.
"There's a lot about discovering who you are and how difficult that is," Bray said. "And it never stops."
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