Betty J. Bady
Betty J. Bady is a late bloomer on the writing scene. She never had any conscious aspirations to become a writer, but in 1999, for reasons she says she can’t explain, she sat at her word processor and started tapping away at thoughts that had been in her head for many years. Because she writes from her heart, before she realized it, she had written a chapter, then another, and another. After many months of writing gestation, a story was born.
Betty was the second child born to a 16-year-old mother and a 19-year-old father in Memphis, Tennessee. Her young parents’ fate was sealed when their marriage couldn’t stand up against family pressures and interferences, so six months after she was born, they separated. Her mother moved to Saginaw, Michigan taking her and her two-year-old sister, while their father stayed in Memphis. Her parents later divorced due to other outside pressures and influences. It was in Saginaw, Michigan where three-year-old Betty, her four-year-old sister, and their mother lived in the basement of a friend’s house when tragedy struck. Their house caught fire and Betty was the only child out of six children under the care of a babysitter at the time, who couldn’t get out. She grew up as a burn-injured child and has lived her life as a burn survivor.
As a burn-injured child, Betty grew up under a lot of suppressed emotions. The stories in her imagination were an escape from her grim reality and later became the inspiration for the stories that she writes today. She lived vicariously through characters in books and the ones that she created in her imagination. She also found comfort in characters in books that she could relate to in some small way. For example, Beth, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and the physically disabled English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning who was carried away, literally, by the man who loved her unconditionally. After graduating high school, Betty was a struggling mother of three. For years, she worked several low-paying and minimum wage jobs before deciding to go back to school to improve the quality of life for herself and her children. She eventually earned her BA in English from Saginaw Valley State University and also pursued an MA in English from Eastern Michigan University. After moving to Los Angeles, she enrolled at California State University, Northridge where she earned a teaching credential in special education. She taught for over twenty years before retiring from Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in 2016.
It wasn’t until 2017, a year after she retired, that Betty decided to pull out the old dusty manuscript Unspoken Joy that she had written in 1999. In her African American lit classes in college, Betty had discovered an array of African American writers of both genders who impressed her, but she was enamored by the female writers such as: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. She discovered Terry McMillan on her own and when she read her novels, she viewed Terry’s writing style as a lot like her own writing style.
Betty’s stories are character-driven about situations in each of the characters’ lives that she writes about. Life is a journey and Betty focuses on the nuances and emotions inherent in life’s journey including, but not limited to love, compassion, jealousy, hate, death, sex, happiness, heartbreak, friendship, sorrow, human afflictions, betrayal, and more. Betty’s storytelling is influenced by the dreams and fantasies that brought her a sense of relief and solace in her life.