The Best of Friends

Lucinda Berry has a working knowledge of clinical psychology, and her novels deal with the complex, life-changing effects of psychological trauma on children and families. For years, Berry worked as a licensed psychologist, before branching into creative writing with her first novel, Missing Parts (2016), about a “perfect” mother concealing a traumatic past of sexual abuse and murder. The psychological thriller genre has given Berry a means of sharing her clinical knowledge of human psychology, exploring how its darker impulses and traumas impinge on the everyday suburban lives of her characters.

Berry sees no incongruity between her clinical background and her new career as a best-selling novelist, believing that “psychology and writing […] are quite similar” (Berry, Lucinda. “One of Our Own.” Criminal Element, 2021). Both disciplines, she says, require you to “suspend” your own beliefs, judgments, and way of seeing the world in order to “get inside someone else’s head” (Berry, Lucinda. “One of Our Own.” Criminal Element, 2021). Her professional expertise allows her to create psychologically complex characters whose inner lives feel authentic, even when they’re navigating extreme emotional terrain. In The Best of Friends, Berry blends clinical insight with empathetic storytelling, crafting a narrative that is both emotionally resonant and unflinching in its portrayal of grief, trauma, and fractured relationships.

Berry’s 2017 novel Appetite for Innocence dissects the inner life and urges of a serial rapist who kidnaps and murders teenagers; and The Perfect Child (2019) probes the fractured psyche of a six-year-old girl whose nightmarish past drives her to lash out in murderous ways. Although many of her novels, with their disturbed characters and scenes of violence and child abuse, contain elements that are horrific, Berry writes not about monsters but about damaged minds whose worst deeds are still recognizably human. Most troubling, perhaps, is her 2017 novel Saving Noah, which probes the limits of motherly love with its disturbing tale of a suburban mother who discovers that her beloved 16-year-old son has been sexually abusing young girls. As in her novel The Best of Friends, the teenage years emerge as a confusing interregnum of mingled promise and terror, innocence and unfathomable darkness. Saving Noah is regarded as Berry’s most daring novel for its nuanced look into a mentally ill mind, as well as its sympathetic view of a desperate mother who belatedly comes to a terrible reckoning with her son’s misdeeds.

At the inpatient psychiatric facilities where she ministered to troubled youth, Berry took copious notes on “all the frightening and unsettling things the children said or did,” and much of her fiction draws from this harrowing chronicle (Berry, Lucinda. “One of Our Own.” Criminal Element, 2021). She notes that many accounts of troubled children, whether fact or fiction, tend to neglect the struggles and heartache of their parents, who, to Berry, are often the most fascinating figures. With her novels, which work both as thrillers and psychological studies, Berry hopes to deepen her readers’ understanding of mental trauma; not least, the ripples it creates in families and communities, as well as the clinical help available to sufferers and those affected by them.