“That’s the thing about falling.  It doesn’t go on indefinitely, and it rarely ends well?.?.?.?”
 
In her page-turning fiction debut, neuropsychologist Kylie Ladd delivers a searing portrait of two marriages united and betrayed by friendship.
 
“I had been married three years when I fell in love,” begins Kate, a firecracker of a woman who thought she’d found the yin to her yang in Cary, her sensible and adoring husband.  For their friend Luke—a charismatic copywriter who loves women and attention in equal measure, and preferably together—life has been more than sweet beside Cressida, the dutiful pediatric oncologist who stole his heart.  But when a whimsical flirtation between Kate and Luke turns into something far more dangerous, the foursome will be irrevocably intertwined by more than just their shared history. 
 
After the Fall follows the origin and fallout of the most passionate of affairs through the eyes of all four characters, unveiling the misunderstandings and unspoken needs that lie beneath our search for love and connection.  The narrative moves effortlessly between past and present, painting a nostalgic picture of the two marriages at their most idealistic—the exact moment when like turned to love—and at their most volatile.  Thanks to the boundless compassion with which Ladd draws her characters, one can’t help but root for them as they wrestle between newfound desire and remembrances of time past, all the while spinning toward an inevitable conclusion.
 
Steeped in psychological insight and raw emotion, After the Fall is an unsettling novel of the many ways we love and hurt each other.


From the Hardcover edition.

Whenever I meet someone new and they ask me about my occupation I always reply that I’m a psychologist. It’s true. I’m a clinical neuropsychologist, to be precise, with a Ph.D. in the field and fifteen years' experience working in both the public and private sectors. What I fail to mention--mostly because I still can’t quite believe that it’s true, and I’m stupidly afraid that saying it out loud will make it disappear--is that I’m also a writer.

I never planned to study psychology. At the time it simply seemed like a good compromise between the medical degree my parents wanted me to do and the arts degree I was keener on, but now I realize what a great fit it was. I have always been fascinated by people, and more specifically how we become who we are and why we make the choices we do. I'm also--as is true for most writers--rather a voyeur. Psychology gave me the tools to observe others; writing gives me the reason to do so.

Psychology has also helped me understand something I think every writer needs to grasp: that "story" is a fluid concept, depending wholly on perspective. In the clinic where I work, part of my role is to take a history from both the client and a member of his or her family. Though I have been doing so for many years, the process still has the power to surprise, given how differently the same events can be perceived and experienced by different people. It seems there is always some fresh way for us to love or hate, to accommodate or alienate each other; there are at least two sides to every story. Listening to my patients and their families gave me the idea for the narrative structure of After The Fall, where four main characters take turns at telling their side of a shared story.

Now that both my children are in school, I write three days a week and practice as a psychologist for two--but the distinction is often blurred. When I write, I am using the resources that psychology has given me; when I am seeing a client I am simultaneously alert for what I can learn from them about being human. In both cases, I am listening for story--the stories that explain and define us all.

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