Jeremy C. Bradley’s Three Days Grace is a deeply emotional novel exploring trauma, silence, identity, and the lingering cost of survival. Set over three intense days in Paris, the book asks what happens when buried truths finally resurface, and whether anyone can ever truly outrun their past.
We caught up with Jeremy to talk about queerness beyond coming out, complicated families, and why perfect representation was never the goal.
Three Days Grace deals with trauma, silence, and identity in a deeply emotional way. What first sparked the idea for the novel?
I wanted to challenge myself to write a novel that took place in a very constrained amount of time. You can spend years building a life that looks stable from the outside, while carrying something unresolved and almost unspeakable inside you. I was interested in what happens when that inner architecture finally cracks. Then the central question emerged: What does silence does to a person over time? Not just the silence imposed by others, but the silence we participate in ourselves: the stories we don’t tell, the names we don’t say, the truths we avoid because speaking them would change everything. From there, the characters began to form around that emotional pressure.
The story unfolds over just three days in Paris. What drew you to that setting and compressed timeline?
Paris has always felt, to me, like a city where beauty and loneliness sit very close together. It’s a place people project so much romance onto, but it can also be incredibly isolating. That tension made it the right setting for this story. The three-day structure came from wanting the novel to feel almost breathless. Trauma often doesn’t return politely or gradually. Sometimes it arrives all at once, and suddenly the life you’ve built has to be re-examined under immense emotional pressure. A compressed timeline also allowed me to focus on consequence. The characters don’t have the luxury of distance. They have to react, remember, confess, retreat, and decide who they are going to be almost in real time.
A lot of queer fiction still centres around coming-out narratives. Your book feels more interested in what happens after that. Was that a conscious choice?
Coming out is an important story, but it is not the whole story. For many queer people, the more complicated work begins after the declaration: how you build intimacy, how you understand shame, how you form family, how you live with what it cost you to become yourself. I wanted to write about queerness as a lived emotional reality, not just a moment of revelation. The characters in Three Days Grace are not asking, ‘Am I allowed to be who I am?’ so much as, ‘What has becoming myself required of me, and what have I lost or hidden along the way?’
Family tension and buried secrets sit at the heart of the novel. Why are you drawn to exploring complicated family dynamics?
Family is often where our first stories about ourselves are written. Sometimes those stories are loving and expansive. Sometimes they are restrictive, painful, or incomplete. But either way, they leave a mark. I’m drawn to complicated family dynamics because families are rarely one thing. They can be sources of protection and harm, tenderness and silence, loyalty and betrayal. That contradiction feels very human to me. In Three Days Grace, family is not simply a backdrop. It is part of the emotional inheritance the characters are trying to understand. The question is not only what happened in the past, but who was allowed to speak about it, who had to carry it, and who benefited from the silence.
The novel asks whether we can ever really escape our past. Do you think people can truly reinvent themselves?
I think people can change profoundly, but I’m not sure we ever escape the past completely. Reinvention can be real, but if it depends on denial, it eventually becomes another kind of prison. What interests me is not the fantasy of becoming someone entirely new, but the harder and more compassionate work of integrating who we were, what happened to us, and what we did to survive. That, to me, is closer to transformation. We don’t erase the past. But perhaps we can learn to stop letting it speak for us.
Your characters feel emotionally messy and very human, even when they’re difficult or flawed. How important was it for you to avoid “perfect” queer characters?
I understand the desire for positive representation, especially when queer characters have historically been punished, flattened, or made symbolic. But I also think there is a danger in making queer characters so exemplary that they stop feeling human. I wanted the characters in Three Days Grace to be allowed the full range of human complexity. They can be loving and selfish, brave and evasive, tender and cruel. Their queerness is central to them, but it does not make them morally simple. For me, honest representation includes imperfection. Queer characters deserve dignity, but they also deserve mess.
The phrase “Not everyone survives becoming themselves” is such a striking line from the campaign artwork. What does that sentence mean to you personally?
It speaks to the cost of identity. We often talk about becoming yourself as though it is purely liberating, and of course it can be. But it can also involve loss: of belonging, of certainty, of family myths, of the version of yourself other people needed you to be. Not everyone gets through that process untouched. Some people survive it by hardening. Some survive by disappearing. Some survive by building a life that works, but only if certain doors remain closed. The line is not meant to be hopeless. It is meant to acknowledge that becoming yourself can be an act of survival, and survival is not always clean or triumphant.
There’s a strong sense throughout the book that silence can be both protective and destructive. Was that something you wanted readers to wrestle with?
I didn’t want silence to be treated as simply cowardice or repression, because sometimes silence is how people survive. It can be a shield. It can buy time. It can protect people from consequences they are not ready to face. But silence also has a cost. It distorts relationships. It creates distance. It allows shame to grow in the dark. And eventually, what is unspoken often begins to shape a life more powerfully than what is said. I wanted readers to sit with that tension. The novel doesn’t argue that every truth must be spoken immediately, but it does ask what happens when silence becomes the foundation of a life.
The reviews so far describe the novel as “lyrical”, “raw”, and “emotionally precise”. How would you describe your own writing style?
I’m drawn to emotional intensity, but I try to write it with control. I like prose that feels intimate and lyrical without becoming ornamental for its own sake. The sentence has to serve the wound, not decorate it. I’m interested in the small shifts such as the pause in a conversation, the thing someone almost says, the memory that interrupts an ordinary moment. A lot of my writing lives in those spaces. So perhaps I would describe my style as emotionally restrained until it can’t be anymore. I like the pressure of what is held back, and the release when it finally breaks through.
Did writing this book teach you anything unexpected about yourself?
Writing Three Days Grace taught me that I am more interested in tenderness than I sometimes admit. The book goes to emotionally dark places, but what kept surprising me was how often the characters were still reaching for connection, even when they didn’t know how to ask for it.
It also reminded me that writing fiction can reveal your preoccupations before you fully understand them. You think you’re writing about one character’s silence or one family’s secrets, and then you realize you are circling much larger questions about identity, forgiveness, and the parts of ourselves we exile. That was unexpected, and at times uncomfortable, but also very clarifying.
Some of the themes in Three Days Grace feel deeply personal. Was it difficult emotionally to write at times?
The novel is not autobiographical in a direct sense, but because the emotional material is close to questions I care about deeply–shame, belonging, silence, chosen family, and the cost of self-protection—it was difficult at times. In fact, it took me close to five years to finish writing it. I kept putting the manuscript aside and coming back to it when I was ready. Writing those scenes required a certain vulnerability. There were moments where I had to resist the instinct to look away too quickly or soften something because it felt too raw.
You balance writing fiction alongside working in the tech world as Managing Director of a fast-growing company. How do those two worlds coexist for you?
They might look very different from the outside, but I experience them as more connected than people might assume. Both require attention to people, systems, language, and consequence. In leadership, you’re constantly trying to understand what is being said, what is not being said, and what sits underneath the surface. Fiction asks many of the same things. Of course, the pace and texture are different. The tech world can be fast, structured, and intensely forward-looking. Writing asks for slowness. It asks you to sit with ambiguity and emotion without immediately trying to solve it. I think I need both. One gives me momentum; the other gives me depth.
Do you find writing gives you an escape from the structure and pace of corporate life, or are the two more connected than people might assume?
Writing is an escape in the sense that it allows me to enter a different kind of time. When I’m writing fiction, I’m not optimizing, deciding, or managing. I’m listening. That is a very different mode of being. But I don’t think the two worlds are completely separate. Leadership is full of narrative: the stories organisations tell about themselves, the identities people form at work, the tensions between what is visible and what is hidden. Those are deeply human questions. So writing is both an escape and a continuation. It lets me process complexity in a different language.
Queer readers are often hungry for stories that feel layered and honest rather than tokenistic. Did you feel any pressure while writing queer characters and relationships?
I didn’t want the queer characters to exist as symbols or lessons. I wanted them to feel like people with histories, contradictions, desires, fears, and private failures. Tokenism often comes from reducing identity to function. I was much more interested in writing queerness as texture: in relationships, in memory, in shame, in humour, in longing, in the ways people build safety with one another. I also didn’t want to sanitize queer life in order to make it acceptable. In my work, honesty matters more than respectability.
Chosen family, memory, grief, and identity all run through the novel. Which theme felt most important to you while writing?
Silence was probably the central theme for me, because it touches all the others. Silence shapes memory. It complicates grief. It can fracture families, but it can also create the conditions for chosen family, because people often seek elsewhere what could not be spoken at home.
Identity, too, is deeply connected to silence. Who are you when parts of your story have been hidden, denied, or made unsayable?
So while the novel is about grief, family, queerness, and survival, I think it is most fundamentally about what remains unspoken , and what it takes to finally give language to it.
The novel is emotionally intense, but there are still moments of tenderness and hope woven through it. Was it important not to leave readers completely devastated?
I don’t mind taking readers into difficult emotional territory, but I don’t believe in despair as the final word. Even in painful stories, there has to be some possibility of grace, which is not necessarily a neat resolution, but a sense that something can still be repaired, understood, or carried differently. Tenderness was essential because the characters are not only damaged. They are also capable of love, loyalty, humour, and care. I wanted the novel to honour that. Hope, for me, does not mean everything is fixed. It means the characters are no longer entirely alone with what has happened to them.
What kind of conversations do you hope Three Days Grace sparks within the LGBTQ+ community?
I hope the book opens conversations about the parts of queer life that are sometimes harder to name: the aftermath of becoming yourself, the private costs of survival, the ways shame can linger even after acceptance, and the complicated relationship between biological family and chosen family. I would love for readers to talk about silence and to explore what they inherited, what they kept, what they eventually found the courage to say. More than anything, I hope the book makes people feel less alone in their complexity. Queer life is not one story. It is many stories, and some of them are tender, difficult, unresolved, and still beautiful.
You’ve built an audience online through your Substack and social channels. Has that changed your relationship with writing or readers?
Writing can be solitary, and engaging with community online creates a more immediate relationship with readers. You begin to understand what resonates, not in a market-research sense, but in a human sense. You see where people feel recognized. At the same time, fiction still requires privacy. You can’t write entirely in response to an audience, or the work becomes too self-conscious. So I try to keep a balance: stay connected to readers, but protect the quiet, uncertain space where the actual writing happens. Having that audience has made me more aware of the emotional contract between writer and reader. People give you their attention, and sometimes their vulnerability. That deserves care.
Were there any authors or books that influenced you while writing Three Days Grace?
I was influenced less by direct imitation than by writers who take emotional life seriously. I’m drawn to novels that are intimate, psychologically precise, and unafraid of beauty. Writers like André Aciman, Alan Hollinghurst, and Hanya Yanagihara all come to mind in different ways, not because Three Days Grace resembles any one of them exactly, but because they each, in their own way, write about desire, memory, shame, class, queerness, and emotional consequence with great seriousness. I’m also influenced by books that understand place as emotional architecture. Paris in this novel is not just a setting; it is part of the pressure the characters are under.
Finally, what would you say to someone picking up Three Days Grace for the very first time?
Let the novel unfold slowly, even though it takes place over only three days. It is a story about what people carry, what they hide, and what happens when the past refuses to stay buried. It is emotionally intense, but it is not without tenderness. At its heart, it is a book about survival, chosen family, and the fragile possibility of grace. And I would say this: don’t expect perfect people. Expect human ones.
Get Your Copy of Three Days Grace: www.jeremycbradley.com/books
