Garbage Man Turned Novelist Debuts Psychological Thriller “The Life That Wasn’t” at 53

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Damian Bednar has published his first novel, "The Life That Wasn’t: A Damon Brenner Story," a psychological thriller built around a man leading a double life: devoted father by day, and by night, host to a violent alter ego who fantasizes about killing the people who stress him out. Newman Springs Publishing released the book, and Studio CarryOnHarry received the announcement this week.

The novel centers on Damon Brenner, a family man weighed down by work, bills and domestic obligation, whose coping mechanism is an imagined second self: a psychopathic killer who exists only in his mind as an outlet. The narrative examines the central question of psychological fragmentation: when one version of yourself becomes dominant, do the two halves merge, does one cease to exist, or did a boundary between them ever truly exist?

Bednar is 53 and a divorced father of two daughters, raising them alone since 2010. He wrote the book, his debut, in the hours he could carve out around a full-time job as a garbage man, pursuing a long-standing ambition to write professionally. In comments distributed with the release, Bednar said the novel grew out of his own observations of the gap between the self people present publicly and the self that surfaces in private, and that he wanted to push that tension toward a breaking point most people avoid examining in themselves.

The book is categorized under psychology-themed fiction and is available through Newman Springs Publishing’s site as well as Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play and Barnes & Noble, according to the announcement.

Studio CarryOnHarry is drawn to the premise less for its shock value than for the biography behind it: a debut novelist writing his first book at 53, between shifts, about exactly the kind of pressure he’s lived with directly as a single parent for over a decade. That’s a more interesting story than the thriller trope alone.

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