By Mark Moran

If truth is stranger than fiction, it is also sometimes a great deal less inviting. Danielle Steel is the author of 46 best-selling books whose themes of adult love, romance, betrayal, and reconciliation portray an enticing fictional universe that has made her name one of the most widely recognized in bookstores today: More than 370 million copies of her work are in print throughout the world.

But her latest work, His Bright Light: The Story of Nick Traina, is a more discomforting tale, not made for summer beach reading. The force of this story and the bittersweet lessons it imparts are rendered all the more powerful by the fact that it is true.

His Bright Light, published by Delacorte Press, is the story of the short life of Steel's son, Nick Traina, who died by suicide at the age of 19, a victim of manic-depressive disorder. Told with the same passionate intensity and shrewd, worldly wise insight that has marked her fiction, His Bright Light is bound to speak to millions.

"It was very different from my previous work, because it was real, and it was extremely painful to write," said Steel in an interview. "But I wanted to honor my son and to share with people who were going through the agony of manic depression what it was like for us."

It is a story that patients, family members, and treating psychiatrists may recognize all too easily. Precociously brilliant almost from birth, Nick embodied throughout his life the paradoxes and extremes that seem to characterize the disease that killed him. Extraordinary creativity and wisdom and a profligate generosity of heart were matched by paralyzing moods of depression and a tragic self-destructiveness.

At the time of his death, his career as a rock singer was taking off at full speed, and he had found a measure of stability in what his mother describes as the "miracle" of lithium. After previous suicide attempts, Nick himself had come to know that he would have his disease for life and that he would need to take the medication indefinitely.

It was at a time that he seemed most imbued with the promise of his new health that he stopped taking the medication. And it was shortly thereafter that his mother received the phone call she had always feared: Nick had taken a massive overdose of morphine.

The brave truths the book tells about an illness that millions know but few dare to discuss have already garnered responses in the form of thousands of letters and e-mail messages from patients and family members. Most proudly, Steel recalls the letter from a 17-year-old girl with bipolar disorder who vowed, after reading the book, to go back to taking her medication.

"Interestingly, mental illness is something that touches many people in our society," the author said of the response her book has received. "By opening the door [that stigma keeps shut], you allow people to say, 'Guess what? Me too.' It's very hard to stand up and say, 'I have a son with mental illness.' In time, I came to view it as no more onerous than the terrible case of having a child with diabetes. But it takes a while for people to get to that point. I was very proud of Nick, and when I accepted it myself, I was able to talk about it and be proud of him."

But she added, "I remember very often I would say, 'I have a mentally ill son,' and I would watch people recoil, because they didn't know how to handle it."

Ultimately, it is a message of hope that Steel intends to impart, but along the way she tells a searing story of heartbreak.

"Persistence" might be said to be the theme of His Bright Light. The melancholy thread that weaves its way throughout is the story of Steel's dogged efforts to get help for a child she knew was in trouble, long before anyone else would recognize it.

Nick always marched to a different drummer, his mother recalled. He spoke in full sentences at age 1; his charm as a child was beguiling. As a young boy, he bared his soul in his journal with uncanny insight, and with prose, poetry, and song. The signs of his illness were in some cases subtle, often paradoxical, and at first even his mother explained away his quicksilver moods. But in many other ways, his emerging illness seems in retrospect impossible to overlook.

"At 4 he was still wetting his bed, still very angry much of the time, rabidly jealous of [a sibling]. . . ," Steel recalls in her book. "And from time to time he defecated in the bathtub. Once on his pillow. And another time, he smeared it across the wall. All of it indicative, I felt sure, of some very deep-seated problem. . . . But I was given the same response by the psychiatrists about his brilliance, his genius, my spoiling him, and now the trauma of new siblings. . . . I had a nagging, gnawing in my gut, a sense that something was wrong and no one would listen."

Neither her fame as a novelist nor the wealth her books have brought her shielded Steel from the trials that confront a mother seeking help for a mentally ill child. "It's a new world for parents who are wandering into that, trying to find the right doctor, the right hospital, the right setting," she told Psychiatric News. "It's very daunting to do that when you are in a desperate situation. . . . We got to be more adept at it as it went along, but it's a very hard and tangled road sometimes."

Trying to get an accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment was the single greatest problem that Nick and his mother confronted. More than anything else, the absolute necessity of early diagnosis and treatment is the message that Steel hopes to impart to patients, family members, and psychiatrists.

"There was a real trend away from diagnosing manic depression early in childhood," Steel said. "Most people don't want to pin that diagnosis on people until their early 20s. But Nick manifested signs of it very early on."

Steel said her son also showed signs of attention deficit disorder, noting what appears to be an emerging link between ADD in childhood and later bipolar disorder.

Despite her conviction, Steel knows the hazards of rendering a diagnosis that will stay with a child for the duration of his or her life. But she said, "I firmly believe that in spite of the dangers of early diagnosis and the fear that [physicians] will misdiagnose people prematurely, there is less of a downside in that than there is not diagnosing."

Her final words to treating psychiatrists? "Listen, listen, listen," she said. "Don't dismiss what parents tell you. Sometimes when you only see people for a short time in your office, it's difficult to see things the way a parent sees them. Maybe what there needs to be is more awareness, in terms of listening to those who do live with patients."

Help for Children

The proceeds from His Bright Light: The Story of Nick Traina, and the fees of author Danielle Steel's agent will go to the Nick Traina Foundation. This foundation was established to benefit nonprofit organizations serving patients with manic depression and children in jeopardy. Already the foundation has provided funding to Music Cares, a group devoted to providing medical and psychiatric care to young musicians. Those interested in contacting the Nick Traina Foundation may write to 1850 Union Street, Suite 1344, San Francisco, Calif. 94123, or call (415) 267-5984.