"I suspect that if I had not lost my hearing I may never have actually started writing (novels)," Briscoe said.

One of her dreams had been to become a reporter or editor at a newspaper. "So if I had been hearing," she said, "I may have gone on to something else as a journalist or an editor or something like that. So I often think, possibly, if I had been hearing, I might never have written a novel."

Few would ever know she had been deaf. She has just finished a promotional tour in the Washington area for her newest novel, "Can't Get Enough." And for the first time in a decade she didn't need a sign-language interpreter.

Two summers ago she had a cochlear implant - a complex electronic device surgically inserted behind the ear - at The Listening Center at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

When she wrote her first novel, "Sisters and Lovers," she had an 80 percent hearing loss. Today, she hears at an 80 percent level.

"With the implant, I'm back to where I was when I was younger," she said. "A lot has changed. I'm able to use the telephone again, hear things like the doorbell without any aids or enhancement.

"When I went on book tours for my first four novels, I had to take an interpreter with me," she said.

That changed a few weeks after her surgery when her implant was activated by a small computer she wears on the ear, like a large hearing aid.

Dr. John K. Niparko, director of ear surgery at Johns Hopkins and head of The Listening Center, explains that an antenna collects sounds that the computer transmits across the skin to the "radio control tower" of the implanted device. This sound information is relayed into the contacts in the ear which stimulate the hearing nerve with small electrical impulses.

"It's absolutely remarkable," Niparko said. "The most remarkable thing about it, though, is that the human body can use this very, very complicated information to give a good sense of sound."

For Briscoe, this means she had gone from being "severely, profoundly, definitely deaf to being mildly hearing impaired." She was born with a 20 decibel - about 20 percent - hearing loss. That's about where she is now.

Her novels, which she wrote over the last decade, don't seem to reveal that they were written by a deaf person.

"I think deafness is a state of mind as much as it is a physical condition," Briscoe said. "Because I heard pretty well when I was young. I think like a hearing person. I think that's true for people who become deaf late in life. For a person who is born deaf, it's just different."

Dr. Charley C. Della Santina, The Listening Center surgeon who did Briscoe's implant, said the fact that Briscoe lost most of her hearing later in life made her an excellent candidate for implant surgery.

"Cochlear implant is really just restoring input to a brain that knows what to do with it," Della Santina said.

"You remember sounds even though you may not hear them for years," Briscoe said. "When I lost my hearing I had enough that I could pick up the ebb and flow of a conversation. I was still very good at the stresses in the voice. I could tell if you were angry by the tone. I could tell if you were sad."

Understanding those nuances has helped her with writing. And people have said her writing is "very visual."

Most of her books explore the lives and loves of affluent black women from Montgomery and Prince George's counties who wear Jimmy Choo shoes, Albert Nipon suits and sleep on Pratesi sheets. She calls them "women's novels."

Characters from her book "P.G. County" reappear in her latest, "Can't Get Enough." She scored big with "Sisters and Lovers," which sold more than 100,000 in the hardcover edition and half a million as a paperback.

During her first try at a novel, Briscoe was managing editor of the American Annals of the Deaf.

"I would get up like 5 in the morning, write for a couple of hours, then go to work," she said.

"I get a lot of people asking me what it takes to be a writer," she said. "They seem to think it's this sort of magical formula or some secret we possess. It's really not. It's just a lot of hard grunt work. Disciplining yourself. And just sitting there at the keyboard or typewriter day after day, hour after hour."

By Carl Schoettler, The Sun