Strange Sally Diamond

Sally Diamond’s elderly father is dying. In the casual English way, he tells his daughter that after he passes, “to put him in the bin.” And of course Sally being vaguely autistic takes him literally and instead of the bin, since they in fact incinerate their garbage, to the incinerator he goes. That is the beginning of the story on the page. The back story which we learn is that Sally was originally Mary and her mother were held for 15 years by a very clever pedophile who flees abroad to successfully evade capture. She with her mother are found when Sally is five, the therapist and his MD wife adopt Sally in the aftermath of her mother’s unintentional suicide. Sally is suddenly alone and independent as thirty(ish) year old woman. Because of her odd and easily misconstrued handling of her father’s corpse there is a great deal of publicity which leads to Peter (who is in New Zealand) to contact her. From that point on the story is told in two voices, one being Sally, the other being Peter, her brother and the first offspring of Sally’s birth mother.

I was on a four hour road trip and finished, early on, [Infinite Jest](books/Infinite Jest/), so to keep myself entertained I tried Strange Sally Diamond. It was reasonably entertaining and several women from my book club enjoyed it a great deal. Obviously, the backstory of Sally is melancholy but story follows her in present day as she attempts to rework her life and her mental habits acquired living a very sheltered existence for twenty five years. It filled my driving time nicely even if I think it was a perfectly cromulent, “mid” story, with my thoughts recorded here to memorialize this otherwise forgettable story.