Author Liz Nugent told David Hennessy about her most recent book bringing her more adulation than ever before, why she could never write a happy family and putting dead bodies out with the bins.
The Dublin author Liz Nugent’s latest book Strange Sally Diamond has been her most successful offering to date.
It has already won Crime Novel of the Year at the 2023 Irish Book Awards.
It has also seen Liz shortlisted for the prestigious Theakston Old Peculier crime writing award, the winner of which is announced this week.
It has also been longlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award alongside Zadie Smith and Lisa Jewell.
Strange Sally Diamond tells the story of Sally.
As she says herself, she is ‘mentally deficient’.
She has led a sheltered life, never liked to put herself out there and avoided human contact as much as she could.
Since her mother died, it has just been her and her father.
Her father often said, ‘When I die, put me out with the bins’.
Never one to pick up on sarcasm or humour, that is exactly what Sally does when the time comes.
Practically and unaffected by emotion, she does as her father asks.
When the police come to investigate, they find that Sally did not act maliciously and there is not the usual murder that precedes the disposal of a body.
However, they also find that Sally has not always been Sally.
Although she can not remember it, she was once called Mary by her birth mother Denise.
Denise was just 11 years old when she was snatched by paedophile Conor Geary.
She would have her children in captivity before eventually being rescued from her cell but never free of her years of trauma.
Graham Norton, who Liz can count as a well known fan having raved about her books before, says: “Liz Nugent has outdone herself. Twisted and twisty, dark and gripping, no one is going to forget Sally Diamond in a hurry!”
Ian Rankin added: “It creeped me out (in a good way). Think Room and The Collector but add a dazzling/ unique main character and encroaching dread. Terrific from Liz Nugent.”
Liz Nugent won the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award at the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards in 2014 for her debut novel Unravelling Oliver.
Lying in Wait would take the Ryan Tubridy Listeners’ Choice Award at the Irish Book Awards 2016.
Skin Deep would win that same award as well as the Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year.
The last time The Irish World spoke to Liz she had been longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for Our Little Cruelties.
Now with Strange Sally Diamond, she has gone one better.
Liz Nugent told The Irish World: “To be down to the last six in the Theakstons is a career high.
“I’ve never had as much adulation for a book, or as many sales of a book.
“I don’t know where they’re at now.
“I think we’re heading towards 200,000 copies sold now, maybe more. I don’t know, I don’t keep track.
“I’m really blown away.”
Can you put your finger on why it has struck such a chord? “Well, I think the first thing is that this is the first character I wrote who is entirely likeable, as flawed as she is.
“She’s prone to flashes of violence and she has a terrible temper but because you know why she does, you automatically forgive her because it’s not her fault.
“She’s grown up in this horrific, horrific, nightmarish environment and she didn’t know so when we the readers know how awful it was, we forgive her for all those flaws because we can see why she has them: Her avoidance of people and her antisocial behaviour and her violence when she feels threatened.
“It’s entirely natural that would be the case if you know her early years, even though she doesn’t remember them.
“Her early years are definitely still with her, in her.”
Sally’s stepfather says ‘put me out with the bins’ and so she does when the time comes.
It’s a misunderstanding and it would almost be funny if it wasn’t so serious..
“It is kind of funny, I want people to kind of laugh at that but you need people to laugh with Sally not at her because she is lovable.
“But she’s very clear about the fact that she doesn’t want a romantic relationship.
“She doesn’t know why she doesn’t want one.
“She never wants to have a sex life but she doesn’t know why and then gradually she realises why and she’s delighted when she finds out that asexuality is a thing because that fits her completely, so she’s very happy with that label.
“A lot of adult friends of mine are now being diagnosed with ADHD and they only realising it when their children are diagnosed with it and they’re listening to the questions that the kids are being asked and they’re kind of going, ‘Oh yeah, me too, me too, me too’.
“And they’re getting diagnosed as adults now and it’s funny how you’ve always known that there’s something not quite right and then suddenly, you have a label for it and they’re really relieved because it explains to them why they’re awkward in certain situations.
“It’s good, I think, for people to have a label for themselves, that will explain some of their behaviour.”
Was this story inspired by some sort of true horrific events as things like the abduction and mothers and children being held captive for years have, sadly, happened?
“To be honest when I started writing, I didn’t know that this was the character I was going to write.
“I just wanted somebody to put somebody out with the bins because I always thought, what if somebody did that?
“Because it’s something I always say, jokingly, to my husband, ‘Put me out with the bins’.
“But I thought, ‘I wonder what would happen if somebody put somebody out with the bins’.
“If she didn’t murder him, then why? Why would you do it?’
“And then I happened upon this neurodivergent character.
“She’s not autistic but because of her background, she has social deficiencies and she takes people at their word.
“And then I was also thinking about those cases that we hear about, the Josef Fritzls and everything.”
In Austria, Josef Fritzl kept his own daughter Elizabeth captive in a secret room under his own family home for 24 years.
Letting his family believe she had run away, Fritzl raped his own daughter fathering seven of his own grandchildren.
Also in Austria Natascha Kampusch was abducted as a ten-year- old girl and kept captive for eight years until she escaped.
“I always thought, ‘What happens to the children? The children of the paedophiles?’
“We never hear, I assume they’re given new identities and taken off to different places but I don’t know whether they could ever function normally if you’re six or seven years old and you’ve lived in that environment, how could you live a normal life?
“Then I thought of her psychiatrist father and I thought, ‘Okay, he feels responsible for the death of her mother and he’s now taken over the care, he’s adopted this child’.
“Because everybody agrees he’d be the best person to do it because he’s Ireland’s leading psychiatrist at the time, and his wife who is far more clued in.
“She’s far more aware of what Sally needs than he is, but he treats Sally- He loves her but he treats her as a case study rather than a daughter.”
In the story, Sally’s first memories are of her seventh birthday. She can remember nothing earlier than that.
“And I kind of thought, ‘Well, if I was a psychiatrist and I had the power to take away those memories, would I?’
“I thought, ‘Yeah, I probably would’.
“So I don’t even know if it’s actually possible but if he kept her sedated for about a year and then slowly wean her off the sedation, could we wipe her memory that way?”
The horrific case of Josef Fritzl and what he did came to mind reading the book, I have to say..
“Yeah, it is horrific and I think Peter in the book, Sally’s brother, is almost a bigger victim than Sally is because he’s never had the benefit of loving parents.
“Sally’s (adoptive) mother was alive until she was about 18 so she had that and a father who certainly seems to love her. They have a laugh together, they get on together.
“She doesn’t realise he’s not pushing her to go out into the world which is what her mother was doing, wanted her to go to college, wanted her to have a normal life and she’s very resistant to that and the father backs her up because he’s studying her.
“But Peter doesn’t have the benefit of having two parents for a start and having parents who love him.
“Well, I suppose his father loves him but in a very, very warped way: Telling him he has this disease. It’s really kind of sinister stuff and he doesn’t have the benefit of the four years of psychotherapy that Sally has over the course of the book where she finally gets some help with dealing with her emotions, like dealing with her anger and when she finally finds out the root cause, what happened.”
There are certainly some bits that are very distressing or very upsetting to read.
I was wondering, in that in that same way, was it a bit upsetting to write at times?
“Yeah, the scene with Peter and his mother when they’re locked in the room together and he kicks her in the stomach.
“I really wanted to take that out.
“It upset me to write it and I just thought, ‘It’s too much. It’s too much’.
“So I wrote to my editor and I said, ‘I really want to take this out’.
“And she said, ‘But that’s your gasp moment’.
“And I said, ‘What?’
“And she said, ‘Well, in publishing terms, you need a gasp moment when the reader gasps at what they’re reading’.
“I’d never heard it before.
“So I said, ‘Okay, if you think it’s alright’.
“And she said, ‘Yeah’.
“But it came out of the American version.
“The Americans are much more sensitive to stuff like that.”
The story is more upsetting for being told through innocent eyes, whether it is the point of view of Sally or a child in Peter..
“I don’t say whether Sally was abused or not but prefer to think that she wasn’t.
“I don’t know whether that comes across in the book.
“His target age is like 12 or 13.
“He’s looking for adolescents.
“The monstrous father is looking for adolescents, children, girls.
“And then Peter being the victim, he’s turned into the father, even though he’s denying it because he’s not going to kidnap a child. He thinks that that’s good, that makes him okay.”
Conor Geary keeps Sally’s mother Denise in squalor and a dungeon. I was struck by in the book this hellhole being disovered in Killiney, Dublin.
I’ve never been to Killiney but it sounds as ordinary and suburban as anywhere to me.
People would probably say the same about the area in Austria Josef Fritzl kept his own daughter a prisoner.
We never know what’s going on in suburbia, do we?
“That’s the whole thing.
“Killiney is such a wealthy area of Dublin and nobody would think- We’ve never had a case like that in Ireland that we know of.
“I’m not ruling it out that it’s not happening somewhere right now, but we haven’t had a case like that.
“I don’t think there’s even been a case like that in England.”
In America there have been cases like the abduction of Jaycee Dugard who was snatched at the age of 11 and remained missing for 18 years.
“It’s happened in America.
“There was a woman who got out but they were allowed out, I think they went to the mall and stuff at certain times, but they were so affected by Stockholm Syndrome that when they did get out, they didn’t try to run because it was the only life they knew really: Scary.”
Denise says in the book, ‘They want her, they don’t want me’, meaning that her parents want the young girl that was taken and not the disturbed, traumatised woman she has been replaced by after 25 years in captivity and torture..
“It’s a very sad book.
“I hope people see the humour in it as well.
“There are a lot of lighter moments.”
Denise’s parents also don’t want to see Sally who is, to them, a biproduct of their daughter’s rape..
“I think Sally, to them, is a product of Conor Geary.
“Their lives were destroyed by the fact that their daughter was snatched all these years ago, and then they have the further horror of realising that she was kidnapped by a paedophile and then now there’s this child that they certainly don’t want to take responsibility for because as far as they’re concerned, the child is half him.”
The mother- daughter relationship is so central, isn’t it? Whether it is Denise being unable to cope with her child being taken away or Sally and Jean’s inability to connect meaningfully..
“Yeah, it’s funny.
“Most of the mothers in all of my other books have either been absent or horrific.
“The mother in Lying in Wait was terrible. The mother in Unravelling Oliver was absent.
“And in Skin Deep, she was monstrous. She was absolutely horrific.
“The mother in Our Little Cruelties is awful as well, so I have a habit of writing really nasty, nasty mothers and in this case, the mother was not nasty but too much of a victim to be able to give her child a good upbringing even when rescued.
“She’d been kept for 17 years.”
Something lacking or wrong in those parental relationships can be at the root of some of the worst people..
“In a lot of my books, you’ll find that the central character is just somebody who wants their mum.
“Unravelling Oliver, he just wants his mum and dad to love him.
“In Lying in Wait, the mother is so horrific that she won’t let her only child grow up. She’s determined to hang onto him.
“And in Skin Deep Cordelia, the mother doesn’t want her child, rejects them completely, treats him terribly and nearly kills him when he’s almost burnt to death in a fire and he’s so badly disfigured after that, he’s extremely damaged for life and she has done this to him.
“Then in Our Little Cruelties, the mother of the three boys treats them all so differently that she’s a piece of work as well.
“The other thing I notice actually in all my books is that the fathers all die young.
“It’s because when I was six or seven years old, my parents separated so I don’t know what it’s like to have a father growing up.
“I just don’t know what it’s like so I kill them off pretty quickly to avoid having to explain, because I just don’t know.”
Do you ever think you might write something about a family with two parents and neither one of them nasty?
“A happy family? Who’d want to read that?”
I’m sure it’s the kind of thing there are always rumblings about but would you like to see Strange Sally Diamond made into a film?
“Of course I would.
“Yeah, there’s always talk but nothing happens.
“There’s constant talk, but nothing happens in the end.
“So yeah, I’d love it.”
If they were to make it, would any particular actress come to mind for Sally?
“I thought Kerry Condon would be amazing.
“I know she could play this role and I know she’d be absolutely brilliant in it.”
Strange Sally Diamond is out now.
For more information about Liz Nugent, click here.
You can vote for Liz in the Theakston Old Peculier by clicking here.
