65 pages • 2 hours read
Strange Sally Diamond
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Themes
The Impact of Trauma on Development
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of anti-gay bias, racism, ableism, misogyny, kidnapping, imprisonment, rape, sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse, and suicide.
Strange Sally Diamond explores the life-long impact of trauma on individuals. Sally Diamond is strange precisely because she has experienced trauma. Though she has repressed her trauma, this repression is as dangerous as the trauma itself. Having been abused for years as a child, Sally enters society as a victim. Although Sally is raised by two loving parents who adopt and care for her, the past continues to haunt her. Sally has a difficult time relating to people and distrusts others because she is aware that her differences make other people uncomfortable. As a result, she prefers to be alone. Sally endures secondhand revived trauma when she reads her father’s notes about her biological mother and starts seeing similarities between her own self-destructive, violent behavior and her mother’s trauma. Sally goes through therapy to help her remove herself from that behavior and find a happier way of living, but the trauma she has fought to work through reappears through her fear of Conor Geary and is manifested in the disappointing betrayal of Peter Geary. Sally then returns to her self-isolation, which emphasizes that working through trauma is a painful, lifelong journey.
In addition to relating the protagonist’s complex development, the author also explores the long-term effects of trauma by creating situations that demonstrate clear ripple effects, thereby making the point that trauma affects individuals both directly and indirectly. For example, Mark Norton is heavily traumatized by his sister’s years-long ordeal and eventual demise. The disappearance of Denise and the years spent worrying about her define his family ethos and have a profound impact upon his own sense of self. He grows up with the unabated tension of a missing sister whom he once adored. Mark’s home life is therefore mired in grief and desperation, a circumstance that prevents him from finding happiness even in his adulthood. Losing a loved one is traumatic, but losing a loved one at such a young age under such mysterious circumstances is a trauma that perpetually haunts the family dynamics. Even as an adult, Mark is unable to form a family with his wife because he is so worried that their children will be kidnapped. Mark knows what it’s like to live with the danger of the evil of the world, and he refuses to take any further such risks in his life. Mark’s marriage falls apart, and he becomes obsessed with Sally and the Conor Geary case. Mark can’t live a normal, well-balanced life because he can’t get over the trauma of his lost sister. Thus, the author uses Sally and Peter to outline the potential direct effects of long-term trauma, while the character of Mark is used to outline the indirect effects.
Isolation as a Survival Tactic
Nugent’s novel explores many different aspects of the impact of isolation on the human psyche, for just as Conor’s abuses warp Denise, Lindy, and Peter over the years, Sally’s adulthood attempts to rejoin society emphasize the importance of community as a primary agent of healing. Likewise, Peter’s adulthood attempts to mirror Conor’s crimes imply that if left to their own devices, isolated people are doomed to replicate the cycles of abuse that they themselves experienced.
Sally’s relationship with isolation is complicated. She was forced to be isolated with her abused mother as a child, so when she was freed from her captivity and adopted into a loving household, she had a difficult time integrating into society. Her adoptive father, Thomas, encouraged her self-isolation because he didn’t want to cause her more pain. Unfortunately, this has the opposite impact once he has died and left her to fend for herself in the world, for because she has spent her life avoiding anyone other than Thomas and his wife Jean, Sally convinces herself that other people are cruel. This impression is further reinforced by her childhood experiences with bullying in school, and her odd mannerisms only get worse as time goes on because Sally internalizes her strangeness. She self-isolates herself as an adult because she recognizes that she is different in a way that her society won’t accept. But after Thomas dies, Sally learns that loneliness is painful. She makes a concerted effort to build up an anti-isolationist mindset. She makes new friends, learns about herself, and finds happiness. Sally’s character development is thwarted when people close to her betray her. She regresses into self-isolation because isolation is her survival tactic.
In many ways, Sally therefore serves as a foil to Peter Geary, for he also suffers from the effects of isolation but chooses to embrace the effects of his trauma rather than seeking to recover from it. His way of dealing with his trauma and isolation is to replicate Conor’s activities, for they are the only way he knows how to make sense of the world. While the character deserves a measure of sympathy for the way he was treated as a child, it is important to note that as an adolescent, Peter takes an active part in his father’s activities and graduates to perpetuating them alone once his father is dead. Thus, the author emphasizes that although each individual in the novel suffers from a degree of trauma, he or she is ultimately responsible for taking charge of their own healing after the fact. Sally, with the help of her friends and community, works toward this goal, but Peter succumbs to the damage caused by his traumatic upbringing and passes his trauma along to the next generation. Ultimately, Peter is so secluded from society and out of touch with human emotions that he becomes more isolated than Sally ever has. Unlike Sally, Peter has nobody in his life who teaches him the value of therapy. Instead, Peter leans into his trauma and replicates the cycles of abuse that he has learned. He keeps Lindy prisoner, takes her baby away from her, and loses her to his own abusive withholding of basic health care. He never accepts another way of life because isolation is the only lifestyle he knows.
The Quest for Identity
In this novel, characters are on a quest for identity that will free them from their traumas, and as the novel relates, they have differing degrees of success in this goal. Sally’s own isolation results from her deep, lifelong distrust of the surrounding community, who also distrusts her because her behavior does not conform to the usual standards of social normality. For Sally, her quest for identity unfolds on two different fronts, for just as she relies upon the help of a few family friends to venture out into society and build a new life for herself, she must also gain the courage to take a long, hard look at her forgotten past and come to terms with the horrors that lie hidden there.
With regards to Sally’s day-to-day “strangeness,” she has learned to expect other people to be abusive and unkind and therefore chooses to distance herself from other people. She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her, and while her refusal to internalize other people’s criticisms is a source of strength, it nonetheless holds her back from gaining a sense of happiness and community. Only by undergoing therapy and confronting the hidden aspects of her own identity is she able to take positive steps toward building a more inclusive life within the community. Thus, when her father dies and Sally is forced to deal with the outside world, she starts discovering more about her identity. Her first friends are with children. Her immediate positive reaction to Abebi and Maduka proves that she is capable of connecting with other people. This motivates her to be more open with others and to pursue friendships with adults as well. In therapy, she learns how to process the facts about her abusive past and learns how to avoid allowing that past to dictate her present. As she learns to manage her anger issues, she seizes control of her autonomy and finds a new version of herself that is not controlled by rage. Sally makes new friends, starts yoga classes, and even gets a job—all things that she wouldn’t imagine doing before Thomas’s death. Sally starts to construct an identity based on her love for the piano, her appreciation of yoga, and her connection to her new friends. Nugent uses Sally’s character development to demonstrate that identity formation is a long but necessary process.
Significantly, the antithesis to Sally’s character development is Peter, who lacks any sense of identity beyond the warped and damaged person that his father, Conor, has made of him. Because Peter lived under his father’s control during the formative years of his life, Peter doesn’t know who he is and essentially becomes an extension of Conor. Peter has repressed his guilt and replicated Conor’s cycles of violence in order to avoid confronting his lack of identity or taking any responsibility for his many harmful choices. Peter only believes in his identity as a counterpoint to that of his father. He constantly compares himself to Conor, convincing himself that he’s not as bad as his father was because he’s not a pedophile and because he doesn’t rape Lindy. This is a self-delusional tactic that Peter uses to protect himself from the inner realization that he was raised by a monster and has therefore become a monster himself. In the face of trauma, Nugent argues, identity formation is thwarted, but a lack of identity is also a lack of autonomy, which is dangerous because it can lead to destruction of the self and others.
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