'Out with the bins'

Irish author Liz Nugent talks about trauma and isolation, being inspired by an American classic, and why New Zealand features in her new novel. 

- CRAIG SISTERSON

Getting the body into the large garden-waste bag wasn't too hard; he'd been a small man, old and frail. Carrying it across the frost-covered yard to the green barn on their property, down the end of a tiny lane just outside the Irish village of Carricksheedy, was tougher. Into the barrel, a splash of petrol, a whoosh of flame. Job done. Or not, as it turned out.

"Sally Diamond is the first likeable protagonist I've written," says Liz Nugent. Likeable may not be the first adjective that comes to mind for someone we meet as she's just stuffed her dead father into a bag and tried to reduce him to ashes. Those in Sally's village certainly have others. "Strange Sally Diamond, the weirdo," say local schoolchildren, even before the failed incineration. "F-ing psycho," says a garda to her colleague after they visit Sally's house and she tells them what she's done.

Then again, compared with Nugent's previous central characters, Sally, with her social missteps and occasional rages, is positively lovable. Characters such as a children's author who beats his devoted wife into a coma (Unravelling Oliver), a respectable family with a sex worker's body buried in their garden (Lying in Wait), a faux socialite with a fly-infested corpse in her French Riviera flat (Skin Deep), or three brothers whose sibling rivalry turns deadly (Our Little Cruelties).

And after all, Sally was just doing what her father, a retired psychiatrist, wanted. "When I die, put me out with the bins," he'd regularly said. "I'll be dead, so I won't know any different."

So, she did.