When I finished The Story of Beautiful Girl I felt like I needed a lie down.
The story begins slowly enough on a stormy night in Pennsylvania in 1968, when the lives of Homan, a deaf African-American man and Lynnie, a young intellectually disabled white woman, become forever entwined with elderly widow Martha, in whose farmhouse they seek refuge.
The first half of Rachel Simon's novel deals with the immediate aftermath of that night, following the three main characters through 1968 and 1969. Lynnie is dragged back to the State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, where she will be punished for daring to escape. Homan is on the run and desperately trying to find his way back to Lynnie. Martha is left wondering how to care for and protect Lynnie's secret newborn baby.
This is where Simon's writing is at its best. She shows what it might be like to live a life where no one understands the way you think, and (almost) everyone underestimates your abilities.
Simon leaves the reader in no doubt that Lynnie knows what is going on around her, despite her classification by her attendants as a "low grade" and an "idiot". She pieces information together, making sense of her restricted world as best she can, holding back her tears and her voice to keep herself safe. She feels herself growing numb as she mourns the loss of Homan and her daughter, and compares this to how she felt after her mother's first and only visit to the school. "Lynnie", writes Simon, "remembered more numbness, when she caught on that Mummy was never returning. Ever since, Lynnie had wondered which was worse: the sudden good-bye you know is a good-bye, or the long good-bye you have to guess."
