Was Martin Amiss sister killed by the Sixties sexual revolution – or her drunken fathers neglect?
No one would ever doubt that author Martin Amis loved his late sister Sally, and because she loved him and would call him in times of crisis, she would probably not have objected to him describing her this week as ‘pathologically promiscuous’. Sally died nine years ago, a tragic figure who had existed for years in a council bedsit on state handouts and virtually drank herself to death at the age of 46. Amis, 60, whose books frequently draw on his dysfunctional family for well-publicised inspiration, has written Sally into the storyline of his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, which explores the devastating pressures on women created by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and Seventies.
