FIVE THINGS ABOUT A STUDENT WHO VANISHED, CAME BACK WITH A BOOK
1 DIARY SOW
A young woman who was twice crowned the top student in Senegal, Diary Sow, 20, had won a scholarship to attend the Lycée Louis-le-grand, a launchpad to France’s top science and engineering schools. Senegal’s president had called
her a “rising star.” Then she went missing on Jan. 4, sparking fears the star pupil had been kidnapped or killed.
2 HER DISAPPEARANCE
Her disappearance drew global interest. French police scoured the streets. Her mother Binta Sow wept at her childhood home in the village of Malicounda as a politician led prayers. People made T-shirts with her face. For nearly a month, people around the world waited to hear Diary Sow speak. Anguish over the disappearance gave way to confusion on Jan. 21 when a Senegalese minister, Serigne Mbaye Thiam, announced on Twitter that Sow was alive and well. Thiam — her mentor and godfather, according to her family — said that she left on her own, desiring
only a break.
3 HER RETURN
Early Monday, followers of this four-week saga — the international investigation, the search parties, the family pleading for answers — got their wish: Sow recorded a three-minute video for her 32,000 Instagram followers. She was promoting her new novel about a girl who ran
away.
4 THE BOOK
“I climbed and climbed, never complaining about my fate,” Sow says in the clip, speaking as her protagonist, “but my heart beat tragically to the rhythm of the great clock. I hurried to live in fear of my life passing me by.” The advertisement — a “book trailer,” according to the caption — triggered an Internet firestorm. The book, her second in as many years, is about “a teenage girl with a painful past,” the caption said. The character
flees home “in hopes of rebuilding herself and living the life she has always dreamed of.” She is a “country girl” who transforms into “a siren of the Parisian catwalks,” Sow wrote. The title: “And the masks fall.”
5 ANSWERS
Sow offered no clarity about her personal experience. Both her mother and her former teacher, Mame Coumba Diouf Sagna, said Sow had completed her second novel before falling out of contact.