Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold
Sebold in New York City, October 2007
Born	(1963-09-06) September 6, 1963 Madison, Wisconsin, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Education	Syracuse University (BA) University of California, Irvine (MFA)
Genre	Literary fiction, memoir
Notable works	Lucky (1999) The Lovely Bones (2002) The Almost Moon (2007)

Alice Sebold (born September 6, 1963) is an American author, known for her novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and a memoir, Lucky. She is best known for The Lovely Bones, a New York Times bestseller that was adapted into a film by the same name in 2010. She is also known for her memoir, Lucky, which sold over a million copies and describes her experience in her first year at Syracuse University, when she was raped. Anthony Broadwater, who was incorrectly identified as the perpetrator by Sebold, ultimately served 16 years in prison. He was exonerated in 2021, after a judge found serious issues with the original conviction.

Early life and education

Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She grew up in the Paoli suburb of Philadelphia, where her father taught Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania. While they were young, Sebold and her older sister, Mary, often had to take care of their mother, a journalist for a local paper, who suffered from panic attacks and drank heavily.

Sebold graduated from Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1980. Her father was unable to get her into the University of Pennsylvania, so Sebold attended Syracuse University instead, where she earned her bachelor's degree. Among her professors was Tess Gallagher, who became one of Sebold's confidantes. Also among her professors were Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Hayden Carruth.

After graduating in 1984, she briefly attended the University of Houston in Texas, for graduate school, then moved to Manhattan for the next 10 years. She held several waitressing jobs while pursuing a writing career, but neither her poetry nor her attempts at writing a novel came to fruition.

Sebold left New York for Southern California, where she became a caretaker of an artists' colony, earning $386 a month and living in a cabin in the woods without electricity. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1998.

Rape and writing of Lucky

See also: Lucky (memoir)

In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University, she was assaulted and raped while walking home through a tunnel to an amphitheater near campus. She reported the crime to campus security and the police, who took her statement and investigated, but could not identify any suspects. Five months later, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she encountered a man whom she believed to be the rapist. The man, Anthony Broadwater, ultimately served 16 years in prison, maintaining his innocence throughout. Because he would not admit to the attack, he was denied parole five times. Broadwater was released in 1999, and remained on New York's sex offender registry.

Writing of Lucky

After the rape, Sebold was traumatized and struggled to make sense of life for at least ten years. In 1996 or 1997, she began writing a novel about the rape and murder of an adolescent girl. The interim title was Monsters. She found herself struggling to finish it, and abandoned several other novels she had also started. Eventually, she realized she needed to write about the rape, and its impact on her first.

Lucky was published in 1999, in which she described every aspect of the rape in graphic detail. She used the fictitious name "Gregory Madison" for Broadwater. The title of her memoir stemmed from a conversation with a police officer who told her that another woman had been raped and murdered in the same location, and that Sebold was "lucky" because she hadn't been killed. Sebold wrote that the attack made her feel isolated from her family, and that for years afterwards, she experienced hypervigilance. She resigned her night job, fearing danger in darkness. She was depressed, suffered from nightmares, drank heavily and snorted heroin for three years. Eventually, after reading Judith Lewis Herman's Trauma and Recovery, she realized she had developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to one reviewer, Lucky was positively reviewed and then "sank into oblivion". After Sebold became successful with her 2002 novel,The Lovely Bones, interest in the memoir picked up and it went on to sell over one million copies.

Exoneration of Broadwater

Broadwater tried five times to have the conviction overturned, with at least as many groups of lawyers. When Timothy Mucciante began working as executive producer on a project to adapt Lucky to film, he noticed discrepancies in the portion of her book describing the trial. He later told The New York Times, "I started having some doubts—not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together". He ultimately left the project because of his concerns about the story, and hired a private investigator to review the evidence against Broadwater.

In November 2021, Broadwater was officially exonerated by a New York Supreme Court justice, who determined there had been serious issues with the original conviction. The conviction had relied heavily on Sebold's testimony, as well as on microscopic hair analysis, a forensic technique the United States Department of Justice later found to be unreliable. At the police lineup, which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had picked out the "wrong person", she said the two men looked "almost identical". Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who joined the motion to overturn the conviction, argued that suspect identification when the suspect is a different race from the victim is prone to error; Sebold is white and Broadwater is black. The prosecutor had also lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she identified in the lineup and Broadwater were friends and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her; attorneys argued that this falsehood had influenced Sebold's testimony. Sebold also wrote in Lucky that the prosecutor had coached her into changing her identification.

A week after Broadwater was exonerated, Sebold publicly apologized for her part in his conviction, saying she was struggling "with the role that I unwittingly played within a system that sent an innocent man to jail" and that Broadwater "became another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. I will forever be sorry for what was done to him." Scribner, the publisher of Lucky, released a statement following Broadwater’s exoneration that distribution of all formats of the book would cease while Sebold and the publisher determined how to revise the work.

The Lovely Bones

See also: The Lovely Bones

Once Lucky was finished, Sebold was able to complete her novel, Monsters. She sent the manuscript to her mentor, Wilton Barnhardt, who passed it to his agent. The work was eventually published as The Lovely Bones in 2002. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Sebold said, "I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us."

A reviewer for the Houston Chronicle described the novel as "a disturbing story, full of horror and confusion and deep, bone-weary sadness. And yet it reflects a moving, passionate interest in and love for ordinary life as its most wonderful, and most awful, even at its most mundane." A reviewer for The New York Times wrote that Sebold had "the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose". The Lovely Bones remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for over one year. It was adapted into a 2010 film of the same name by Peter Jackson, starring Saoirse Ronan as Susie Salmon, Susan Sarandon as Grandma Lynn, Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, Mark Wahlberg as Jack Salmon, and Rachel Weisz as Abigail Salmon.

Other writing

Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, describes an art class model who murders her mother. It received mixed reviews.

Sebold guest-edited The Best American Short Stories 2009.

Awards and recognition

The Lovely Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel and the Heartland Prize in 2002, and the American Booksellers Association's Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003. Sebold held MacDowell fellowships in 200, 2005, and 2009. In 2016, Emerson College awarded Sebold with an honorary degree.

Personal life

In 2001, Sebold married the novelist Glen David Gold; they later divorced.

Works

• Lucky (memoir, 1999), Scribner, ISBN 0-684-85782-0
• The Lovely Bones (novel, 2002), Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-66634-3
• The Almost Moon (novel, 2007), Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-67746-9

External links

• Alice Sebold at IMDb