Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold
Born	(1963-09-06)September 6, 1963 Madison, Wisconsin,U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Education	Syracuse University(BA) University of Houston University of California, Irvine(MFA)
Genre	Literary fiction, memoir
Notable works	Lucky(1999) The Lovely Bones(2002) The Almost Moon(2007)
Spouse	Glen David Gold ​ ​ (m.2001;div.2012)​

Alice Sebold(born September 6, 1963)is an American author. She is known for her novelsThe Lovely BonesandThe Almost Moon,and amemoir,Lucky.The Lovely Boneswas onThe New York TimesBest Seller listand was adapted into afilm by the same namein 2009. She is also known for the false accusation of rape againstAnthony Broadwater,who spent 16 years in prison, before being exonerated.

Her memoir,Lucky,sold over a million copies and describes her experience in her first year atSyracuse University,when she was raped. She wrongly accused Anthony Broadwater of being the perpetrator. Broadwater spent 16 years in prison. He wasexoneratedin 2021, after a judge overturned the original conviction. Consequently, the publisher ofLuckyannounced that the book would no longer be distributed.

Early life and education

Sebold was born inMadison, Wisconsin.She grew up in thePaolisuburb ofPhiladelphia,where her father taught Spanish at theUniversity 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 frompanic attacksand drank heavily.

Sebold graduated fromGreat Valley High SchoolinMalvern, Pennsylvania,in 1980. Sebold attendedSyracuse University,where she earned herbachelor's degree.Among her professors wasTess Gallagher,who became one of Sebold's confidantes.Also among her professors wereRaymond Carver,Tobias Wolff,andHayden Carruth.

After graduating in 1984, she briefly attended theUniversity of HoustoninTexas,forgraduate school,then moved toManhattanfor 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 forSouthern California,where she became a caretaker of anartists' colony,earning $386 a month and living in a cabin in the woods without electricity.She earned anMFAfrom theUniversity of California, Irvinein 1998.

Rape and writing ofLucky

See also:Lucky (memoir)

In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was a freshman atSyracuse University,she was assaulted and raped while walking home along a pathway that passed 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, during which he maintained he was innocent.Because he would not admit to the attack, he was deniedparolefive times.Broadwater was released in 1999, and remained on New York'ssex offender registry,before ultimately being exonerated in 2021.

Writing ofLucky

After the rape, Sebold 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 wasMonsters.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.

Luckywas published in 1999, in which she described every aspect of the rape in graphic detail. She used the fictitious name "Gregory Madison" for the rapist.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 experiencedhypervigilance.She resigned her night job, fearing danger in darkness. She was depressed, suffered from nightmares, drank heavily and snortedheroinfor three years. Eventually, after readingJudith Lewis Herman'sTrauma and Recovery,she realized she had developedpost-traumatic stress disorder.

According to one reviewer,Luckywas 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 adaptLuckyto film, he noticed discrepancies in the portion of her book describing the trial. He later toldThe 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 was fired from the project when he did not provide funding as he had originally agreed, and subsequently hired a private investigator to review the evidence against Broadwater.

In November 2021, Broadwater wasexoneratedby aNew York Supreme Courtjustice, who determined there had been serious issues with the original conviction. The conviction had relied heavily on two pieces of evidence: Sebold's testimony andmicroscopic hair analysis,a forensic technique theUnited States Department of Justicelaterfound to be unreliable.

At thepolice lineup,which included Broadwater, Sebold had identified a different person as her rapist. When police told her she had identified someone other than Broadwater, she said the two men looked "almost identical".Defense attorneys arguing for Broadwater's exoneration asserted that, after the lineup, the prosecutor lied to Sebold, telling her that the man she had identified and Broadwater were friends, and that they both came to the lineup to confuse her.They also stated that Sebold wrote inLuckythat the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification.In 2021, Broadwater's new attorneys argued that this influenced Sebold's testimony.Onondaga CountyDistrict Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who joined the motion to overturn the conviction, argued that suspect identification is prone to error, particularly when the suspect is a differentracefrom the victim; Sebold is white and Broadwater is black.

After his exoneration, Broadwater said: "I'm not bitter or have malice towards her."A week later, 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."The manner of Sebold's apology drew criticism from some observers, who noted that it was largely made in thepassive voiceand did not acknowledge any direct responsibility for Broadwater's conviction.Scribner,the publisher ofLucky,released a statement following Broadwater's exoneration that distribution of all formats of the book would cease.

The Lovely Bones

See also:The Lovely Bones

OnceLuckywas 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 asThe Lovely Bonesin 2002. It is the story of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered at age 14. In an interview withPublishers 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 theHouston Chronicledescribed 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 at its most wonderful, and most awful, even at its most mundane."A reviewer forThe New York Timeswrote that Sebold had "the ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose".The Lovely Bonesremained onThe New York TimesBest Seller listfor over one yearand by 2007, had sold over ten million copies worldwide.

In 2010, it was adapted into afilm of the same namebyPeter Jackson,starringSaoirse Ronan,Susan Sarandon,Stanley Tucci,Mark Wahlberg,andRachel Weisz.

Other writing

Sebold's second novel,The Almost Moon,describes anart class modelwho murders her mother. It begins with the sentence: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily" and continues a key theme of her two other books in describing acts of violence. Sebold uses the killing as the starting point from which to examine dysfunctional relationships between parents and their daughters.The book received mixed reviews.

Sebold guest-editedThe Best American Short Stories 2009.

Awards and recognition

The Lovely Boneswon theBram Stoker Awardfor First Novel and theHeartland Prizein 2002,and theAmerican Booksellers Association's Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003.Sebold heldMacDowellfellowships in 2000, 2005, and 2009.In 2016,Emerson Collegeawarded Sebold with an honorary degree.

Personal life

In 2001, Sebold married the novelistGlen David Gold;the couple divorced in 2012.

Works

• Lucky(memoir, 1999), Scribner,ISBN0-684-85782-0
• The Lovely Bones(novel, 2002), Little, Brown,ISBN0-316-66634-3
• The Almost Moon(novel, 2007), Little, Brown,ISBN0-316-67746-9

External links

• Alice SeboldatIMDb