Alice Sebold

Alice Sebold (born September 6, 1963) is an American author.

She is known for her novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, and a memoir, Lucky.

Sebold graduated from Great Valley High School in Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1980.

Sebold attended Syracuse University, 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.

In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse 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, maintaining his innocence throughout.

Because he would not admit to the attack, he was denied parole five times.

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.

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.

She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1998.

Broadwater was released in 1999, and remained on New York's sex offender registry, before ultimately being exonerated in 2021.

After the rape, Sebold struggled to make sense of life for at least ten years.

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 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 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.

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.

The Lovely Bones was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was adapted into a film by the same name in 2010.

Her memoir, Lucky, 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, spent 16 years in prison.

He was exonerated in 2021, after a judge overturned the original conviction.

Consequently, the publisher of Lucky announced that the book would no longer be distributed.

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.