Author Birthday: Alice Sebold

photo credit

From today's Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of writer Alice Sebold (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1963). She grew up near Philadelphia — and she says that she was the "weird" one in an otherwise normal, suburban, middle-class family. Her older sister was smart and talented, but Alice fell between the cracks. She was turned down by the University of Pennsylvania even though her father was a professor there. 

She ended up at Syracuse, and during her first semester of college, she was attacked and raped near campus. Sebold tried to piece her life back together — she helped bring her rapist to trial and got him convicted with a maximum sentence; and she went back to college, where she was mentored by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher in the creative writing program. But after graduation, she floated around all over the country, did too many drugs, worked a series of jobs, and made halfhearted attempts to write but never finished anything. When she was in her 30s, she got a job as the caretaker of an arts colony in California. It was there, in a cinderblock house in the woods with no electricity, that she finally started to write seriously. She applied to graduate school and wrote a memoir, Lucky (1999). 

Her breakthrough was her first novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), the story of a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered and narrates the whole novel from heaven while looking down on her family and murderer. It remained on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year.  

Sebold has said in interviews that she was as surprised by the book's success as anyone. She said, "It's very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway." 

Her most recent novel is The Almost Moon (2007).

A decade ago, it seemed like you couldn't turn around without bumping into The Lovely Bones.  The book was everywhere and probably read by nearly every book club in the country! I read it with both online and in-person groups and, while I didn't love it, found it fresh, creative, and disturbing.  Many members of the groups went on to read Lucky,  but I decided against it ... not my type of memoir.

Several years later, I listened to The Almost Moon.  It was engrossing, dark, and, again, disturbing. I wonder if she has a new book in progress. Have you read Alice Sebold?