Alice Sebold
1 book analyzed
Biography
Alice Sebold was born in 1963 in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in suburban Philadelphia — the same landscape The Lovely Bones inhabits. In 1981, as a freshman at Syracuse University, she was raped in a tunnel on campus. Her memoir Lucky (1999) describes that assault and its aftermath: the trial, the conviction, the years of processing. The Lovely Bones was her debut novel, published in 2002. It became one of the fastest-selling debut novels in American history — three years on the New York Times bestseller list, over ten million copies sold in the United States alone. Sebold has said that Susie is not herself, but the novel's engagement with rape, family rupture, and the impossibility of conventional justice is unmistakably rooted in her own experience.