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. The Lovely Bones was on The New York Times Best Seller list and was adapted into a film by the same name in 2009.

Her memoir, Lucky, sold over a million copies and describes her experience in her first year at Syracuse University, when she was raped. She falsely accused Anthony Broadwater of being the perpetrator. Broadwater 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.

Early life and education Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin.

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.

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. Five months later, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she encountered a man whom she mistakenly believed to be the rapist and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker. Although she identified a different man in a police lineup, the police arrested Anthony Broadwater, and Sebold later identified Broadwater in court as the perpetrator. Broadwater ultimately served 16 years in prison, during which he maintained his innocence. Eventually, she realized she needed to write about the rape and its impact on her first. Sebold wrote that the attack made her feel isolated from her family, and that for years afterwards, she experienced hypervigilance. She resigned from 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.

Initially, Lucky received positive reviews. 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.

In November 2021, Broadwater was 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 two pieces of evidence: Sebold's testimony and 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 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. 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 the passive voice and did not acknowledge any personal responsibility for Broadwater's conviction.

The film adaptation of Lucky was canceled after losing its funding in mid-2021.

The Lovely Bones

Once Lucky was finished, Sebold was able to complete her novel, Monsters. She sent the manuscript to her mentor, Wilton Barnhardt,

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 at its most wonderful, and most awful, even at its most mundane." and by 2007, had sold over ten million copies worldwide. In The Guardian, Philip Hensher called it "a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy."

In 2009, it was adapted into a film of the same name by Peter Jackson, starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, and Rachel Weisz.

Other writing Sebold's second novel, The Almost Moon, describes an art class model who 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.

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 2000, 2005, and 2009. In 2016, Emerson College awarded Sebold with an honorary degree.

Personal life In 2001, Sebold married the novelist Glen David Gold;

Works Lucky (memoir, 1999), Scribner, The Lovely Bones (novel, 2002), Little, Brown, The Almost Moon (novel, 2007), Little, Brown,