The title comes from a police officer who told her on the night of her rape that she was lucky to be alive. Sebold's second novel, 'The Lovely Bones' began as a story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl called 'Monsters'. Sebold's third and most recent novel, 'The Almost Moon' takes a slightly different tack but still holds to Sebold's unique, flowing writing style and dark themes.
It is the story of an agoraphobic woman who spontaneously kills her mother. Born c. Alice Sebold's debut novel, The Lovely Bones, dominated the best-seller lists for several months in The story of a murdered teenager who observes her grieving family and the impact the crime had on everyone involved, Sebold's literary tour-de-force struck a chord with readers, garnered impressive reviews, and sold 2.
Alice Sebold. In an article solely devoted to this publishing phenomenon of the year, New York Times writer Bill Goldstein called Sebold's novel "the literary equivalent of that other word-of-mouth success My Big Fat Greek Wedding, " and included it in a roster of several other recent novels, more literary in spirit than purely potboiler, that had also climbed to the top of the best-seller lists.
Such books, Goldstein asserted, were "a trend that appears to be blurring the boundaries of literary and commercial fiction. Born in the early s, Sebold spent her formative years in suburban Philadelphia. Her mother was a journalist for a local paper, while her father was a professor of Spanish at the Ivy-League University of Pennsylvania. She had an older sister who excelled in school, and while Sebold was also a good student, she was the self-admitted joker in her family.
It was a way of coping with the stress inside the household, which she dissected years later in her memoir, Lucky. Her parents were undemonstrative, and her mother suffered from panic attacks and endured a secret drinking problem for a number of years. Because her parents were more intellectual than their neighbors in their upper-middle-class world, Sebold recalled that they were considered somewhat "weird," a tag that followed her into college.
Sebold chose to attend Syracuse University—in part to distance herself from her family—and it was there, near the end of her freshman year, that she was attacked while walking back to her dormitory on the evening of the last day of school for the year. She struggled with her assailant, but was badly beaten and bloodied. After sexually assaulting her in a tunnel that was once the stage entrance to a now-closed amphitheater, he let her go.
She managed to make it back to her dorm, and was taken from there to a local hospital. When she gave the police her account of the rape, one cop told her that the tunnel had been the site of where a young woman was once murdered and dismembered, and made the offhand remark that Sebold was "lucky" to have walked away. Sebold's rapist was caught, convicted, and given a maximum prison sentence, but the ordeal was far from over.
She recounts in Lucky, her memoir centered around the experience, that she lost friends over it, and that even her father was disdainful that she had not put up more enough of a struggle.
Somewhat surprisingly, Sebold returned to school in Syracuse, and after graduating headed to the University of Houston for a brief attempt at graduate school. She eventually settled in New York City, where she planned to become a writer.
While working in an adjunct professorship position at Hunter College, Sebold discovered her gift for teaching. After living in the city for ten years, she moved to California and became a caretaker of the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. At age 33, she began writing a novel called Monsters, a story about the rape and murder of a year old girl. After more revisions, Monsters eventually became The Lovely Bones.
The title came from the policeman who told her she was lucky to be alive after her rape attack. He had a Ph. Her mother, Jane, was an alcoholic, who suffered severe bouts of panic and anxiety. They married in November, And yet it reflects a moving, passionate interest in and love for ordinary life as it's most wonderful, and most awful, even at its most mundane.
Sebold says it was hard to get accustomed to this overnight success, given her modesty. In its fifth month after publication, The Lovely Bones had finally fallen to the second spot on the Times Bestseller list. Director Peter Jackson secured the book's film rights and began production of a film adaptation of the novel. In a interview, he said, "I don't want the tone or the mood to be different or lost in the film.
The production then moved to New Zealand. The film is scheduled for a release. Sebold's second novel, Almost Noon , is about a suburban woman living in Pennsylvania who kills her elderly mother in a fit of rage.
In this novel, Sebold admits to returning to her "obsessions" the dark side of suburbia and of mother-daughter relations. This novel is literary fiction with a gothic twist. Throughout her life, Sebold's mother too wanted to pursue a career in writing and poetry. This mother-daughter psychodrama, Sebold says, is framed in her mind and thought of this bad relationship as the topic of her novel.
In the end of her misery memoir Lucky , Sebold leaves her readers with a sense of sadness of how she, at only 18, experienced a horrific tragedy and will continue to live the rest of her life in agony, constantly desiring normalcy. Photo Credit: David Shankbone. The photographer dedicates this photograph to Daniel Case, who requested it for Ms.
Sebold's Wikipedia article, for his many improvements to the Wikipedia project. Cropped to 4x3. Source: Wikipedia Commons. Skip to main content. You are here Home.
Primary Vocation: Literary. Selected Works: Lucky.
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