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Introduction


Alice Sebold
Alice Sebold has transformed the ugliest of violence into art. When she was an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, Sebold was brutally beaten and raped near campus. After her recovery, she returned to Syracuse where she recognized her attacker and had him arrested. Her memoir, Lucky, is about this attack. The title comes from her experience of being told by the police that she was “lucky” to be alive since another woman had been killed in the same area where Sebold was assaulted. Her novel The Lovely Bones, which is about a young girl who is murdered and tells her story from heaven, won much acclaim and many honors, including the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award in 2003 and the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 2002.

Essential Facts

  1. When Alice Sebold started writing The Lovely Bones, she felt that the novel’s main character urged Sebold to tell her own story first. So she put The Lovely Bones aside and wrote the memoir Lucky.
  2. Sebold worked for a time at an arts colony with no electricity and wrote by candlelight.
  3. Sebold went through a brief period of heroin abuse.
  4. Sebold loves and is greatly inspired by poetry. She originally set out to write her story in poetry, but it turned out as a novel instead.
  5. Sebold’s latest novel, The Almost Moon, is about a woman who murders her own mother.
 

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