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. Anthony Broadwater was incorrectly identified as 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.
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.
In the early hours of May 8, 1981, while Sebold was a freshman at Syracuse University, she was assaulted and raped while walking home along a pathway that passed a tunnel to an amphitheater near campus. She reported the crime to campus security and the police, who took her statement and investigated, but could not identify any suspects. Five months later, while walking down a street near the Syracuse campus, she encountered a man whom she believed to be the rapist. The man, Anthony Broadwater, ultimately served 16 years in prison, maintaining his innocence throughout. Because he would not admit to the attack, he was denied parole five times. Broadwater was released in 1999, and remained on New York's sex offender registry, before ultimately being exonerated in 2021.
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.
After the rape, Sebold struggled to make sense of life for at least ten years. In 1996 or 1997, she began writing a novel about the rape and murder of an adolescent girl. The interim title was Monsters. She found herself struggling to finish it, and abandoned several other novels she had also started. Eventually, she realized she needed to write about the rape and its impact on her first.
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. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1998.
Lucky was published in 1999, in which she described every aspect of the rape in graphic detail. She used the fictitious name "Gregory Madison" for the rapist. The title of her memoir stemmed from a conversation with a police officer who told her that another woman had been raped and murdered in the same location, and that Sebold was "lucky" because she hadn't been killed. Sebold wrote that the attack made her feel isolated from her family, and that for years afterwards, she experienced hypervigilance. She resigned 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.
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.
In 2001, Sebold married the novelist Glen David Gold; the couple divorced in 2012.
Once Lucky was finished, Sebold was able to complete her novel, Monsters. She sent the manuscript to her mentor, Wilton Barnhardt, who passed it to his agent. The work was eventually published as The Lovely Bones in 2002. It is the story of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered at age 14. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Sebold said, "I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't. Though it's a horrible experience, it's not as if violence hasn't affected many of us."
In 2010, 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.
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. They also stated that Sebold wrote in Lucky that the prosecutor coached her into changing her identification. In 2021, Broadwater's new attorneys argued that this influenced Sebold's testimony. Onondaga County District Attorney William J. Fitzpatrick, who joined the motion to overturn the conviction, argued that suspect identification is prone to error, particularly when the suspect is a different race from the victim; Sebold is white and Broadwater is black.
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.