The Lovely Bones And The Almost Moon By Alice Sebold

Natalee Gallahar
Amanda Lumpkin
English Composition 101-102
14 April 2023
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold is an American writer known for her fiction works The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon, as well as her memoir Lucky. Sebold was born in 1963 into a family who had a love for literature. Her mother was a journalist for a local newspaper, and her father was a Spanish College Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a journalist. In her memoir, she notes that she was known as the joker in her family as a way of coping with the problems going on in her household. Her parents weren’t very good role models to her and her older sister, as her mother had suffered from panic attacks and had a secret drinking problem. Her family was

At the end of her freshman year, she was attacked on the way back to her dorm room. She was raped, badly beaten, and bloodied. She was sexually assaulted in a tunnel that was once a stage entrance to an amphitheater but the man let her go, where she was then able to make it back to her dorm room. After going to the hospital, she reported the crime and the cop told her that another girl had been raped and killed in the same place and made a remark about how “lucky” she was to be alive. This inspired her memoir Lucky where she describes her experience of being raped and beaten, as well as how this experience shaped her whole life into what it is

Years later after releasing that article, a quote from it was put into a book called Trauma and Recovery where she noticed she was quoted in the trauma section but not in the recovery, making herself seek help and get the therapy she knew she needed to come to terms with her assault. She left New York after being there for almost ten years, moving to California. There, she was accepted into the Master of fine arts writing program at the University of California’s Irvine campus where she quickly met her soon-to-be future husband. Sebold got her M.F.A and published her memoir Lucky a year later. The book had a disappointing amount of sales and after not being sold enough on hardcover it was never even printed in