After a savage rape, her assailant forced her to kiss him, urinated on her and eventually left her to crawl to safety, like a wounded animal. 'I'm a virgin,' she pleaded, to no avail. She fought her rapist, but he beat her up anyway. One night during her first semester, on her way back to her dorm, Sebold was brutally raped in the tunnel to an amphitheatre. But when she left home and went to college, that 'weirdness' became very weird (aka shocking, traumatic and horrifying) indeed. She has described herself as 'very happy with my weirdness'. 'Weird' is a word that crops up a lot in Sebold's conversation. The life of Alice Sebold was just about to get 'a little bit different'. Nevertheless, it was a conventional liberal-arts course that took her to Syracuse in upstate New York in the fall of 1980, aged 18. To Sebold's bewilderment and, I suspect, inner rage, her father couldn't get his faculty-brat daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Her husband jokes that when she's in a mood you want your name to rhyme with 'Orange'. Even now, in moments of private stress, she releases the tension by chanting aloud in rhyming couplets. But (another merry laugh), 'I couldn't sing.' So it would have to be poetry. For Alice Sebold, whose parents lavished all their approval and attention on their straight-A-winning eldest daughter Mary (and Alice's childhood rival), it was Broadway or nothing.
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Speaking for 'the frustrated fat girl' who could not fit into the repressed routines of her parents' lives, and who suffered from a mild dyslexia that inhibited her adolescent reading, she notes that, 'As a misfit, if you become that super-freak on stage, you think that things will work out for you.'įinding a place in the world is every teenager's project. Looking back from the safe high ground of middle-aged success, she is happy to say: 'I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.' With another convulsion of merriment, she observes, in a kind of warning: 'The life of a middle-aged snob is something that seems horrible to me.' Somewhere else she has said she feels no bond with 'well-educated writers'.įor all that, she always wanted to be a writer, 'with a penchant for the morbid', and felt herself 'divided between being a poet and Ethel Merman or Bette Midler'.
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Why is it wrong to embroider your pants, or paint with acrylics on your clothing? Why is that weird? Isn't it weirder to want to be like everyone else?'Īs an academic family, the Sebolds had their own kind of weirdness - fierce dinner-table arguments about the meanings of words - and Alice was, 'kind of proudly', she says, in full revolt against it. 'I always had that sense of being censored for the things that I thought. That was me,' she recalls, letting out another fruity laugh. The teenage Alice, she says, was 'too smart, too fat, too loud, too arty', and she fought her mismatched, unhappily married parents tooth and nail.
She is the 'alienated' second child of academic, self-improving parents from the University of Pennsylvania (her father taught Spanish), a college awkwardly placed towards the bottom of the Ivy League. Certainly, there's a book to be written about the creative kids of the suburbs in contemporary America, from Steven Spielberg to Dave Eggers, dreamy misfits from the place that's sometimes called Disturbia.Īlice Sebold, who is one of these children, grew up in Paoli, a comfortable, God-fearing middle-class suburb on Philadelphia's Main Line region. How much she has to hide remains to be seen. This is a significant declaration from a writer who makes a fetish of her 'honesty' and her 'truth-telling', and who has been at odds with the adult world almost all her life. 'I've decided to trust you,' she says a few minutes into our conversation. That's what she wants you to think because, behind her mask, she's watchful, and alert.
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But although she might seem a little bit gothic (black silk blouse, black trousers, jet-black fringe and pure white skin animated with sensuous scarlet lips) she projects none of the whimsical self-absorption you might imagine from reading her 2002 mega-bestseller The Lovely BonesĪt odds with her image, and some of the things she has said in the past about the predictability of violence in everyday life, she's rather jolly and game for a laugh, with smiley, Chinese-looking eyes and a lovely, infectious chuckle that bubbles up from somewhere deep inside. Sebold, now 45, still possesses the singularity of a weird child telling herself stories, and the unworldly detachment from everyday life of a woman who needs to be lonely.
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