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Author Alice Sebold to lecture in Iowa City

By Emily Grosvenor

No one writes first sentences like Alice Sebold. Often short, always shocking, they establish her characters swiftly and definitively, laying bare voices and identities that grab you by the throat until her books’ very last pages.

From Lucky, her 1999 memoir: “In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an ampitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.”

From her 2002 novel The Lovely Bones: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”

The first sentence of her latest novel, The Almost Moon: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”

The best-selling author will hold a free talk at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Main Lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union in Iowa City an event sponsored by the University Lecture Committee.

Not going to see her would mean forgoing a chance to stand face-to-face with one of the most successful and far-read writers of recent years, one whose two novels and one memoir touch on the taboos of rape, violence and matricide and explore them with great compassion and insight without ever exploiting the shock and awe such crimes engender.

For writers, she is also an example of the old mantra if at first you don’t succeed – well, you know the drill.  Sebold toiled for years and through other stylistic genres before finding the right way to tell the story of how she was beaten and raped as a freshman at Syracuse University. She tried poetry for about 10 years, and wrote a few “bad novels” before turning to nonfiction and discovering her voice there for her memoir, Lucky.  The book has become a touchstone for rape victims and their supporters everywhere and has been hailed as a nonfiction masterpiece.

Then, in 2002, she dropped her biggest bomb. Where Lucky was initially a quiet success with a limited audience, her 2002 novel The Lovely Bones took similar material – in this case, the brutal rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl Susie Salmon by a neighbor – and dealt with it to great imaginative effect, becoming a runaway bestseller that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.

Many critics hailed the author for taking a great fictional gamble: using a narrator who dies before the book’s first line and who is telling the story from heaven. In doing so, Sebold created a novel that is as powerful and unforgettable as it is mesmerizing. Often linked thematically with its memoir predecessor, which became a modest bestseller in its own right after readers began discovering the author, some even looked to the book as proof of fiction’s ability to convey truth more successfully than nonfiction.

Sebold, who lives in California with her husband, the author Glen David Gold, followed The Lovely Bones with The Almost Moon, a 2007 novel that completely divided critics. One critic called it “so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it’s bound to become a best seller.” The book told the story of a judgmental and often pathetic woman named Helen who murders her cancer-ridden, mentally incapacitated mother – and then waxes on about it for the next 24 hours and a few hundred pages. In what can only be seen as a feat of irony, The Almost Moon was all but dismembered in the culture pages of our most prominent publications.

Still, with a film adaptation of The Lovely Bones by director Peter Jackson set for release in 2009 (and starring Saoirse Ronan in the victim’s role), we can expect to hear much more from Sebold in the coming years. More importantly for students at the University of Iowa, she is sure to have much to say.