Alice Sebold biography

Synopsis

Early Years

Born Alice Sebold on September 6, 1963, in Madison, Wisconsin. The daughter of two academic parents, Sebold grew up in a household dominated by dysfunction. Her mother, Jane, was an alcoholic, who suffered severe bouts of panic and anxiety, often leaving Sebold and her older sister Mary to take care of her.

Sebold's father, a Spanish professor, eventually relocated his family to Paoli, Pennsylvania, where Jane worked as a journalist for a small newspaper and he taught at the University of Pennsylvania. To help diffuse the difficulties her home life introduced, the argumentative and sarcastic Sebold took on the role of the "family moron."

"[They] seemed to have more fun, more freedom, and more personality," Sebold has said.

Tragedy Strikes

After high school, Sebold, in an attempt to distance herself from her family, enrolled at Syracuse University in upstate New York in the fall of 1980. But during her first year at the school, Sebold suffered a horrific event that would change her life. While walking back to her dorm one evening, she was brutally attacked and raped in a tunnel. Sebold eventually made it back to her room where friends took her to the hospital. After reporting her case to the police, one of the officers said she was "lucky" to be alive. Not long before, another rape had occurred in the same tunnel where Sebold had been attacked, that had resulted in a woman's death and dismemberment.

Sebold's attacker was eventually apprehended and sentenced to prison but, not surprisingly, finding closure wasn't easy for Sebold. "In my world, I saw violence everywhere," she later wrote. "It was not a song or a dream or a plot point." She was, however, determined to move forward, and returned to Syracuse to finish her degree.

Sebold's immediate post-college years only brought more trauma. Her parents, unable to process what had really happened to their daughter, proved to be of little support. After a failed attempt at graduate school in Texas, Sebold landed in New York City, where she started experimenting with heroin.

But there were some glimmers of hope. While working in an adjunct professorship position at Hunter College, Sebold discovered her gift for teaching. She then relocated to California and took a position as the caretaker of an arts colony. Sebold's living conditions put her in the middle of the woods without electricity, where she learned to embrace solitude.

She also continued to write, experimenting with a novel about the rape and murder of a young girl that she tentatively called Monsters. After some time, Sebold enrolled at University of Irvine for graduate school, where she met her husband, writer Glen David Gold.