The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - Essay Example She struggled with her assailant, but was badly beaten and bloodied. Sebold's rapist was caught, convicted, and given a maximum prison sentence, but the ordeal was far from over. Somewhat surprisingly, Sebold returned to school in Syracuse, and after graduating headed to the University of Houston for a brief attempt at graduate school. She eventually settled in New York City, where she planned to become a writer. For years, she lived in the East Village--during its rattiest period, before it was an acceptable post-college, bar-and-restaurant-filled enclave--while working as a research analyst and teaching English as an adjunct instructor at Hunter College on the side. It took her several years to emerge from her post-assault experience, she admitted, and recalled her 20s as a period in which she dated the wrong men, drank too much, snorted heroin for three years, and took part in daring stunts like climbing to the top of the Manhattan Bridge. Finally, Sebold wrote a New York Times article about her rape, which led to an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. A sentence from her article was quoted a few years later in a book called Trauma and Recovery, about post-traumatic stress disorder. As she explained in an interview with the Guardian's Katharine Viner, reading that book was a turning point in her life. "I was failing miserably in New York, I'd written two novels that weren't published," she recalled. Sebold applied to graduate school in California, but was determined to relocate no matter what. "If I didn't get in I was going to buy a dozen nude-colored panty hose and get an office job in Temecula, California," she said in the interview with Valby. (Huntley p1510) Accepted into the master of fine arts writing program at the University of California's Irvine campus, she took out a student loan, and met her future husband on the first day of school. The work earned good reviews, with Publishers Weekly describing it as a "fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life," but failed to catch on with readers. (Conway p127) Finally, she finished The Lovely Bones manuscript, and it netted her a two-book deal with Little, Brown. As advance copies began circulating in the months prior to its June of 2002 publication date, a publishing-industry and bookseller buzz began to attach to it. The Lovely Bones, told from the viewpoint of a 14-year-old rape and murder victim looking down from heaven, struck a nerve with a society reeling from accounts of 12-year-old Ashley Pond and 13-year-old Miranda Gaddis, Danielle van Dam, 7, Samantha Runnion, 5, and 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart, all snatched and silenced since January. Summary Drawing on folkloric and religious motifs and ideas, Alice Sebold presents a remarkable, complex, and comforting vision of heaven as the platform from which Susie Salmon, raped and murdered by a neighbor at the age of fourteen, tells her story. It is a heaven that indeed has many "mansions," one of which is the "wide wide Heaven," which can provide one's every desire. The word Susie's grandfather has for the dominant quality of this heaven is "comfort," and oddly comforting, indeed, is Alice Sebold's novel because it postulates a vision of heaven that begins with an "intake" level of simplicity that matches