Alice Sebold (1963-) Greta Olson (Justus-Liebig-University) Memoirist, Novelist. Active 1999- in United States Alice Sebold lives with her writer husband Glen David Gold and dogs in California. At the date of this writing, one cannot know whether she will be remembered as a flash- in-the-pan writer, whose debut novel The Lovely Bones (2002) was a much lauded, surprise bestseller, or if she has the gravitas to be heralded in the future as a dark portraitist of suburban American family life. In the deadpan quality of her writing, her biting humor and her attention to the painful dysfunctionality endemic to educated middle-class American families, her work is not unrelated to that of Jonathan Franzen. Sebold grew up as a self-defined ‘weirdo’ in Paoli, Pennsylvania, the younger daughter of a Spanish professor father and a frustrated writer mother (McCrum). Her liberal arts education at the University of Syracuse was interrupted at the end of her freshman year when she was attacked, beaten, and raped. This rape and what followed, including her family and fellow students’ inability to deal with the assault, and the deep traces on her identity that the rape left, form the contents of Sebold’s first book, the memoir Lucky (1999). Pitch black in its irony, the title refers to what the investigating police told Sebold in a misinformed act of condolence as she recounted the assault; another woman had been murdered and dismembered in the same place where she had been raped. By comparison she had had ‘good luck.’ Reissued in paperback in 2002 with a reading group guide, Lucky’s powerful account is arguably Sebold’s finest work to date. A trauma narrative, it recounts in unadorned prose not only what is required to have the principal weight of suspicion removed from the rape victim during an investigation and trial – Sebold had been a virgin who was wearing loose clothes when the assault took place; her assailant was unknown to her – but also society’s continuous attempts to silence rape victims, something about which Sebold has continued to speak out actively (Viner). As harrowing as the blow-by-blow description of the rape is Lucky’s transcript-like description of the rape trial. Sebold recounts her struggle to