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Letter to the editor

Author Sebold slowly surrenders private life

Readers always question how much of Alice Sebold's books reflect her reality.

By John Freeman, Special to the Times
Published November 25, 2007

The Almost Moon
By Alice Sebold
Little, Brown and Co., 304 pages, $24.99

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Eight years after publishing a harrowing memoir about being raped, half a decade since her blockbuster debut novel, The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold has discovered she is a more private person than she originally thought.

You can see it in her face as she strides, 15 minutes late, to New York City's flagship Barnes & Noble at Union Square, dressed all in black.

She had been out all night and done a TV interview that morning. More negative reviews of her new novel, The Almost Moon, are on the way, perhaps explaining the barely 300 seats set up in a room that occasionally squeezes in more than 1,000.

Flanking one side of the podium is a poster of Moby Dick, a monster who entranced and eluded Melville's hero in a way the protagonist of Sebold's new novel might relate to, except the monster the woman confronts is her mother. And in the book's first line, Sebold's protagonist kills her dead.

"All right," Sebold jokes, "who's ready for more of my peppy, happy fiction?"

Five minutes later, the reading is over, the question period commences, and you see why such appearances might be difficult for her.

"I am curious to know if that story you just read has a parallel to your own life," one woman says.

"Is your mother living, and what did she think of The Almost Moon?" asks another.

"Can you tell us a little bit about your background?" asks a man, apparently unaware of her memoir.

The barrage continues and then dies down, but the air is thick with one presumption: No matter what Sebold writes, there will be a code and a key to it somewhere, buried in her real life or in her memoir, if only the public can keep her still long enough to ask about it.

"What did you like to read growing up?" one guest asks, to which Sebold replies a little too quickly to be fibbing: "Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, all the confessionalists."

A dark beginning

"I knew I made a mistake when I said that," she laughs two days later, by phone from San Francisco, where she moved recently with her husband, novelist Glen David Gould. Her voice is a husky deadpan - the sound of brutal honesty. Then she catches herself and recovers a more controlled timbre.

"Those were the perfect poets for me at the time," Sebold says, "living in the suburbs, where I was growing up, because they had a certain intelligence and spice which told me where I was living and what I was experiencing . . . that fabric was not the whole fabric, that was not the whole gloss of the world."

The rest of the world she would encounter is in her 1999 memoir, Lucky: the brutal rape she suffered at Syracuse University, her quest to put her rapist, whom she later recognized on the street, behind bars, recovery and then nonrecovery while living in New York City in the 1980s, reckless behavior, drugs, moving to California, a new start at writing and meeting her husband-to-be.

"I wasn't able to write very well the whole time I was in my darkest mood," Sebold says now. "I had to get to the place where I could write well - I'll try not to get too happy, but you know what, that's not really a threat."

She's right. The Almost Moon grew out of this mood and stability and is even darker than The Lovely Bones, somewhere between Patricia Highsmith and Stephen King.

It has a much more complicated, ambiguous sense of victimhood, and it begins with one of the most swiftly plotted lines in recent memory:

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

So says Helen Knightly, after smothering her 88-year-old mother, Clair, on the concrete patio behind her home. Her mother had dementia and soiled herself, precipitating the violence.

"It's a shock that I am suddenly being accused of being bleak," Sebold says. But there is something far darker about The Almost Moon than The Lovely Bones, which told the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl from her perspective in heaven, while her death remains unsolved.

Helen's crime is not a freak of malicious intent, or even a loving attempt to put her mother out of a degrading misery. It is a fantasy of revenge, acted out.

"Once begun," Helen says, "I did not stop. . . . I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died."

For the next 24 hours, Helen tries to cover up her crime, eventually calling upon her ex-husband and then her best friend's son, whom she takes to bed in a fury, to help her.

Neither can, especially as chips of memory drift to the fore and we discover Helen and her troubled father lived in thrall to her mother and her mental illness.

In Lucky, Sebold discovered "memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only resource of the powerless, the oppressed, the brutalized." In The Almost Moon, Sebold has written a character who turns to that recourse for solace or forgiveness and is crushed by it.

Glimpses of reality

It's impossible not to point out similarities between Helen and her creator. In Lucky, Sebold described her mother as an ex-alcoholic who would take to her bed some days, a woman she perceived as frail enough that her first concern after being raped was to protect her mother from knowing about it - convinced it would destroy her.

But Sebold says this new novel owes less to her childhood and more to watching her mother care for her own mother. But that's as far as she'll go.

"There is this desire - and how could you avoid it? - to find the roots. But I am not Helen, my mother is not Clair."

One thing that is somewhat true to life is the Pennsylvania Sebold writes about. Is Helen in some way the self she could have been had she never left Pennsylvania?

Sebold pauses for a long time, and then says, "I have seen many people who are unable to break that oppressive, destructive, duty-bound bond - not just to a parent who is ill, but a mentally ill parent who can be full of personality and very dominating. They are distinctly and inherently more interesting than the boring Mr. and Mrs. Jones; either you break free from that or you don't."

Lucky and The Lovely Bones prompted an avalanche of letters, some disturbing, some amusingly disturbing - fan fiction from grandmothers who had ideas about how she could have killed off the rapist in her novel - and some so involved she had to disengage.

And now, just a week into the American publication of The Almost Moon, Sebold has already begun to retreat.

"I think you only learn what kind of personality you have by committing to things," she says, and while she is grateful for her success, she doesn't feel she owes the world herself in response. In fact, she is being so irresponsible now as to take time to write poetry while working on a new novel.

"I'd like to go back to poetry again," Sebold says, for the first time sounding sheepish. "I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline."

The question remains, though, whether Alice Sebold can have privacy any more.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

[Last modified November 21, 2007, 18:22:34]