8/18/2023 0 Comments Lovely bones authorIt's just kind of basic human acknowledgment. They read the book, and now they're sharing something with you.' So it's a reciprocal relationship. A friend of mine said something that I liked, which is, 'You've already given them what they wanted, which was the book. "They're not asking me to fix anything or do anything. If Sebold were a different type of person, perhaps she would find these exchanges - which, admirably, she prefers not to detail - emotionally draining.īut these interactions are gratifying for her. And we kind of look at each other for a minute or two, and then they move on." ' and then tell me the rest of that," she says matter-of-factly. There is something serene in her manner, a deliberate detachment that perhaps makes the sudden rush of success less unwieldy than it might otherwise be.Īgain and again at book readings, Sebold has been approached by people who have lost someone - a parent, a child, a spouse, a friend. Sebold is sitting at a corner table of a midtown restaurant, where the morning light makes her pale skin seem luminous. The idea that grief is something that contorts your life and changes things and that you want to try to find some kind of hope out of. "Everybody has lost somebody, so to be honest about that seems to be attractive to a lot of the readers. "This was not a book that was supposedly supposed to do this," says Sebold, still shaking her head in disbelief as she tries to explain the novel's success. Sebold, a 40-year-old whose only published book before this was the 1999 memoir "Lucky," has become a literary sensation. More than 2 million copies of "Bones" are in print (Little, Brown has reprinted 17 times), and the foreign rights have been sold in 18 countries. in early July, it has spent 15 weeks on or near the top of most bestseller lists. Since "The Lovely Bones" was published by Little, Brown and Co. The "lovely bones" of the title have to do with what Sebold describes as "the architecture of loss" - the often hard-won connections between people that are built around the absence of someone after they die. But Susie spends most of her time watching her family learn to bear their unbearable loss. Instead, we learn about Susie's custom-made Heaven, an idealized version of the high school that she would never attend, where there are no teachers, the boys aren't rude and the textbooks are fashion magazines. Harvey, a middle-aged loner adept at hiding his horrifying compulsions. Three days later, a neighborhood dog brought home one of her elbows.īecause "The Lovely Bones" is not a murder mystery, we know from the very start that Susie's life was taken by a neighbor, Mr. Later in the first chapter, we learn that Susie, 14, was on her way home from school when she was raped and dismembered in a cornfield. By now it seems that almost everyone has read or heard about Alice Sebold's remarkable debut novel, "The Lovely Bones." In its opening paragraph, narrator Susie Salmon informs the reader that she was murdered on Dec.
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