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 …