Alice Sebold mined her own pain to write her 1999 debut memoir Lucky. The book focused on Sebold’s rape in 1981 as a freshman at Syracuse University. But the man convicted of the crime in 1982, Anthony Broadwater, was exonerated a week ago on November 22, and there is a much more complex web of pain now woven into what was already a tragedy.
Sebold also wrote The Lovely Bones, which was the biggest selling book of the year in 2002 — a rare occurrence for a first-time fiction author at the time — which was turned into a feature film in 2009 starring Saoirse Ronan. The author, having made a career out of dark stories both fiction and nonfiction, must now face perhaps the darkest story of all: that she misidentified an innocent man who was then jailed for 16 years and haunted by the conviction for four decades.
