Alice Sebold's debut novel, 2002's The Lovely Bones, was a tremendous sensation and an international bestseller. The story of a 14-year-old girl raped, murdered, dismembered, and watching from heaven as her friends and family deal with her death is surprisingly poetic, given the subject matter. It's a strange, delicate sort of mystery novel, in which the reader knows who the killer is from the beginning, but the characters (apart from his victim, Susie Salmon) don't; the question is whether he'll be caught, and whether Susie will come to terms with her death either way.
Sebold paused while writing Lovely Bones to write another book, Lucky, an unflinching, mesmerizing memoir about her own violent rape, and the subsequent capture and trial of her rapist. Violence and torment surface yet again in her third book, the new novel The Almost Moon, which begins with a 49-year-old woman instinctively murdering her senile, mentally ill mother, then alternately deals with the preceding decades and the following 24 hours, shaping a picture of why it happened and following what Helen does next. While on tour supporting Almost Moon, Sebold spoke with The A.V. Club about finding her voice, avoiding her reviews, and the Lovely Bones film adaptation that Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson is helming.
The A.V. Club: You've said you didn't start writing The Almost Moon with that much-discussed first line, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." What was the first thing you wrote?
Alice Sebold: I have no idea. [Laughs.] I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.
AVC: How do you find the voice you want? Do you outline and plan, or just sit down and write and see where it takes you?
AS: Yeah, I don't outline and plan, I just work with what I unattractively call "the subconscious stew."
AVC: Do you have any sense of how many drafts or how many directions you went through for this book?
AS: I know that I wrote pretty far into three different points of view before I found Helen's voice.
AVC: What do you do with the discarded versions? Do you keep them around to mine, or for posterity, or are you the slash-and-burn kind?
AS: I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street—what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.
AVC: What's your actual writing process like?
AS: I wake up very early in the morning. I like to start in the dark, and I never work at night, because my brain is evaporated by 4 p.m.
AVC: Do you work with a goal? A set number of hours, or a set number of words or pages?
AS: Depending on where I am in the process, sometimes I have a page count and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I have an hour count; sometimes I'm just happy to string a few words together. I do keep pretty rigorous hours, because otherwise you never get anything done.
AVC: How did you know with Almost Moon when you'd found the voice you wanted to stick with?
AS: I guess it's like the same way a musician feels when they hit the right note. It was the marriage of the obsessions and the voice, and it just sounded right to me. To my ear, it was right.
AVC: The book has a very different voice from The Lovely Bones—less poetic, more blunt and practical. Was that a conscious choice?
AS: Well, they're two different people with two different experiences and lives, so they have voices that are different from one another. I think I'm not interested in repeating myself, so to me it would be a happy thing that Helen's voice is different than Susie's.
AVC: When you wrote Lucky, did you find that non-fiction required a similar process of having to write and rewrite to find your direction?
AS: Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.
AVC: When you write to see where the story goes, do the characters wind up surprising you?
AS: Sure. In some sense, I would say just about everything does. It's not true and it is true, in that Helen, once I had the voice, she really directed the specifics of the book in some ways. In other words, she tells me as much as I tell her, so it's a coupling in that way.
AVC: Are there points along the way where you have to take control back? Do you ever have concerns about where the characters are taking the book?
AS: It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.
AVC: Do you find yourself judging their behavior? Do you have a moral judgment about the things Helen does?
AS: No, I just leave that up to people who read it. [Laughs.] Moral judgment's not a big thing for me.
AVC: It seems like her backstory is designed to draw sympathy and to make people understand why she does what she does, but she sees herself fairly unsympathetically.
AS: Right. Well, she judges herself, partially, which I think is a pretty common phenomenon.
AVC: Does that give you more freedom to not judge her one way or the other, because she does that for you?
AS: I hadn't really thought about that. I just write the character. I don't know if I've got an answer to that one. [Laughs.]
AVC: Sometimes it's hard in the book to tell why she's doing what she's doing; she herself periodically says, "I don't know why I did that. I don't know where that came from." Do you yourself feel like you know?
AS: I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things. So it made sense to me to reflect the human condition that not every action has an explanation. We act, and then later maybe come to an understanding about it, or maybe not.
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