More than the world's rape counsellor

Alice Sebold was brutally attacked at 18. After writing two books on the subject she wants to change direction, writes Angela Long

Alice Sebold has made her fame with two books dealing with rape. But it is a subject she doesn't really want to go into. She has moved on. "My journey is about writing," she says. That's how she wants to be regarded: not as a spokesman or figurehead, not as a rape counsellor to the world.

The dark-haired, smiling and laid-back 40-year-old is the author of The Lovely Bones, a novel about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, and Lucky, her memoir. She winces at the description that follows her wherever she goes, but here it is all the same: Alice Sebold was brutally raped at the age of 18. She was a virgin. At the time she was taking what she presumed was a safe, familiar route home on the campus of her university, wearing big jeans, her mother's shirt, a cable-knot cardigan.

Not exactly temptress dress.

Her attacker, whom she had never seen before, was a youth from a family known to police in the town, Syracuse, in New York state. She saw him again, five months later, in daylight, when he spoke to her: "Don't I know you from somewhere?" Unpleasant as the experience was, it gave her the lucky break she needed for him to be picked up by police, charged and tried.

Her following through with the case made her unusual among rape victims. Some of the initial police responses to her were conditioned by the expectation that it was the last they'd hear of her.

Although there is some expression of a fear or hatred of men after the attack, Lucky is not an anti-man treatise and she appears to have retained no such feelings. "If you like men anyway it isn't going to change you totally. And in those first moments and hours after the rape there were men in the room when I was telling my story, men who helped me." She regrets that rape is still often seen as exclusively a woman's torment, though she points out that the number of women who rape is tiny. "A few years ago I did a piece for the Village Voice [newspaper in New York\] in which I spoke to four men who had been raped, but by adult males. The editor didn't like it and didn't use it, but his only objection seemed to be that these men were very articulate about what happened to them. I'd say, yeah, if you spend 20 years thinking of a trauma like that, you can get pretty articulate."

Lucky was published in the US four years ago but is now out for the first time in Ireland and Britain. There was obviously a gap in the market, Sebold notes, that her books fill.

"When it happened to me there was nothing out there. At 18 I felt a responsibility to write about it. I might not have written the book at all if there had been other books doing the same thing." Even when Lucky came out in the US the huge bookstore chain Barnes & Noble put it in the recovery-and-addiction section. She got one letter from a reader "very pissed off" that she had not explained how to recover after such an outrage. Although, of course, she did, but not in the manner of recovery-and-addiction literature.

"I have never associated myself with any rape-crisis centre or group like that." In Lucky she described such an option as a club she didn't want to belong to. "After one book reading a woman came to me and wanted to sit down for two or three hours to talk about her rape. I had to tell her I just can't do that."

She lives with her husband, Glen David Gold, also a writer, , in a southern California town she does not wish to name. It is not a very literary community, she says, with only one other writer, known but unseen, locally.

It seems appropriate to ask how a man reacts to his wife's success, when it ensures she is known as a woman who was raped violently. And she did write in Lucky: "I share my life with my rapist, he is husband to my fate." Perhaps because of the time elapsed since she wrote those words she seems less involved with that idea. "I met him when I was a graduate student in my 30s. He encouraged me to write the memoir in the first place, so he is thrilled with my success and also with anything that promotes further understanding of what rape means."

Suggest that she was unusual in how she coped because she is very smart and very strong and she responds: "I was brought up in a family where it was unthinkable to praise yourself. But you have said it." Traumatic as it was, she describes the event as "a garden-variety rape. I wasn't raped by my father or lover or a friend. It was very devastating, but I wasn't tortured massively."

And she survived, part of the reason for the title Lucky. Police told her that another girl who had been raped in the same place had been killed and dismembered. That story led to The Lovely Bones, in which 14-year-old Susie Salmon looks down from heaven on her devastated family and her killer, a local eccentric bachelor called Mr Harvey, who is never apprehended.

She says she didn't find it difficult to write about the rape and dismemberment of a teenager. "I really liked my characters and hanging out with them. You are not so conscious when you are writing, when it is going well. You are not even aware you are sitting in a chair or holding a pen."

When this book was finished, Sebold returned to the memoir, which became Lucky. Her own story has coincidences worthy of Thomas Hardy at his most fantastical, but they are true. The most extreme is the rape of a close friend, who was sharing a flat with Alice at the time, a couple of years after the attack on her.

But violence and terror seem to touch her life continually, from the brutal burglary of an elderly couple who are members of her church, to the realisation that the only girl in her poetry class who refused to comment on Alice's poem about her rape had been sexually abused by her father and brothers for years.

Now she is working on another novel but is coy about its content. Will it too feature a rape? No comment. It is not easy when you receive plaudits for a story about a very particular experience but then wish to move on.

"I can't control how I am written about or seen, and the rape has too much spice to leave it out," she acknowledges. As well as the two books she has written newspaper columns, and there is a searing poem, quoted in Lucky, that a sympathetic poetry lecturer encouraged her to write just after it happened. Apart from that she does not publish her poetry.

She smiles and is calm. The rape happened. She has written extensively about it. It is over. She has moved on, although we are invited to buy the books and draw the lessons, whatever warnings or comfort, from them.

Is it possible to live a happy life after something like this happens to you? She repeats the question. "Sure. It is not an easy process. But if anyone says that being raped ruins your life that's a load of shit. I am not saying that everyone can get past it, but it is possible, and that should be more publicly known."

Lucky and The Lovely Bones are published by Picador, £7.99 and £6.99 in UK