A few months ago, the writer Alice Sebold began to experience a kind of vertigo. She looked at a cup on the table, and it no longer appeared solid. Her vision fractured. Objects multiplied. Her awareness of depth shifted suddenly. Sometimes she glanced down and for a split second felt that there was no floor. Sebold and I had recently begun corresponding, a little more than a year after she learned that the wrong man had been sent to prison, in , for raping her.
She stopped writing and reading. Sebold, who is sixty, recognized that her case had taken a deeply American shape: a young white woman accuses an innocent Black man of rape. She lives alone with her dog. She wore fingerless woollen gloves and kept the lights off; her living room was lit by a window.
She was fearful of taking in new details too quickly. She was struggling to figure out what to call Broadwater. She had avoided his name for forty years. And yet their lives were intertwined. Sebold and Broadwater had defined themselves through stories that were in conflict. But Broadwater, too, felt that they were bound together, the same moments creating the upheaval in their lives. Sebold was raped in a pedestrian tunnel in a park around midnight on May 8, , the last day of her freshman year at Syracuse University.
Eventually, she stopped resisting and tried to intuit what he wanted. She walked back to her dorm, bleeding, and a student called an ambulance. According to a medical exam, her nose was lacerated, her urine was bloody, and her clothes and hair were matted with dirt and leaves. Sebold went home for the summer to a suburb of Philadelphia, where she rarely changed out of her nightgown. She sensed that her father believed she was at fault somehow, for walking through a park at night alone.
Even during the rape, she was aware that she would eventually write about it. She felt that Gallagher, the partner of Raymond Carver, who also taught at the university, embodied the transcendence of a life devoted to writing. For her first assignment, Sebold turned in an opaque five-page poem that alluded to the rape.
