Interview

Alice Sebold - In Her Own Words

The Oddity of Suburbia

My family was watching television when a couple - the mother and father to a woman who lived one street over with her family - were hit by a car and landed on our front lawn. The man who hit them, leapt out of his car and shouted to two boys playing basketball in the driveway of the house across from ours. He yelled: "These people need an ambulance." He then proceeded to jump back in his car and drive three houses down, where he calmly parked in his own driveway and went inside his house. The daughter of the couple who had been hit had been walking behind her parents and, having lapped them once, now came up upon the scene. We heard the screaming and ran out. Both of her parents were killed. One died on our lawn, the other died later, in a hospital. And the man who struck them? He was both one of our neighbors and, by profession, a paramedic.

As I grew up and left home, living in Manhattan and just outside L.A., I began to realize more and more that within the suburban world of my upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more romanticized parts of the world. Ultimately, the East Village had nothing on Nowhere U.S.A. and I returned, ...