A young woman hovers near a table in a Manhattan restaurant. ''Excuse me, I hate to bother you. Are you, are you the author of this book?'' She's holding a copy of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's story of a murdered girl who narrates from heaven. The author smiles warmly and invites the stranger into her space.
So how is Sebold handling the autograph seekers, the photo shoots, the sudden celebrity that accompanies a debut novel that -- driven by the passionate word of mouth of booksellers and critics -- boasts more than a million copies in print? ''I've been such a miserable failure my whole life...this feels great!''
Sebold, 39, who now makes her home in long Beach, Calif., used to live a block away, on Seventh Street in the East Village. The Pennsylvania native moved to New York when she was 23, with an agent already signed up and just two chapters left on her first novel. The unpublished manuscript was nominated for a Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award for literary ex- cellence. But she couldn't sell it. So she wrote another novel, and that was shopped around town by a different agent. It went nowhere.
An unsigned author's life is no damn good: Sebold started writing less and less. She dated lousy men. She didn't like herself. She used heroin and booze. And after nine hard years, she quit the city. ''I couldn't handle the rejection and the failure anymore...and the 'almost' of it all,'' she says. ''Everybody from New York has their almost-but-not-quite story, and I just felt like I don't want to be walking around on the planet trotting out mine.''
In 1994, in a last stab at faith, she cleaned up and applied to graduate school: ''If I didn't get in I was going to buy a dozen nude-colored panty hose and get an office job in Temecula, California.'' She was accepted into UC Irvine's MFA writing program.
At Irvine, she found mentors and peers and her future husband, Glen David Gold, who last year published his own best-selling first novel, Carter Beats the Devil. ''I met her, I fell in love with her with a slight hesitation,'' remembers Gold. ''And then when I got her first short story I just thought, Oh, thank God.'' ''By the time we met we were both in our mid-30s,'' says Sebold, ''and we had decided we weren't sleeping with anyone else who can't write.... I'd already slept with enough bad writers where you have to go like 'Oh, yeah, I love it when the golden retriever makes like a human being.'''
Then, in 1999, Scribner published Sebold's first book, Lucky, an unflinching memoir about being raped when she was a college freshman. The book received some gorgeous reviews but at the time sold fewer than 14,000 copies and was never released in paperback. (Little, Brown now plans to publish it in October.) With the story of her violent past down on paper, Sebold returned to fiction, and spun a weird, risky, thoughtful tale with a raped and dismembered girl at its heart. Based on the manuscript, Little, Brown signed her up for two books. The first printing of The Lovely Bones was 50,000 copies; it has since gone back to press 12 times and is currently the top-selling hardcover novel in the country. ''You could walk through Times Square naked and you wouldn't distract from the attention The Lovely Bones is getting,'' says her agent, Henry Dunow.
''If I were a writer right now, I'd hate me,'' says Sebold. ''I spent a long time hating people like me when I was writing and not being paid attention to, so I understand it.'' But she won't apologize for her unexpected good fortune. And once the hullabaloo fades, she'll return home, where her husband and dog, Lilly, and second novel await. ''She's 39, she's not 22,'' says Gold, 38. ''Her big indulgences are she's going to get some really great plants for the yard and we're going to tile the bathroom, which, you know, is an upgrade from snorting heroin.''
This summer, Sebold is traveling the country on a 13-city tour. Her bookstore audiences often include people whose siblings or children were murdered. Sometimes they'll come up after the reading and need to cry or hold her hand for a minute, and Sebold is comfortable with the familiarity. ''It's a very clean, reciprocal moment,'' she says. ''And I think I spent so many years feeling alienated myself that it's a thrill to me to have violence and death and crime and justice discussed like it's a normal part of life. Because it is.''
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