Is The Lovely Bones a True Story?
No. The Lovely Bones is a work of fiction. Susie Salmon, her family and her killer are invented, and the novel's events did not happen. But the book is linked to the author's own life, because Alice Sebold wrote about surviving a rape in her memoir Lucky.
The novel was published in 2002, three years after the memoir.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is the plot a true story? | No, it is fiction |
| Is Susie Salmon a real person? | No |
| What is the real connection? | Sebold's memoir Lucky (1999) |
| Where is it set? | A Pennsylvania suburb, 1973 onward |
Are the characters real?
Susie Salmon, 14, her parents Jack and Abigail, her sister Lindsey, her brother Buckley and the killer George Harvey are all products of Sebold's imagination. The novel is narrated by Susie from her afterlife, which is itself an invention, and there was no real case behind it.
↑ Back to the topWhy do people think it is true?
Sebold has described being raped as a first-year student at Syracuse University in 1981, and she wrote about it in her 1999 memoir Lucky. The title comes from what she says police told her: that she was lucky, because another young woman had been murdered in the same place.
Sebold has said she wrote the memoir while working on the novel, and that having told her own story let her enter a purely fictional world. The novel did not retell her experience, but readers saw the connection, and it is one reason the book feels so real.
↑ Back to the topIs anything about the memoir different now?
In November 2021 a New York court vacated the conviction of Anthony Broadwater, the man convicted of the rape in 1982, after he had spent 16 years in prison. Sebold apologized to him, and her publisher stopped distributing Lucky while it considered how the book might be revised.
This concerns the memoir. The Lovely Bones is fiction and does not depend on those events.
↑ Back to the topMore about The Lovely Bones
This guide covers the 2002 novel and the 2009 film. The subject matter includes the murder of a child, described without graphic detail.