![]() ![]() “You see movies about rape and the young lady is scrubbing herself in the shower, over and over. “We both went through the fire,” he said. But Broadwater, too, felt that they were bound together, the same moments creating the upheaval in their lives. Sebold and Broadwater had defined themselves through stories that were in conflict. “My rape came out of nowhere and shaped his entire life.” “The rapist came out of nowhere and shaped my entire life,” she said. “Anthony” felt like a level of closeness she didn’t deserve. She had avoided his name for forty years. She was struggling to figure out what to call Broadwater. It feels like it’s a whole spinning universe that has its own velocity and, if I just stick my finger in it, it will take me-and I don’t know where I’ll end up.” “The present collapses, and any sense of good I ever did collapses. “It’s not just that the past collapses,” she said. She was fearful of taking in new details too quickly. “There’s that sense of standing up and immediately needing to sit down because you’re going to fall over.” She allowed that her experience with vertigo represented a kind of psychological progress: she was absorbing the fact that “there was no ground when I thought there was ground,” she said. Although she’d quickly accepted the news that Broadwater was innocent, she felt as if she had “strapped on the new reality” and was still in the process of inhabiting it. Several times she started explaining something she’d once thought, and then stopped, midsentence. She wore fingerless woollen gloves and kept the lights off her living room was lit by a window. In February, I met Sebold in San Francisco for the first time. “I still don’t know where to go with this but to grief and to silence and to shame,” she wrote to me. 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. Even stringing together sentences in an e-mail felt like adopting “a sense of authority that I don’t have,” she said. Then she wrote “ The Lovely Bones,” a novel about a girl who is raped and murdered, which has been described as the most commercially successful début novel since “ Gone with the Wind.” But now Sebold had lost trust in language. In 1999, she had published “ Lucky,” a best-selling memoir about the rape and the subsequent conviction of a young Black man named Anthony Broadwater. 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 1982, for raping her. Sometimes she glanced down and for a split second felt that there was no floor. ![]() She looked at a cup on the table, and it no longer appeared solid. A few months ago, the writer Alice Sebold began to experience a kind of vertigo. ![]()
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