This is what I remember. This is the first line in Lucky, Alice Sebold's memoir of her rape and its aftermath. It's the kind of first line that hooks you as you stand in the aisle of Barnes & Noble, or as you browse the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon. It's the kind of line that demands you read further. In five words, swollen with portentousness, it makes a lot of promises. An author needs to have a certain amount of guts to start a book like that. Alice Sebold has them and more. All the words that follow are testament to this; every page is an act of courage. The first thing that jumps out at you, even before that opening line, is the title: Lucky. Is that supposed to be ironic? Blackly humorous? Or, somehow, the truth? Sebold answers that question immediately, with a brief, lyrical prologue:In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky...But at the time, I felt I had more in common with the dead girl than I did with the large, beefy police officers or my stunned freshman-year girlfriends. The dead girl and I had been in the same low place...During the rape my eye caught something among the leaves and glass. A pink hair tie. When I heard about the dead girl, I could imagine her pleading as I had, and wondered when her hair had been pulled loose from her hair tie...I will always think of her when I think of the pink hair tie. I will think of a girl in the last moments of her life.Since Lucky was published back in 1999, Alice Sebold has gone on to great fame and fortune as the author of The Lovely Bones. That 2002 novel was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. As with any pop cultural phenomenon, however, there was an inevitable backlash. These days, it's hard to find people who can say a kind word about it. Eight years and a subpar film later, it has become easy to pretend that we were never moved. But in that passage above, you see all of Sebold's gifts on display. She's not a complicated stylist; rather, she hits her emotional beats by dint of perception. She captures the small details that can raise the hair on the back of your neck. And in every sentence you see the catharsis. I am not a huge fan of memoirs. I think everyone has a story, and everyone is entitled to tell it, but I'm just not going to read it. Unless you're a president, or a war hero, or the guy who invented Diet Pepsi, you probably don't need to publish a memoir. I don't like reading books about people with whacky families or who were heroic recreational drug users. That's not unique, and it's seldom enlightening. Rather, it smacks of calculation. A way to get Harper Collins to give your rough draft a look-see. Hey, I'm a talented writer who needs a break. What should I do? Maybe I'll snort a line of heroin off that prostitute's buttocks and write about that... Those thoughts - admittedly cynical - never slipped into my mind while reading Lucky. It didn't feel commercialized; it wasn't manipulative. It was therapy. There's no other way to describe it. Sebold writes nakedly about an intensely private violation in cringing detail. You can almost see her dissociating in front of you, allowing her to write with a kind of reportorial detachment. The opening pages are unforgettable, as Sebold graphically and unflinchingly describes her sexual assault. At times her writing is clinical, at times, oddly poetic. She alternates smoothly between short, simple, punchy sentences, and flighty, novelistic turns-of-phrase. For instance, during the rape, she wrenchingly describes being forced to give oral sex. Here, the prose is dry, workmanlike, almost like the transcript of a court proceeding: just the facts, as they happened. And maybe that's the only way it could have been written, because the detail is so precise, you want to look away. To have veered away from objectivity might have been unbearable. (Even so, it often felt like an invasion of privacy to be reading this, almost like you've opened a super secret diary). Then, smoothly, Sebold will shift styles, such as the way she describes how she talked to her rapist: "I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death. The beginning of Lucky is like a punch in the gut. Its honesty and power leaves you drained. You will read it in one gulp of air, unable to stop to breathe. Of course, that tension cannot be maintained. Nor should it. The rest of Sebold's story is about coming to grips with that moment, and the way she tells this story expresses, in its way, what it felt like for her to put life back together. There is a certain feeling of anticlimax in the writing that mimics Sebold's post-traumatic stress. She struggles with shame, alienation, and the eventual trial of her rapist. And out of nowhere, there's even a cameo by Tobias Wolff (!). If you come by this book, it's probably for one of two reasons: first, you liked The Lovely Bones; second, you have a personal need for Sebold's insights. Adult rape is a hard crime to classify. It's easy to get tangled up in legal arguments about consent, or to reduce its seriousness by hinting that the victim somehow had it coming. Even with DNA, it's a crime that is often impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yet in a very real way, rape is as serious as murder. It spares the finite of a person's body, while destroying the infinite of the soul. This is why I read Lucky.The first girlfriend I ever had in college was raped at a frat house. We were both freshmen, a few months into our first semester, still in that sheltered bubble of youth, where bad things only happen to strangers. She went out with friends, I made the decision to stay in and study. Thus, for me, the first lesson of college: the choices you make can be the choices you cannot unmake.I didn't see her again for a couple days. I heard the news, of course, but she was busy with those things you hope you never know. Later, after the late-night trip to the hospital, and the rape kit, and the meeting with detectives from the sex crimes unit, and a phone call home that I can't imagine but have spent many hours imagining, I went to visit her in her dorm room. When I saw her, she was cowering in the corner, and the look in her eyes, that mingling of fear and alertness, is something that I've never forgotten. (The only thing I can compare it to is my dog, Henry, who I rescued from a shelter; when I first got him, whenever I raised my voice, he got that same slinking, terrified look, as though waiting for his next beating). As a man, I'm genetically incapable of understanding what the experience meant for her. Indeed, unless I'm convicted of a felony, I probably never will. All I'd ever know was the external stuff: how we broke up; how she walked about campus with a certain listlessness; how she started smoking and drinking and doing things she hadn't done before; and how she dropped out of school a year later, and disappeared into the rest of her life, while I stayed with the rest of mine. It would be insulting to think my imaginative powers could conjure a fraction of her reality, though it has never stopped me from trying. So when I picked up this book, long after my freshman year had passed, I did so with purpose. I wanted to read this for her.
This was the last thing I ever intended to read, but Sebold's narrative really captured my attention. I was on Chapter 3 before I knew it, and just had to keep reading; I had to find out what happened. I actually got the rest of the book as an audiobook (got to Chapter 3 via online excerpts) and listened to Sebold herself narrate the story of how, when she was an 18 year old virgin coed at Syracuse University, she was brutalized, beaten, and viciously raped and sodomized one night on her way home. Not exactly the lightest of subjects, and told in very intimate detail to boot. But it is Sebold's wry and factual telling of her story that made me keep listening, even when it was difficult. This isn't a pity-me memoir, drenched in oversimplification and gratuitous tragedy. It is an important story that needs to be told, because as someone put it, a lot of people seem to still think that rape is just a form of bad sex. It was heartbreaking and disheartening to hear that even though Sebold had been through such a brutal ordeal, she was still getting asked questions by jurors like why she went through the park at night. Her own father asked her how she could have "allowed" the rape to happen, since her perpetrator wasn't holding the knife to her throat the entire time? I got so angry about how she was treated, this visibly beaten human being, who wasn't believed by the police officer who took her statement (he thought there was more to her story than what she was telling him, as in he thought she was at one point a willing participant--can you imagine???), and who had to be the calm one who held her family together (nobody wanted to be at the grand jury proceeding or the trial, though eventually her father deigned to go to the trial) because they just didn't know how to deal with what had happened at all. Neither, as you can imagine, did Sebold, who was able to identify her rapist and get him convicted and given the maximum sentence (25 years), but found that despite this form of closure, she was still haunted and traumatized by the events for 20 years, even as she attempted to convince herself emotions were bullshit and she was fine. I give Sebold credit for being frank and honest about the extent to which she deceived herself, about how she used alcohol and heroin and bad relationships to self-medicate, and I identify with her intellectual impatience with herself to be "over it". We know, though this book doesn't go into it, that Sebold eventually sought therapy, re-enrolled in school, met the love of her life (fellow novelist Glen David Gold) and wrote a bestselling first novel. After reading what happened to her at 18, I am left in awe of her strength and perseverance.
What do You think about Lucky (2002)?
It wouldn’t do justice to Lucky to call it a “rape memoir.” Though the events of the book cycle around Sebold’s rape she experienced as a college freshman, in a broader context her story deals with social attitudes and crime/justice. It takes a gifted writer to make brutal events into captivating memoirs; in stories that deal with a single trauma, first-person accounts tend to be so caught up feelings of aggression or grief that the emotions take precedence over the writing itself. Since Sebold wrote Lucky 20 years after the main incidents of the book, however, she was removed enough from the situation to be straightforward.With detail-oriented prose that doesn’t sugar-coat or euphemize, Sebold recalls facets of her life outside the rape, along with the facets that can’t help but be influenced by the rape. She doesn’t detail her emotions as much as she reveals how others respond to her. To me, the most compelling part of her story was the court case: how race came into play and how the defense played their game.I originally bought Lucky as part of a psychology class I was taking on the subject of human resilience, and though I didn’t finish the class, I picked up the book again months later. So while I was reading it I was questioning the process of resilience, I was drawn to something Sebold says in the beginning when she’s recalling the actual rape: she says that the women who claim they would rather die defeating rape than to be raped are fools; that you do what you have to do to get by. Though I think most of us would agree with her, what does that say about the resilience of those who don’t? Whoa.
—Kelly
The first line of the book: “This is what I remember…”The last line (implied): “This is what I’ll never forget…”“The Lovely Bones” was how I first heard of Alice Sebold, first the movie, and then the book. Unfortunately I wasn’t as much fascinated by the book as I was with the movie, which I think captured the real essence of what was supposed to be the book. “Lucky”, a true account of the brutal assault and rape of Alice Sebold, was the precedent to “The Lovely Bones”, her first novel. I was immediately intrigued and surprised, I must admit, that someone would open a personal book for the whole world about such a tough subject. Now that I’ve read it, I think this worked as some closure for her.Because I was so shocked, I never got past the first few pages of the book, and kept putting it aside for some other time. The main reason was that I already knew I would be living horrible things with 18-year-old Alice Sebold. Her raw descriptions of the rape were so disturbing I had to stop myself a couple of times to regain composure. When you read something like this you start asking questions that you can’t really give an answer to. While I was reading this book I kept thinking I was inside a nightmare, and once I woke up I’d be free… but am I really? Is she? The author’s strength is inspiring, and this book is an empowering testimony. Though I’m not so sure this is a nightmare you can wake up from, one thing I know… Alice Sebold survived.
—Tânia
When I first started reading ‘Lucky’ I thought that something was wrong with me. I mean, I get that there is this horrific rape within the first chapter and that NO ONE should have to go through what she went through, but I wasn’t feeling it. It was more like ‘oh, wow, that sucks’. Then, I started feeling worse because I thought of my soul has become a blackened prune pit residing near my left kidney. I was more into the fact that Tess Gallagher and Tobias Wolff were Alices’ professors than that poor Alice had to live through all this. Then, thanks to the good people on GoodReads I learned that there is a syndrome. Compassion Fatigue; A combination of being overwhelmed by the sheer number and scope of human disasters and atrocities, and numbed by the decontextualized manner in which they are presented by the media (thanks Abigail!)This in no way undermines the meat of the story, I'm just explaining my utter horror of discovering that I wasn't truly freaking out during this book. You can tell me something straight out and I’ll be blasé about it, but once you start to hint at an issue, I’m all over it. I think that as the book went on, it wasn’t so much a direct ‘I was raped’ story but more of a day to day life after with all the idiosyncrasies and patterns that emerge that drew me in. It reminds me a bit of Joan Didion’s ‘Year of Magical Thinking’. That same sort of despondency that you find when you know that there is no option but to just move on. So, there was a peak and then a valley and then a peak and then a valley and so on.. I would find myself not being able to put the book down during the time between the rape and the trial, watching Alice justify her actions and her drinking and not even commenting on the fact that it was an escape mechanism. But, following the trial, I was in that sort of valley stage, which, I suppose, is how life goes and it took me a bit longer to get through that. The ‘Aftermath’ section was strong, except at that point I think her use of choppy, six word sentences seem out of place. This is the stuff that should flourish, the drug use, the denial, the recovery.I appreciate her direct approach and lack of drama though. I won’t even pretend to understand what she went through and to write a memoir about it is extremely brave.
—Kim
