Alice Sebold’s heartrending and inspiring memoir chronicling her rape, recovery, and drive to bring her rapist to justice.
Author: Alice Sebold
Pages: 272
Published: 2003
Bottom Line: An extremely emotional and disturbing memoir. Sebold does not tiptoe around her rape – she relives it, and through her candid and brutally descriptive telling of it, so do we.
I don’t even really know where to begin. Lucky was an extremely difficult read and it brought me to tears over and over again. It ignited all of my most primal fears and filled my clean, modern world with threats and lurking danger. This is a powerful memoir, and one that took a great deal of courage to share with the world and it should be read by everyone – men and women – if only to show the inspiring highs and utterly despondent lows of the human spirit.
For those who don’t know, Alice Sebold is the author of the tremendously popular and gut-wrenchingly tragic novel, The Lovely Bones, which chronicles the rape and murder of a 14 year-old girl and the effect it has on her family, her friends, and her soul. What I didn’t realize until I read Lucky, was how close Alice Sebold herself came to meeting the same fate – brutally beaten and raped as an 18 year-old college freshman.
Lucky examines Sebold’s rape with heartbreaking detail. You relive every single moment, every single thought and feeling with the author. It is painful, it is brutal, and it is excruciating. You beg her to run, you hope that someone stumbles upon them, you plead with the rapist to stop. At parts you begin to distance yourself, to see it as fiction, because the reality is difficult to comprehend. Bad things happen to good people, and they must live with the knowledge and the fear for the rest of their lives.
The most remarkable thing in Lucky is Alice Sebold’s absolutely indomitable will and courage. She is strong for herself, and for her family. She does not define herself by her victimhood, but also doesn’t try to suppress and hide the fact that she was raped. She fights to bring her rapist to justice in a world where most rape victims refuse to bring charges or stand trial for fear of repercussion or ostracization.
Lucky is a wonderful, painful book that will stir up a plethora of emotions. Sebold’s candid and darkly funny style ensures that you will laugh as well as cry, and perhaps finish the book with a changed perspective of the world.
I was glad to meet Alice Sebold, if only in the pages of her memoir. She seems like a truly remarkable woman.
THE NOVEL NEMATODE 