Lucky: A Memoir

It was very good, although a little too graphic in details for it to be an appropriate read for teenagers. It was a good conversation starter. My husband read it, too.

It's hard to read, let alone review, a book about rape, but I think that this book it is an important one. Lucky is a memoir about a college student who was attacked and raped in the park by her campus. Despite its difficult subject matter, Lucky reads smoothly. I feel that this is an accessible book for people to read who would like to understand better how to deal with rape, and to see all the ways that it impacts someone.

For me there were four distinct parts of this book (although the writer did not designate them as such - it just felt to me to read like that). The first part was the beginning, in which the actual rape sequence is told right up front. It is hard to digest but is written very clearly and directly. I really felt for the narrator in the next scenes, which immediately follow the rape, in which she goes to the police and is examined and has to tell her friends and family members what happened. At one point she describes something that I imagine must be almost as horrible as the rape itself - having to live the rest of her life as a rape victim:

"I knew exactly what had happened. But can you speak those sentences to the people you love? . . . That question continues to haunt me. After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes."

The second part of Lucky, for me, described the weeks and months following the rape. I found this part to be lacking because it seemed to me that the narrator wasn't really dealing with her true feelings. I suppose that that is how it actually happened, though, and she did a good job of making me feel like I was right there with her in that time and that space, even though I often wanted her to do things differently. At times it seemed like she was pushing the rape out of her mind completely, and writing about her college classes and other things that any book about any college student would include. I wanted her to focus more on the issue, but perhaps she dealt with it by not focusing on it. In this part the theme of writing was introduced, which I did enjoy. Sebold dealt with her emotions by writing poetry and fiction. She took classes and seminars by Tobias Wolff and Tess Gallagher. Tess Gallagher is actually a pretty central character in the book, who accompanies Alice to court when she has to confront her attacker (although she's disappeared by the end of the book without explanation, leaving me to wonder what happened).

The third part of the book, which I really liked, moved on to show how the narrator was intent on prosecuting her attacker. It was easy to cheer for her and she showed a lot of strength and wisdom. She describes the legal process well and at one point she mentions wanting to go to law school so that she can prosecute other criminals (she later decides to pursue teaching instead, and says it became her lifeline and salvation). It seems very fulfilling that the narrator finds some kind of justice and closure in the midst of all her suffering. At the same time, she is still human. I could tell that the rape had affected her and that in some ways it had changed her in a negative way. She seems to use men for own reasons and disregard what they must be feeling. She has a strange relationship with her father that she never quite explores in depth the way I wanted her to. (At times she has a close bond with her mother, who is always anxious and has panic attacks). Through all of these shortcomings, however, for most of the book she seems strong and like someone to whom most readers would be able to relate, despite the horrible thing that happened to her.

The fourth and last part of the book, though, takes a strange turn. I don't want to include spoilers so suffice it to say that the narrator is no longer the intelligent, strong fighter that the reader had gotten to know and admire. This made me feel like my hunch was correct that she hadn't been dealing internally with the aftermath of her rape. I was disappointed at her downfall but, more than that, it didn't seem to make sense to me. I thought that the writer should have spent more time on the last part of the book and less time with the mundane intricacies of college life. I felt there were issues left unexplored in the book.

Overall, I "enjoyed" reading Lucky, although that is a strange thing to say about a rape memoir. I thought it was well-written and that it dealt with some very important social issues. I especially liked how it explored the subject of how different women deal differently with rape, and the need for there to be open dialogue about it. The writing in parts is flourishingly poetic, which was a strange offset for the subject, but it usually worked. I would like to read another book by Alice Sebold to see whether the tone works even better with a lighter subject matter (although, from what I understand, her novel Her Lovely Bones has anything but a light subject matter). I give Lucky three and a half stars and would recommend the book, but be forewarned that the subject matter is obviously difficult.

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This is a wholly absorbing memoir by Alice Sebold. It begins with her last day of Freshman year at Syracuse University. It was that day that she was brutally raped in a tunnel near campus. I started this book early in the morning and finished five hours later, with a cold cup of coffee in front of me not having moved at all. I was so transfixed by the brutality of the event that changed Sebold's life and the brutal honesty of her writing I was incapable of doing anything else. Sebold is able to go on after that day and we wonder how. Her life though is permanently changed from before the rape to after the rape. She eventually goes to trial only to relive the whole brutal incident in painstaking detail when questioned by the defense attorny. It is especially hard to read after knowing what happened in that tunnel. Her attempts at coping involve "getting back to normal" which means returning to campus, dating boys, doing schoolwork and making friends and holding her breath each time to see if she is merely the "girl who was raped" or if she is really just Alice Sebold. This is a heavy burden for any person to carry and as Sebold writes about her family we realize she doesn't have the support system to cope with the emotions that need to come out for her to heal. Only once is she allowed to express the rage she feels when a poetry teacher encourages her to write about the experience. Even Alice is dumbfounded at the outpouring of rage and at the mixed reaction and uncomfortable feelings the students express when the poem is shared. In a gut wrenching turn of events her roomate is brutally raped. This alone is terrible in and of itself but once again brings all the pain to the surface. Alice finds herself needing to connect with her roomate to prove that she can be "ok" just like she was. Eventually Sebold seems to settle with the uneasy truth that you can "live in a world where the two truths coexist; where both hell and hope lie in the palm of your hand." An engrossing memoir that you won't soon forget.

As one who enjoyed "The Lovely Bones" (until the end, which struck me as more artifice than art), I was severely disappointed by Ms. Sebold's memoir. Like "The Lovely Bones," the beginning of "Lucky" starts strong, the events she relates are gripping and well told, and we are drawn into the narrative's chilling details because of her almost clinical point of view. However, the rest of the narrative is far less engaging. For the most part, "Lucky" struck me as an inauthentic, clumsy, and occasionally cliched reporting of an event that Sebold has yet to deal with and recover from emotionally. We are told a series of episodes in Sebold's life, some that are relevant to the rape, others that appear thrown in for no apparent reason other than they may have been associated in her mind in some way with the rape. Unfortunately, Sebold relies almost entirely on telling us the logical connections between events; rarely does she shows us the emotional connections and, more importantly, her emotional reactions to them. In short, I felt cheated by Sebold's lack of emotional engagement with her ordeal. The fact that she eventually resorted to heroin and a series of emotionally-detached serial sex partners makes me wonder how she could categorize the last section of the memoir as the "Afterword." Clearly she was still in the grips of PTSD, which was, from my perspective, where the memoir should have begun. Of interest to everyone, not just other women who have been raped, or, for that matter, anyone who has experienced a traumatic event (the death of loved one, the horror of war) is this: how did she recover her former self-respect and self-confidence to the point of being able to turn this traumatic experience around and use it not only as the focus of a memoir, but as the gist of a best-selling novel? By the end I was still wondering if Sebold ever recovered from the effects of the rape.

Perhaps I was left with this question because Sebold's irritating self-absorption killed any sympathy I may have had for her as both the central "character" and and the narrating author. Rather than take us into the fear, panic, loneliness, even alienation from others she must of felt during and after the attack, most of the time we hear Sebold's "author" voice summarizing and sanitizing every experience. Ironically, we could infer that in her own life Sebold failed in her roles as loving daughter, compassionate friend, and caring lover because in the memoir we see her exerting an almost obsessive, predicable, even mechanistic control over all of her relationships. Take her desperate need for Lila's friendship after the rape. When Lila eventually "dumps" her, Sebold takes pains to describe how she was snubbed publicly. Where is her private grief at the loss of her closest friend? In fact, who is Lila, apart from Sebold's "clone" or, as Sebold seems to suggest, her doppelganger? That Sebold can only describe Lila as a reflection of herself (literally, Lila is raped on Sebold's bed), would be repugnant if it weren't for the fact that Sebold seems totally unaware that she is abusing a real person for literary effect. Moreover, except for the inclusion of her poem "Conviction," which is emotional catharsis dressed up as a literary exercise (merely clever, but not convincing), Sebold would have been far more convincing had she quoted directly from her journals (which she frequently mentions) to show us authentic expressions of grief, loneliness, anger, depression in all its unmediated rawness.

Ultimately, like any fictional narrative, a successful memoir must exhibit the qualities of good story telling: include only what we need to know, show rather than tell, and most importantly, leave the reader with something experienced, felt, and learned "with" the author, not "by" the author. Sadly, Ms. Sebold's memoir failed to convince me that she lost more than just her virginity that night in the tunnel.

After I had gone through some intense emotions over my rape experience, a friend suggested I read this book. The first chapter was very difficult to get through. I was able to picture it all very vividly, and it brought back some memories of my experience that I thought that I had forgotten. Somehow, even though I was crying, I was able to get through that first chapter.

The first chapter goes into great detail about a black stranger who drags her into a tunnel under an outdoor theatre in Syracuse and rapes her, leaving her to walk back to her dorm alone and get help. This book is about the long court process and her recovery.

Part of rape therapy is writing a story about your experience. This book shows a woman who had (and still has) a great deal of strength. She says in her book (and also on the back cover) "you save yourself or you remain unsaved".

This book left me with a better understanding of my emotions about my experience after hearing similar feelings from someone else.

If you can get through the first chapter, I would totally recommend this book.