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By far the most distubring memoir I've read, but worth reading. Sebold doesn't leave anybody in the dark about what rape victims go through, and c... (show more)
Lucky : A Memoir
Enormously visceral, emotionally gripping, and imbued with the belief that justice is possible even after the most horrific of crimes, Alice Sebold's compelling memoir of her rape at the age of eighteen is a story that takes hold of you and won't let go.
Sebold fulfills a promise that she made to herself in the very tunnel where she was raped: someday she would write a book about her experience. With Lucky she delivers on that promise with mordant wit and an eye for life's absurdities, as sh... (show more)
Enormously visceral, emotionally gripping, and imbued with the belief that justice is possible even after the most horrific of crimes, Alice Sebold's compelling memoir of her rape at the age of eighteen is a story that takes hold of you and won't let go.
Sebold fulfills a promise that she made to herself in the very tunnel where she was raped: someday she would write a book about her experience. With Lucky she delivers on that promise with mordant wit and an eye for life's absurdities, as she describes what she was like both as a young girl before the rape and how that rape changed but did not sink the woman she later became.
It is Alice's indomitable spirit that we come to know in these pages. The same young woman who sets her sights on becoming an Ethel Merman-style diva one day (despite her braces, bad complexion, and extra weight) encounters what is still thought of today as the crime from which no woman can ever really recover. In an account that is at once heartrending and hilarious, we see Alice's spirit prevail as she struggles to have a normal college experience in the aftermath of this harrowing, life-changing event.
No less gripping is the almost unbelievable role that coincidence plays in the unfolding of Sebold's narrative. Her case, placed in the inactive file, is miraculously opened again six months later when she sees her rapist on the street. This begins the long road to what dominates these pages: the struggle for triumph and understanding -- in the courtroom and outside in the world.
Lucky is, quite simply, a real-life thriller. In its literary style and narrative tension we never lose sight of why this life story is worth reading. At the end we are left standing in the wake of devastating violence, and, like the writer, we have come to know what it means to survive. (show less)
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As heartfelt as this true stroy is, it's no comparison to her fictional story Lovely Bones. Her writing it still beautiful, but the story doesn't c... (show more)
As heartfelt as this true stroy is, it's no comparison to her fictional story Lovely Bones. Her writing it still beautiful, but the story doesn't carry the reader through to easily. (show less)
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I read this in one day. Just like the story had to go on for Alice to remove herself from her nightmare and survive, There just seemed no appropriate place to close the book and put it away. Tragic, horrific and painfully honest, the book gained a completely fresh and irritating facette near the end, when Lila's story showed that no one, not even another rape victim, is able to help or understand another individual's torment. But Alice answers that question early on in the book. She resents ... (show more)
I read this in one day. Just like the story had to go on for Alice to remove herself from her nightmare and survive, There just seemed no appropriate place to close the book and put it away. Tragic, horrific and painfully honest, the book gained a completely fresh and irritating facette near the end, when Lila's story showed that no one, not even another rape victim, is able to help or understand another individual's torment. But Alice answers that question early on in the book. She resents Tricia, the woman from the rape center, for putting her case in context of many sad stories without a happy end. "I dindn't want to belong to that club," she writes. But she must accept that Lila doesn't want to belong to her club either. One of the strongest questions centers around this: should she go the way Alice did "I saw what it did to you", or choose not to pursue the rapist's conviction? "This way it will be over." (show less)
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Before she wrote Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold wrote, with frankness and courage and unblinking honesty, this wrenching account of her violent rape and journey through the justice system in its aftermath. As I reach for words; fitting words, to talk about what Sebold has done in this book, I find that mine fall short. Lucky for me, and perhaps luckier for you, I remembered someone else who wrote words that are exactly right. I remembered Anne Lemott, writing about why we write. She quoted To... (show more)
Before she wrote Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold wrote, with frankness and courage and unblinking honesty, this wrenching account of her violent rape and journey through the justice system in its aftermath. As I reach for words; fitting words, to talk about what Sebold has done in this book, I find that mine fall short. Lucky for me, and perhaps luckier for you, I remembered someone else who wrote words that are exactly right. I remembered Anne Lemott, writing about why we write. She quoted Toni Morrison, and this is what she said:
"The function of freedom is to free someone else, and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life {or a horrific trauma}, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else."
That is what Alice Sebold has done. For any woman-and there are too many-whose life has been crossed by this particularly shattering brand of violence, Sebold offers up an unflinching accounting of her own hard-won triumph. Her words delineate her own path out of the aftermath of violence, and also blazon the way for any woman on that path, or any person who longs to support a loved one on that hard journey. To mark a trail through so painful a wood is a staggering gift. I have to confess. When I first read Lovely Bones, I was disappointed by Sebold's resolution of the story. But after reading Lucky, I think my critic's eye was too hard. I think Sebold led Lovely Bones where she did out of a longing to conjure beauty out of pain, and who could criticize that? Not me. (show less)
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