Lucky

by Sebold, Alice

ISBN: 9780684857824

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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.

Item Information Item Information

Format: Hardcover
Author: Sebold, Alice
ISBN: 9780684857824
Condition: Used
Dimensions: 8.70 x 0.94
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Year: 1999

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“In the tunnel were I was raped…a girl had been murdered…In comparison, they said, I was lucky."

Jennifer E. - 4 years 3 months ago

“In the tunnel were I was raped…a girl had been murdered…In comparison, they said, I was lucky…I described the assault, the blow job, talked about how cold I was, detailed the robbery of $8 from my back pocket, his kiss good-bye, his apology. Our parting ‘...and he said, ‘Hey girl.’ I turned around. He said, ‘What is your name?’ I said ‘Alice.’” “Without a name attached to my story, it remains fiction, not fact.” I read The Lovely Bones as a college student, so I was determined to read Lucky after learning publishers were pulling it from the shelves after the recent exoneration of her wrongly convicted rapist. But while the accused may have been erroneous, the author’s experience is grievously relevant. “People think a woman stops fighting when she is physically exhausted, but I was about to begin my real fight, a fight of words and lies and the brain.” “I’ve always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything…It’s not ‘that thing that happened to me,’ or ‘the assault,’ or ‘the beating,’ or ‘that’...it’s important to call it what it is…It’s rape’…It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life…My rapist…the husband to my fate…The woman who is ripped open by violence and then asked to parcel out redemption for the rest of her life.” “The world was not divided for me then as it is now…I would enter what I’ve thought of since as my real neighborhood, a land of subdivision where tracts are marked off and named. There are two styles available: the safe and the not safe…‘You can’t tell me you want to spend the rest of your life this way.’ She was talking real estate and apartment size but they were words…that took on a different meaning for me…I had gone through a death-and-rebirth phenomenon in the span of one year. Rape to trial.” A resurrection.

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“In the tunnel were I was raped…a girl had been murdered…In comparison, they said, I was lucky."