Lucky

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
One night near the end of her freshman year at Syracuse University, Alice Sebold was raped while walking home through a park. From that experience comes Lucky, an account of the rape and the year that followed it, 12 months during which Sebold tried to readjust to college and family life. Six months after the rape, she spotted her attacker on the street in Syracuse, and thus began the long, arduous task of prosecuting him.

This is not an ordinary memoir. Sebold is determined to tell the truth about her rape and its aftereffects. The book opens with a detailed account of the actual rape, which I at first found lurid, until I realized I had never read anything like it before except in fiction. Rape is still such a stigmatized crime that its victims' names are omitted from news reports; rarely do they tell their own stories. To share her experience in such a precise and detailed manner is an act of courage.

After the rape, Sebold finds a huge gulf has opened up between herself and those around her, those who have not been raped. No one is sure how to treat her, and Sebold hates the silence and embarrassment that seems to creep into every conversation. Even her own father admits to believing that, for a rape to occur, the woman must in some way be complicit. Home for the summer, Sebold feels alienated from the "nice boys," who now can barely look at her, and family relations, which were never easy (her mother is prone to panic attacks, her father is aloof), are now further strained.

Back at school in the fall, Sebold finds that she has unwittingly achieved a sort offacelesscelebrity; although her anonymity was never officially compromised, many know her name, if not her face. Having moved to a new dorm, she is stunned when people say things like, "You moved here from Marion [her old dorm]? Did you know the girl who was raped?" She is also surprised to learn that many people assumed she would leave school. The response they expect from her is shame; what they get is defiance.

Sebold has begun taking classes (two with the poet Tess Gallagher and one with fiction writer Tobias Wolff, both of whom turn out to be tremendously supportive) and reestablishing a social life when she runs into her assailant on a city street. (He greets her casually, as if they'd once dated.) The second half of the book is devoted to his prosecution — her identifying him in a police lineup, the preliminary hearing, the trial. The prosecutor tells Sebold she is unusual for sticking with it, that most rape victims give up at some point and drop out of their cases. But Sebold is determined to get her life back and to make the rapist pay for what he has done.

This section of the book is gripping in part because Sebold is a neophyte in the criminal justice system and makes mistakes along the way that might increase her attacker's chances of being acquitted. Because of the facts in the case — that Sebold did not know her attacker, that she was beaten, and that her hymen was torn in two places — there's no question that she was raped. The defense's strategy, therefore, is to throw as much doubt as possible upon her identification of the rapist. It proves to be much harder than she thought it would be to prove that the man that she has identified is actually the man who attacked her.

Sebold titled her book Lucky because the police told her that another girl raped in the same park recently had also been murdered, and that compared to her, Sebold was lucky. The title is meant to be ironic, but in fact she is lucky in many ways: She survives her ordeal, her case goes to trial (which very few rape cases do), and in the end her assailant is convicted. Sebold becomes a sort of hero in the Syracuse police department, which turns out to be a mixed blessing a year later when her best friend and roommate, Lila, is raped and the investigating officers seem more interested in congratulating Alice than pursuing Lila's attacker.

Unfortunately, Sebold includes an epilogue to her story that covers more familiar territory — substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder, therapy — and is weaker than that part of the narrative that is uniquely hers. Because of her rape, Sebold experienced college in a very different way than most of her middle-class classmates, and her account would have been perhaps more effective if it had ended with her graduating from Syracuse, damaged but a survivor. Still, she continues to experience the rest of her life differently, too. She is now aware of two worlds, one damaged by the intrusion of violence, the other not, and she knows she can never go back to her old pre-rape existence again.

—Gail Jaitin

Sally Eckhoff

Whether or not you'd go out of your way to read anything that might be classified as a rape memoir, give Alice Sebold your attention for her first five pages and you're in for the whole ride. Written in a fever of unapologetic self-discipline, Lucky is just about everything you'd expect it not to be. There's no expedition in search of psychic wounds, no yanking at your sleeve to get your conscience into the picture. Sebold was only a college freshman in a beat-up sweater when her horrible assault occurred, and she was a virgin. Maybe if rape was classified as a form of torture it would be simpler to map out the parameters of the damage it causes. Right now, as Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of Telling, has said, a lot of people think of it as a form of bad sex.

At first, Lucky seems to bounce you into a state of half-belief. The rape itself, narrated at the very beginning of the book, is so merciless it's nearly impossible to absorb. The man beat her and tore at her; the shriveled object in the courtroom evidence bag was so stiff and black -- like ruined leather -- that it was hard to tell it was her blood-soaked underwear. Once Sebold goes back to her bookish family to repair herself, her household becomes an odd but dramatically rich place to begin to heal. The first thing her father asks her when she gets back home is whether she'd like something to eat. "That would be nice," she says, "considering the only thing I've had in my mouth in the last twenty-four hours is a cracker and a cock."

The smart but not good-looking Alice (as she sees herself, wrongly on that last count) keeps a cool head as her family wavers, as she leaves them once more to return to school, as she helps catch her assailant. And then, in a wrenching moment that comes from out of nowhere, she has to keep from losing her mind when she faces the police lineup and fingers the wrong guy. How in the world is this ever going to work out?

Sebold credits teachers, including Tess Gallagher and Geoffrey Wolff, who surely had something to do with the making of a writer who can spit out a harrowing story that's still vibrating and flexible. Reading Sebold is like listening to Syd Straw singing about the worst thing that ever happened to her. Not that being funny doesn't help; Sebold can do that, too. But mainly, Lucky derives imaginative traction from its form and style, its continually expanding view. By the end, the mysteries of individuality that it conveys seem accessible only to the reluctantly brave. The book's acknowledgments conclude with some lovely, ardent thanks to Sebold's vulnerable mother. Because Lucky makes compassion a more personal, less automatic response, this gift to her mother seems light enough to carry and to keep.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly

When journalist Sebold was a college freshman at Syracuse University, she was attacked and raped on the last night of school, forced onto the ground in a tunnel "among the dead leaves and broken beer bottles." In a ham-handed attempt to mollify her, a policeman later told her that a young woman had been murdered there and, by comparison, Sebold should consider herself lucky. That dubious "luck" is the focus of this fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life. Sebold launches her memoir headlong into the rape itself, laying out its visceral physical as well as mental violence, and from there spins a narrative of her life before and after the incident, weaving memories of parental alcoholism together with her post-rape addiction to heroin. In the midst of each wrenching episode, from the initial attack to the ensuing courtroom drama, Sebold's wit is as powerful as her searing candor, as she describes her emotional denial, her addiction and even the rape her first "real" sexual experience. She skillfully captures evocative moments, such as, during her girlhood, luring one of her family's basset hounds onto a blue silk sofa strictly off-limits to both kids and pets to nettle her father. Addressing rape as a larger social issue, Sebold's account reveals that there are clear emotional boundaries between those who have been victims of violence and those who have not, though the author attempts to blur these lines as much as possible to show that violence touches many more lives than solely the victim's. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Sebold's memoir of her rape as a college freshman and its aftermath is searingly honest and harrowing, and her quiet, personal narration is equally riveting. The gifted author occasionally tinges her intimate tone with irony as she acknowledges the bitter paradoxes of her situation (e.g., the vicious beating she received from the rapist became a "plus" during the trial, because her bruises and wounds proved the encounter wasn't consensual). She also finds irony when a police officer tells her she was lucky because she was "only" raped, not murdered, and later, when the police view her as a "successful rape victim" (one whose rapist ended up behind bars). Through her prose and her reading, Sebold ably conveys both the raw immediacy of her feelings at the time, and her more insightful, aware viewpoint of today. She notes that a year after the rape, she felt she was over it and had successfully moved on, then acknowledges that, looking back, it wasn't true and she was just putting on a brave face. There's also hurt bewilderment in her voice as she recalls how her best friend (whom she met after the rape, but who knew about it and was supportive), froze her out completely after she herself was raped. This is the inspiring story of a survivor who allows listeners to follow her from trauma to recovery. Based on the Scribner hardcover. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

One day short of the end of her freshman year at Syracuse University, Sebold was raped and beaten as she returned to her dorm. This story not only chronicles her recovery from the attack but also the recovery of her family and friends and their reactions to her as she tries to return to normal. Sebold's tale is gripping as she talks about the first hours after the rape or as she eventually deals with the rape of her best friend in their apartment and the eventual destruction of that friendship. It is hard to imagine anyone but Sebold narrating her own memoir; she brings such an intense detachment to her reading that the listener may wonder how she can remain so unaffected. With the popularity of Sebold's debut novel, The Lovely Bones, libraries with true crime collections will want to order Lucky for demand. This tape may also be of interest to rape crisis centers.-Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Sheryl Altman

...[Sebold] bravely delves into her past....[The book] reads like a John Grisham page-turner [and] can't help but haunt you....Hers is a story about having the courage to speak about the unspeakable.
— Biography

Kirkus Reviews

A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author's rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court. In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazine contributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: "Try, if you can, to remember everything." Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and filmlike scene construction. Part of Sebold's ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn't killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: "The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case." Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was "in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime." Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, "Aftermath," has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade's worth of coping and healing into a short chapter. Toldwith mettle and intelligence, Sebold's story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.