1. Lucky Alice Sebold Amazon
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Lucky is autobiographical novel which helps readers to understand who Alice Sebold is and what her books are about. Although she writes about her own experience and family issues, almost everyone can find something relatable in this novel. This is the author’s debut, a public confession of her tragedy, family issues, and fears.

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. Years after the fact, Sebold wrote this memoir about the rape and its aftermath. The book's title, 'Lucky,' is explained in the prologue: the police told Sebold that she was lucky to have escaped the fate of another girl who had been murdered and dismembered in the same spot. Three months after the publication of The Lovely Bones, Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky, an account of her rape at the age of 18 and the trial that followed, also rose to number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Lucky was reissued by Scribner, with a new forward by the author, in 2017.

In the first chapter, it began with Alice's rape. She was walking late at night, back to her dorm room, when a black man grabbed her and dragged her to a tunnel under an amphitheater. Then, it happened. She didn't cry very much. She thought of poems, and agreed to whatever he said. She didn't want to die, that was very clear in this chapter.

Rape and everything attributed to it becomes one of the central themes of the novel. To be sexually assaulted is dreadful experience. The society always warns young girls not to dress too provocatively and behave properly or they might get in trouble. However, there is no guarantee that a person is not going to be raped wearing the most conservative clothes. Rape is not only a physical assault, it is a terrible violation of person’s rights. Alice Sebold was only eighteen-year-old student when this tragedy happened to her. She wasn’t drunk, she didn’t look provocatively, to say more, she was a virgin. They say that such bad things don’t happen to good girls, but they do. Alice and many other victims proved that. There is no need to say that rape is awful, but victim blaming is no less revolting. When a raped girl worries about the way she looks, for she doesn’t want policemen to think that it is her fault, it becomes clear how messed up with world is. The society is not merciful to those who don’t correspond to an idea of an ideal victim. You are to be good, polite, and shy to be pitied by people.

Alice often described herself as destroyed and dirty. Rape took a part of her innocence and she was sure that other people knew and felt that too. She didn’t know what kind of response she wanted to get, but she spoke about rape a lot and couldn’t forget about that. The moment when she said that good boys would never want her showed how desperate she was. It was also evidence that she blamed herself too. For instance, her father couldn’t understand how she could be raped when the assaulter didn’t have any weapon.

Except sexual assaults, the novel covers such themes as alcoholism, depression and an unhappy marriage. It is as clear as a day that Alice’s family could never be one of those which are usually showed in ads. The father, who was constantly busy or abroad and the mother with panic attacks were unable to give their daughters what they needed. Alice’s sister was an example of a child who buried herself in books to forget about everything. Alice’s mother found her salvation in alcohol, but managed to quit drinking. Depression, anxiety, and detachment ruled in the family. It could be quite possible that a process of Alice’s recovery took so long because she was deprived of that family support she needed most of all. Every member of the family had enough on his or her plate to deal with something else.

This novel also portrays a human’s ability to overcome even the most terrible tragedies. It might take a lot of time, but a desire to live a normal life and enjoy it wins.

Lucky

Genre: Memoir

Summary

When Alice Sebold, author of the best-selling novel, The Lovely Bones (see this database), was completing her freshmen year at Syracuse University, she was assaulted and raped. Years after the fact, Sebold wrote this memoir about the rape and its aftermath. The book's title, 'Lucky,' is explained in the prologue: the police told Sebold that she was lucky to have escaped the fate of another girl who had been murdered and dismembered in the same spot. In point of fact, Sebold, a virgin before the rape, was in a sense murdered, since life as she had known it would never be the same: 'My life was over; my life had just begun' (33).

In crisp, lively prose the author takes us relentlessly through the details of her rape and the police inquiry that followed. We learn also that the narrator had suffered from a poor body self-image, loved to spend her time reading, had day-dreams of becoming a poet. We learn about her family--a mother prone to severe panic attacks and a professorial father who hid behind his books, an older sister who helped Alice take care of their mother. The family was considered by neighbors to be 'weird.'

After the rape, Sebold felt even more isolated and 'Other.' She could not bring herself to tell her family, who tip-toed around her, all of the horrendous details of the assault. She realized that all who knew her were aware she had been raped and were uneasy in her presence. Her father could not understand how she could have been raped if the assailant's knife had dropped out of reach.

In spite of everything, Alice returns to Syracuse, taking poetry workshops with Tess Gallagher and a writing workshop with Tobias Wolff. Incredibly, she spots her assailant one day on the street near the college. The author notifies the police, the assailant is later arrested, and Alice agrees to press charges and to be a witness at the trial. Neither her father nor her mother have the stomach to come to the trial, but Tess Gallagher accompanies her. The account of the trial is detailed, agonizing, and fascinating.

Commentary

This memoir is well-written, absorbing, and informative. Sebold had to be extraordinarily self possessed and determined to withstand not only the rape, but also the trial experience. Her stoicism took its toll. After the trial she tried to lead a 'normal' life, but drifted into the drug scene of New York City's East Village. Two things saved her. She taught at Hunter College and found that 'my students there became the people who kept me alive. I could get lost in their lives' (234). Through a series of circumstances, she read the book, Trauma and Recovery. 'I was reading about myself. I was also reading about war veterans . . . reading these men's stories allowed me to begin to feel' (239).

In an interview published at the end of the book, Sebold explains that she began to write The Lovely Bones (which also begins with a rape) but interrupted its writing to write Lucky--'to separate the two stories' ('a conversation with Alice Sebold,' p. 4). In these two works we see, on the one hand, the role of narrative in making sense out of experience (Lucky), and on the other hand, the power of imagination to create a world (The Lovely Bones). Both works draw the reader in.

Lucky Alice Sebold Amazon

Lucky Alice Sebold Publisher