Lucky (1999)

Wow. What a book. This is the true story of the author's brutal rape and her recovery. She is so brutally honest and the book was so detailed that I could not put it down. The description of the rape was hard to read in such detail but I think it was important for the book for the readers to be able to relate even a little bit to her story. Hearing how her relationships changed with her friends and family was difficult to imagine. One scene that really stood out for me was when she tried to get her father to understand what happened to her and why she didn't fight more. People so often judge and blame the victim. In this book, she talks about that frequently and how she actually tried to protect others from their discomfort. She was lucky to have a lot of support and one teacher that helped her have the strength to face her attacker in court and actually convict him. This was a book of strength and courage. It was well worth the read ( )

Alice Sebold was an 18-year old virgin when she was brutally beaten and raped in 1981 on the last day of her first college school year. When she returned for her second year, in October she saw her rapist and immediately went to the police. The book follows the trial and how she tried to continue on with her life after.

This was a compelling read and Alice does not hold back in her detailed account of the rape and she goes into detail about what happens after and the trial. Though not in the book, I’m marking this a As I look up the man now, I’m shocked! He was not her rapist! Debating about bringing down my rating, but I don’t like doing that. The rating is based on what I thought of the book itself. She was tough. She immediately knew she wanted to find the man and have him sent to jail. It was unfortunate – some of the decisions she made as she got older, but I guess that could be chalked up to PTSD. ( )

UPDATE: after learning about the exoneration of Anthony Broadwater I wrote this blog post: https://writersite.org/2022/01/17/the-case-of-alice-sebold/

My OLD review: I remember reading Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones and thinking it was a spectacular book, but that the writer must have something very dark inside her to write it. It wasn’t a judgment, but an exploratory and rather sad thought on my part.

When I read Sebold’s memoir, I learned where that darkness originated. Lucky is the story of the tragedy that happened to her: she was raped while a freshman at college. After the rape, a police officer told Sebold about another girl who had been killed after her rape, and that Sebold was lucky. Imagine how that word lucky must have sounded to her!

The book starts right off with the rape. This hooks the reader--swiftly and absolutely. The rest of the book describes how this experience affected her life, as well as how the rapist was eventually captured and tried. The book has all the “high drama” elements: inadequate responses of family and friends, the emotional terrain, and the legal process.

The book put me in Sebold’s life so that I felt as I were experiencing all that she had experienced. She wasn’t lucky at all, but she was very plucky, both her immediate response to the rape and the aftermath were plucky. ( )

Alice Sebold was a self-described "weirdo" college girl from an even quirkier family when she was raped by a stranger. All at once, everyone's perception of her changed. She coped with her new identity as "the raped girl" as best she could. Then one day, months later, she thought she saw her rapist in the street. He spoke to her as if he knew her. This brief encounter ended with a prosecution and conviction.

This memoir has been controversial ever since the 2021 exoneration of the Black man convicted of Sebold’s rape. I tried to read the book on its own terms and concluded that, as the story of a horrific crime and its aftermath, it works despite its narrow focus and occasional stretches of dull writing. As Sebold writes in the afterword, the narrative has gained a following among survivors of sexual violence. However, when reading this book, it is impossible not to think of the injustice that the author and the legal system unwittingly brought to pass. ( )

Alice Sebold is a terrific writer and this book proves it. A memoir of her rape at a time when she was a young student at Syracuse University, it begins with a harrowing and honest account of the crime. From there, she talks about how her friends and family grappled with it all, and how it changed her forever.

An important part of the book is the story of how she accidentally spotted her rapist on the street one day, months after the attack, which led to his arrest, trial and conviction. Sebold goes into some detail in her report on the trial, including her positive identification of the defendant as the man who raped her. The only problem is that she apparently identified the wrong man, and as a result, an innocent man went on to spend many years in prison and many more years listed as a sex offender, his life ruined. An innocent man.

Sebold wanted to write a book about sexual violence and women, and in the book is rather dismissive of the issue of race, which she saw as incidental. She is angry when the defendant’s lawyer asks her how many Black men she knew — because that’s not really relevant. And yet, the fact that the man she identified was Black and she was White turned about to be far more important than she realised.

The publisher stopped selling the book when the man she identified, Anthony J. Broadwater, was finally exonerated recently, 40 years after the crime. That whet my appetite — and I’m sure that of others as well — to read the book. I look forward to reading Sebold’s thoughts on all this in a future edition of the book. ( )