Precise Memoir | Lucky: A Memoir

Brave, compelling read | Lucky: A Memoir | Alice Sebold

books:


	• Lucky: A Memoir Alice Sebold Back Bay Books, 2002 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 257 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Should be essential reading for college women

While not always pleasant to read, I found Lucky more compelling and much more likeable than that drivel-fest book, The Lovely Bones. Lucky is a blunt first-hand account of surviving rape, and its long-term effects on the victim, including physical and emotional trauma and, consequentially, its indirect impact on the victim's loved ones. I'd recommend it to all women, if not for reading pleasure, then at least as an eye-opener.

Precise Memoir

The differences between Sebold's memoir and fiction are vast. In "Lucky" as opposed to "The Lovely Bones" words are hammered in, staccato and short, understated. I liked both books, but I do have to point out it is as if they were written by different writers. In looking over the reviews people seem to hate one and love the other or vice versa, and I think it's a shame. Lovely Bones is like a poem: dreamy. Lucky is dry and aches like a bad knee. They're both excellent, just different.

Lucky is about Sebold's experience as rape survivor, her eventual court experience, and the sad aftermath of her first two years of college. It's no secret that I've been raped myself and am in litigation regarding it up to my neck so it was interesting to see my own reaction. It's a helpful book to read in regards to coming to terms and being honest regarding rape. It's very grounding.

Sebold's almost obsessional use of detail throughout some parts of the book juxtapose with her complete blanks on other seemingly very important details quite realistically. Her harsh rhythm describes, in many ways, my own blank face when trying to plow through describing to lawyers exactly what happened to me. Certainly a book is a safer place to let loose than a courtroom is, and yet she treats her book like a courtroom, as if everyone is standing in judgment of her, particularly her own self to her own self.

What rang the most truthful was Sebold's masochistic honesty, her seeming wish to drive a stake in every relationship she had had prior to her rape. Likewise, her roommate's rape did the same.

Her sentence-style, syntax, etc, reminded me of Hemingway, each sentence an arrow, pointing to a destination, each point drawn taut and clearly. She hit a bull's eye, no doubt.

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Brave, compelling read

From the opening pages, Sebold tells the reader a truly horrifying story of her rape in accurate and quite graphic detail. And whilst horrified at what she has endured, you want to read more - to see how someone survives an attack like that, and what life is like for a rape victim in the hours, days and week afterwards. I couldn't put this book down - a combination of great writing and admiration for the author, made this a compelling read.

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brutal truth

Sebold is compulsive in her telling of her truth. She is courageous, open, relentless and unsentimental. I worked with rape victims for many years, she tells her story in the unflinching style of one who has grown tired of B.S. following a trauma. I loved this memoir.

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Brutal, honest, powerful, brave and sad.....

Like the Lovely Bones, I like Ms. Sebold's direct storytelling. I found this story very intense, then sad as she tried to struggle to return to "normalcy" in the face of adversity.

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.

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