LUCKY

Alice Sebold's 1999 memoir Lucky inevitably invites comparisons to her stunning 2002 first novel, The Lovely Bones. Issued last October in paperback in the wake of that novel's critical and commercial success, Lucky has remained on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list for more than seventeen weeks. Certainly one of the memoir's attractions is that it provides a glimpse of the source material for The Lovely Bones, but finally it is much more than that, a work that stands on its own as a testament to the way "You save yourself or you remain unsaved."

As a memoir, Lucky lacks the brilliant novelistic artifice of The Lovely Bones, a wrenching and riveting yet surprisingly funny, transcendent account of the aftermath of a teenage girl's rape and murder--told from the perspective of the girl, now in heaven. This voice is one of the enormous gambles Sebold takes in her handling of subject matter and narrative devices. Reading the novel becomes an oddly exhilarating experience because of its portrayal of the resilience and hope that manage to spring from violence and sorrow--and because of the seemingly effortless way Sebold pulls off one risky move after another.

Sebold creates similar effects in Lucky but by a different route, her candid voice and linear presentation a contrast to her novel's omniscient sensibility and more fluid sense of time. Telling Lucky's story simply and directly, Sebold achieves comparable harrowing and often funny and inspiring effects as she recounts her brutal rape as a college freshman at Syracuse University and the aftermath--and as in The Lovely Bones, from the first page Sebold reveals her propensity for taking narrative risks.

The memoir begins with the violent attack, plunging readers immediately into the excruciating particulars of the assault, told with such precise scenic details that it is both deeply unsettling to read and impossible to put down. Beginning with such a scene, omitting any preparation or background detail, has the potential to come across as sensational or disorienting. But Sebold's skill at involving the reader enables us, however uneasily, to experience on a visceral level the devastation of this crime upon its victims.

"My life was over; my life had just begun," Sebold concludes her disturbing opening. Aware that she changes in the eyes of anyone to whom she tells her story, she nevertheless refuses to be silenced. Her headlong courage is evident in the way she gently, but with understated pain, confronts her father's bewildered questions about why she "allowed" the assault. Fueled by the same stubborn courage and encouraged by poet and professor Tess Gallagher, she submits for class comments a poem expressing her rage. Her classmates' puzzled responses are agonizing but ultimately less significant than the permission Gallagher and the act of writing has given her to feel anger and hate. Sebold's trademark honesty is itself risky, but ultimately is what gives the story its authenticity and power.

Anger and hate prove to be productive rather than destructive as they drive her determination when she recognizes her rapist on the street and manages to secure his arrest. She narrates the preliminary hearing, the shockingly botched police lineup that puts her case on shakier ground, the jury selection process, and the trial. But Sebold's hard-earned victory does not end her ordeal. Just as the narrative reaches a plateau, Sebold's best friend is also assaulted. As her friend struggles with her own trauma, Sebold faces another devastating truth about the way rape can ravage solidarity, alienating victims from each other.

In the end, Sebold's triumph is an ambiguous one, her healing haunted by setbacks as she flounders through drug dependency and sexual experimentation. Though her path is a bumpy, disorderly, often painful one, the book's title reinforces her profound gratitude at having survived. Lucky, like The Lovely Bones, provides much insight into the devastation of sexual violence, but these are far more than works about a social issue. With seemingly effortless grace in both genres, Sebold offers profound truths about loss, healing, and the bumbling and glorious ways we save ourselves through the connections we forge--to work, to memory, and with each other.

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Nancy McCabe's creative nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Puerto del Sol, Fourth Genre, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, among others, and has twice been listed in Best American Essays.

Nancy McCabe's book After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening. is forthcoming.

She can be reached at ngm4@exchange.upb.pitt.edu.

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