She says to her renowned teacher she cannot attend class for the day -- but Wolf usually accepts no excuses. Then, when he hears why, he tells her to remember everything, so she can put it down later. "Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing," says Barrington and Sebold is honest on the stand as a prosecution witness and later as a narrator of her own imperfect grappling with her experiences. Sebold's memory yielded, what she was later told, one of the most credible testimonies the prosecutor had ever seen from a violated woman on the stand. But she did not emerge unscathed from the rape. Physically, she was no longer a virgin. Emotionally, she was traumatized. In the last chapter of the book, she chronicles how difficult it was for her to trust men after she graduated, despite the support she received from many sympathetic male students at her college. Judith Barrington states in the first chapter of her book on writing memoirs that "modern memoirs aim to speak intimately to their readers, and those readers like to experience them as...

But Sebold says the rape created a dividing line in her own existence -- before and after. Thus, although she by and large holds true to Barrington's advice, ultimately Lucky tells such a powerful tale of life-altering experience that it transcends some of the conventions of the modern genre of memoir, and creates its own terms as a work of literature.
Works Cited

Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, 1997.

Sebold, Alice. Lucky, 2001.