Memoir Book Review: Lucky She

Memoir Book Review: Lucky

She was lucky. She could have been killed. Over and over, the young, scared freshman named Alice Sebold is told this horrifying fact. Sebold was raped on the Syracuse campus, walking home during her first semester. The student was lucky -- after all, it could have been worse, had things evolved differently, if the rapist had been bent on murder, and if Sebold had not been so clever in her dealings with him.

Also, if Sebold were not so clever the memoir that came to encapsulate Alice Sebold's early, formative experiences as a young woman and a writer could have been different and worse, that is far less powerful in its emotive force upon the reader's heart -- Sebold was a young, white virgin college coed, the rapist was from the small and mixed upstate New York, working class town of Syracuse. He was also a young African-American man with a prior police record.

As an author, Alice Sebold could easily have shaped her narrative according to a destructive cultural myth, as cautioned by Judith Barrington in that author's text on Writing the Memoir in Chapter 11. The use of the genre of the memoir to relate this incident, rather than of essay or autobiography is especially useful, because by focusing only on her own experiences, the author manages to be moving without having to address potentially distracting racial issues, other than how they relate to her own experience as a human being -- in writing a memoir, Sebold can be unabashedly subjective without passing judgment upon men and women, or blacks and whites.

Thus Sebold not only won the trial and saw her rapist convicted, she also won the struggle to make sense of her experience in useful prose. In fact, the climatic moment of the memoir takes place in a writing class. Sebold has just seen her rapist wandering around the town of Syracuse. She knows him immediately, by his walk from behind as well as by sight. But she is due to appear in Tobias Wolf's writing class. Wolf, one of the great modern American masters of the memoir, author of This Boy's Life, which was later to become a film with Leonardo de Caprio and Robert De Niro, is at first angry when his promising student Alice wants to go immediately to the police. 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 if they were sitting in a comfortable chair listening to a series of confidences." Although Sebold's memoir is intimate in the ways it discusses what it was like to be subject to a rape kit, to be violated again after being violated, and to shower for the first time after her experience, comfortable is hardly the world one would use to describe the events of Lucky.