Lucky: A Memoir
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- ISBN13: 9780316096195
- Condition: USED – GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
In a memoir hailed for its searing candor and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-ancient college freshman, she was cruelly raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold’s indomitable spirit-as she struggles for understanding (“After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes”); as her dazed family tree and friends sometimes make a mess of their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker’s arrest and conviction. In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom very much hard-won: “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
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I despised this book!It was really yucky I know its terrible that alice was raped but this is sad and when I read it Ughhh!
Alice if your reading this no offence but Im sorry what happend to you it was just disturbing and got me grossed out!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
1) Lucky/ Alice Seabold
2) Small, Brown & Company, 2002, 272 pages
3) Fiction
Lucky is a fictional book with a strong message behind it. The book is set in present time in the city of Syracuse at Syracuse University. Alice, the main character, and the one who tells the tale in first person, is finishing her first year of college. On her last day there she is coming home from a acquaintances house and walks through the park, alone, then is raped. After being cruelly raped she returns to her dorm where she is then taken to the hospital and then reported her raped. Then the book takes her through her summer getting over the rape and then returning to Syracuse. After she returns she has another encounter with her rapist. He is then taken in, where the book goes through the whole examination.
I really loved reading this book it was very appealing as it ongoing. It starts off really well it kept my attention; until the trials ongoing then the book took a breakdown. The same thing kept happing over and over and over again. I pushed myself to get through the whole book and I was very satisfied with it. If I was to tell a person one thing about this book it would be it gets slow through the middle but read through it, because in the end you will be satisfied with it.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
As one who loved “The Lovely Bones” (until the end, which struck me as more artifice than art), I was severely disappointed by Ms. Sebold’s memoir. Like “The Lovely Bones,” the beginning of “Lucky” starts strong, the events she relates are gripping and well told, and we are drawn into the narrative’s chilling details because of her nearly clinical point of view. But, the rest of the narrative is far less engaging. For the most part, “Lucky” struck me as an inauthentic, clumsy, and occasionally cliched reporting of an event that Sebold has yet to deal with and recover from emotionally. We are told a series of episodes in Sebold’s life, some that are significant to the rape, others that appear thrown in for no apparent reason additional than they may have been linked in her mind in some way with the rape. Sorry to say, Sebold relies nearly entirely on telling us the logical relations between events; rarely does she shows us the emotional relations and, more importantly, her emotional reactions to them. In fleeting, I felt cheated by Sebold’s lack of emotional engagement with her suffering. The fact that she eventually resorted to heroin and a series of emotionally-detached serial sex partners makes me marvel how she could categorize the last section of the memoir as the “Afterword.” Clearly she was still in the grips of PTSD, which was, from my perspective, where the memoir should have begun. Of interest to everyone, not just additional women who have been raped, or, for that matter, anyone who has veteran a traumatic event (the death of loved one, the horror of war) is this: how did she recover her ex- self-respect and self-confidence to the point of being able to turn this traumatic experience around and use it not only as the focus of a memoir, but as the gist of a best-selling novel? By the end I was still wondering if Sebold ever recovered from the effects of the rape.
Perhaps I was left with this question because Sebold’s irritating self-absorption killed any sympathy I may have had for her as both the central “character” and and the narrating leader. Rather than take us into the dread, panic, loneliness, even alienation from others she must of felt during and after the attack, most of the time we hear Sebold’s “leader” voice summarizing and sanitizing every experience. Ironically, we could infer that in her own life Sebold failed in her roles as loving daughter, compassionate friend, and caring lover because in the memoir we see her exerting an nearly obsessive, predicable, even mechanistic control over all of her relationships. Take her desperate need for Lila’s friendship after the rape. When Lila eventually “dumps” her, Sebold takes pains to clarify how she was snubbed publicly. Where is her private grief at the loss of her closest friend? In fact, who is Lila, apart from Sebold’s “clone” or, as Sebold seems to suggest, her doppelganger? That Sebold can only clarify Lila as a reflection of herself (factually, Lila is raped on Sebold’s bed), would be repugnant if it weren’t for the fact that Sebold seems really unaware that she is abusing a real person for literary effect. Moreover, except for the inclusion of her poem “Conviction,” which is emotional catharsis dressed up as a literary exercise (merely clever, but not convincing), Sebold would have been far more convincing had she quoted directly from her journals (which she frequently mentions) to show us authentic expressions of grief, loneliness, rage, depression in all its unmediated rawness.
Ultimately, like any fictional narrative, a successful memoir must exhibit the qualities of excellent tale telling: include only what we need to know, show rather than tell, and most importantly, place the reader with something veteran, felt, and learned “with” the leader, not “by” the leader. Sadly, Ms. Sebold’s memoir failed to convince me that she lost more than just her virginity that night in the tunnel.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The tale was a excellent, strong tale, but the read was so sloooow. She writes very well, but to me, it’s seems so slow. Perhaps she needed more explanation and interactions with the characters.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I’m very surprised that this book has such excellent reviews! I was really looking forwards to reading it only to find that the grammar and spelling mistakes fill this book so terribly that I could not even stand to read it. If errors don’t bother you then go yet to be and give this a try but if you want to read a book that doesn’t keep distracting you because of mistakes then I suggest you keep on searching.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5