About this title: Raped and beaten as an 18-year-old Syracuse University student, Alice Sebold recounts the story of her rape, the trial and conviction of her rapist, and her recovery. Her book also tells the story of its own coming into being. Immediately after the rape, Sebold vowed to write about it, and worked it out in various forms before sculpting it into ...
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Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners, and may have creases. Spine has wear at edges and may have creases. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2002-09
ISBN-13:9780316096195ISBN:0316096199
Description: Very Good. Binding is tight and square. Text is clean, bright and unmarked. Has some light edge and corner wear. We recommend EXPEDITED MAIL for even faster delivery! read more
Binding: Audiobook cassette
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780743529785ISBN:0743529782
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Ex-Library book-on-tape with stickers and stampings. Clamshell has some typical wear. (W2) 6 cassettes. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2002-09
ISBN-13:9780316096195ISBN:0316096199
Description: Very Good. 11th Printing Trade Paperback = very good, minor edge wear, small corner crease on cover. We ship with Delivery Confirmation. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2002-09
ISBN-13:9780316096195ISBN:0316096199
Description: Good. The pages in this book are starting to yellow. Every heavytail order includes with a sweet! We carefully hand clean and reinspect each and every item we ship. Our quality control process ensures items to be in the condition described or better. Heavytail is determined to earn your repeat business through old fashioned customer service. We love international orders. read more
"It was interesting reading this true story after "The Lovely Bones" (this was her first published book) as now I see where her obsession with interlacing violence with the mundane world comes from. This was an interesting read but felt more like a recitation of fact, of the drill you go through as a rape victim, rather than an exploration of her mutilated sexuality, as she suggests. I didn't feel the terror, the anguish, the paranoia but instead felt as if I were in fact at the police station going endlessly over the episode. When I think of it, that's sort of how she describes the rape/murder of the little girl in LB; perhaps that distance is what a victim needs to relay the incident but the reader experiences it as a distasteful, rotten piece of fruit (the raper apologizes and cries afterward) and fails to communicate how it lacerated her sense of self."
"This memoir is almost a really good book. But I think it's lacking the essential emotional connection between the author and readers. And the ending seems empty. Bravo for her, though, for writing about such a tough subject -- her rape and it's aftermath on her life."
"When Alice Sebold was brutally beaten and raped in the cold and lonely park near her college dormitory, police told her that she was "lucky" to have not been murdered. "In the tunnel where I was raped...a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky." The pain and irony in this description serves as the basis for Sebold's memoir entitled Lucky. From that night on, Sebold struggles to keep her life together. She doesn't want to be looked upon by others as tainted or destroyed; nor does she try to pretend that the rape never occurred. Rather, Sebold bravely marches ahead with her life, continuing on with school, while at the same time attempting to deal with the incredible trauma that the rape inflicted upon her. Sebold's story is rich with details and vivid descriptions. She effortlessly weaves together raw and painful details with sarcasm, revealing a raped teenaged woman's forced bravado as she explores the complicated dynamic between herself and her parents and sister after the rape. Desperate for her parents to not treat her differently after the rape, she tries to show her father that she's not broken. "I'm still me, Dad," Sebold tells her father. As Sebold's college years draw to a close, she realizes that she still has not healed from the rape. In the following years, Sebold moves from one precarious situation to the next, moving through lovers, drugs, and low-paying jobs until finally she realizes that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, a realization that finally helps her to deal with the trauma in her life. This book is a remarkable piece. It is a gritty, unabashed, and honest look at the devastating effects of rape on not only the victim, but on her friends and family as well. Sebold's brave work is not an ongoing psychotherapy session. Rather, it is the product of years of reflection and recognition, a beautiful piece of writing that explores the journey of healing and empowerment."
This is the first line in Lucky, Alice Sebold's rape/survival memoir, which begins in media res, as Sebold is violently sexually assaulted.
Before this beginning, however, Sebold presents a short, lyrical prologue, in which the title of the book is explained:
In the tunnel where I was raped...a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky...But at the time, I felt I had more in common with the dead girl than I did with the large, beefy police officers or my stunned freshman-year girlfriends. The dead girl and I had been in the same low place...During the rape my eye caught something among the leaves and glass. A pink hair tie...I will always think of her when I think of the pink hair tie. I will think of a girl in the last moments of her life.
The opening pages are unforgettable. Sebold describes the sexual assault in unflinching, graphic detail. At times detached, at times poetic. That's what struck me most about her writing. She can be journalistic at times; even a little Hemingway-esque with her short, pointed sentences. Then, smoothly, she'll segue into a beautiful description. For instance, during the sexual assault, she graphically describes being forced to give oral sex - the prose is workmanlike, almost confessional, such as you might write in a diary: slangy, idiomatic, conversational. Then she describes the way she talked to her rapist, and her prose becomes poetical: I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
This is a great memoir, but it's this very aspect that makes it a tough read - especially at the start. The first fifty pages especially: the rape, the trip to the hospital, telling her parents. If you can read it without crying, then you've got something on me.
The initial gut-punch power of the start of Lucky inevitably fades. The rest of Sebold's story recounts her attempts to put her life back together, her struggles with this task, and the eventual trial in which her rapist is convicted. There's even a Tobias Wolff (!) cameo, for those of you hip to the lit scene.
When I was a freshman in college, my first girlfriend was raped at a frat house. Later, after the rape kit and the meeting with the ADA and the phone call home to Arizona, I went to see her in her dorm room. When I saw her, she was cowering in the corner, and the look in her eyes, that mingling of fear and alertness, is something that I've never forgotten (the only thing I can compare it to is my dog, Maj. Henry, who I rescued from a shelter; when I first got him, whenever I raised my voice, he got that same slinking, terrified look, as though waiting for his next beating). As a man, I'm genetically incapable of understanding what the experience meant for her. Indeed, unless I'm convicted of a felony, I probably never will. All I'd ever know was the external stuff: how we broke up; how she started smoking and drinking and doing drugs; and how she dropped out of school a year later. I suppose I read this book for her, in the hope of getting the specter of an inkling of what it must have been like."
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