Not Exactly A Lucky Charm (Lucky)

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a beautifully-written, yet harrowing novel that chronicles the brutal rape and murder of 14-year-old Susie Salmon. As Susie watches from heaven as her loved ones come to terms with her death, she slowly begins to grasp the purpose and meaning of her life.

Alice Sebold's Lucky is a well-written, yet painful memoir that chronicles the brutal beating and rape of Sebold herself. Nearly 20 years on, as she remembers the incident and her attempts to bring her rapist to justice, Sebold slowly begins to come to terms with her rape and how it has affected her life.

It is glaringly obvious how similar these two pieces of work are and, indeed, how drastically Sebold's real-life experiences affect her fiction. But where The Lovely Bones is emotional and sprirtual, Lucky is more matter-of-fact. It adeptly timetables key events, details legal processes and describes Sebold's loved ones' reactions to her ordeal, but is less convincing in revealing the author's personal sentiments about the incident.

That's not to say that Lucky isn't insightful or important. Indeed, Sebold paints the ugliness of rape in a way only the victim of this atrocity could. However, given my previous knowledge of the author, I was perplexed by the detachment of the memoir--Sebold's strength and optimism seems almost sacrilegious.

Perhaps this is the by-product of re-living the experience after so many years, or maybe it is simply that Sebold's nonfiction voice is incomparable to her fiction voice. Yet, I can't escape the idea that Sebold's brilliant debut novel gave her the ability to fictionalise her own experiences in a way that allowed her to step back and vocalise her anguish. And if this is the case, then Alice Sebold is, indeed, extremely lucky.