[In the following review, Oates calls Lucky an “exemplary memoir,” asserting that the memoir is original and direct.]

Alice Sebold is the author of the first novel The Lovely Bones (2002), one of those bestsellers described as “runaway” to distinguish them from more lethargic bestsellers that merely slog along selling copies in the six-figure range. Though deftly marketed as an adult novel with a special appeal to women, The Lovely Bones is in fact a young-adult novel of unusual charm, ambition and originality. Its most obvious literary predecessor is Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which the deceased Emily is granted omniscient knowledge of family, friends and community after her death; a subtly orchestrated wish-fulfilment fantasy that allows audiences to weep, and at the same time feel good about weeping. Not the deep counterminings of tragic adult literature here, which suggests that death is not only painful but permanent, and that we are not likely to hover above our families as they mourn us, but a fantasy in which an event of surpassing horror (a fourteen-year-old girl raped, murdered, dismembered by a neighbour who is never apprehended for the crime) is very sketchily narrated in the first chapter, to provide background for a story of mourning, healing and redemption: “Heaven wasn't perfect. But I came to believe that if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on Earth”.

The Lovely Bones might be called “inspirational” fiction in its simulation of tragedy in the service of survival, since its goal is to confirm what we wish we could believe and not to un-settle us with harsh, intransigent truths about human cruelty. Written with the wry panache of contemporary young-adult fiction, its tone gamely “light” and chatty, The Lovely Bones is something of an anomaly: a “survivor” tale that is in fact narrated from Heaven. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that left many Americans stunned and reeling, yearning to be assured of the possibility of Heaven and the immortality of the human soul, the extraordinary success of Alice Sebold's first novel is perhaps not so mysterious. Like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, another young-adult novel skilfully marketed for an adult audience, The Lovely Bones tells a good story, and provides us with good, sympathetic characters with whom we can “identify”.

For those to whom The Lovely Bones is simply too sugary a confection to swallow, Sebold's memoir Lucky, the author's first book (published in the United States in 1999), will be something of a revelation, if not a shock. For Lucky is an utterly realistic, unsparing and distinctly unsugary account of violent rape and its aftermath in the author's life, based upon her experience as an eighteen-year-old freshman at Syracuse University in May 1981. Where the novel transports us immediately to a fantasy Heaven, the memoir transports us immediately to very plausible Hell:

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater … a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.

Lucky is terse, ironic, controlled and graphic. It begins with a literally blow-by-blow account of the protracted beating and rape suffered by Sebold as a university freshman surprised in a park by an assailant who will turn out to be a resident of the city of Syracuse with a prior police record, a young black man so arrogantly self-assured that, when he and Sebold accidentally meet on a Syracuse street some months after the rape, he laughs at her terror: “Hey, girl. Don't I know you from somewhere?” After the ordeal of a preliminary hearing and a trial during which the rapist's defence attorney attacks Sebold's testimony with every weapon allowed in courtroom procedure, her rapist is found guilty of first-degree counts of rape and sodomy and is sentenced to eight to twenty-five years in prison—with time off for good behaviour, the minimum eight years could be considerably reduced. Should anyone imagine that a jury verdict of “guilty” is a happy ending to any crime case, Sebold notes that the rape of her friend and room-mate the following year in Syracuse is theorized by police to have been a “revenge” rape committed by friends of the convicted man, and includes a harrowing final chapter in which she speaks of years of drinking, drug addiction and psychological unease that followed her rape: “I loved heroin. … Ecstasy and mushrooms and acid trips? Who wanted to enhance a mood? My goal was to destroy it”.

Ours is the age of what might be called the New Memoir: the memoir of sharply focused events, very often traumatic, in distinction to the traditional life-memoir. The New Memoir is frequently written by the young or relatively young, the traditional memoir is usually the province of the older. In this sub-genre, the motive isn't to write a memoir because one is an individual of stature or accomplishment, in whom presumably readers might be interested, but to set forth out of relative anonymity the terms of one's physical/psychological ordeal; in most cases, the ordeal is survived, so that the memoirist moves through trauma into coping and eventual recovery. Though the literary structure may sound formulaic, exemplary memoirs like Lucky break the formula with their originality of insight and expression. Like most good prose works, Lucky is far from unambiguous: the memoir can be read as an alarming and depressing document, and it can be read as genuinely “uplifting”. The pivotal point in Sebold's recovery doesn't occur until years after the rape when, ironically, she comes upon her own case discussed in Dr Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery in terms of “post traumatic stress disorder”.

[Individuals suffering from this disorder] do not have a normal “baseline” level of alert but relaxed attention. Instead, they have a baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger. … Traumatic events appear to recondition the human nervous system.

The act of writing a memoir can be seen, ideally, as an act of reclaiming the victim's very nerves. Having been encouraged by her admirable writing instructors at Syracuse, Tess Gallagher and Tobias Wolff, to remember as much as she can and to write freely about it, Sebold will come in time to discover

that memory could save, that it had power, that it [is] often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed or the brutalized.

When Sebold was raped at the age of eighteen she was, unlike the majority of her classmates, a virgin, inexperienced in sexual matters. This fact would be many times reiterated in police and court documents as if, had the victim not been a virgin, the rapist's assault would not have been so heinous and the victim's claim of rape might have been undermined. The (suspicious, male) detective assigned to Sebold's case is finally more sympathetic because Sebold was a virgin than he would have been otherwise, though in his initial report, after having interrogated the injured, dazed, exhausted and sedated Sebold at length, in the middle of the night, the detective comes to the thoroughly unwarranted and arbitrary conclusion that Sebold was not being “completely factual” and that her case should be referred to the “inactive file”. After Sebold's painfully vivid description of the assault and rape, the quoted police report is a masterpiece of banality, its flat, stereotypical language seemingly calculated to minimalize the horrific experience.

It will be upsetting for many readers, and certainly for women, to learn that the rape victim must “perform” convincingly, if she is to be believed. In giving police and courtroom testimony, it isn't enough to simply tell the truth (“if you just tell the truth, you lose”); one must play a prescribed victim-role, dress the part as deliberately as if one were appearing in a stage play, and above all appear innocent, humble, even repentant and apologetic in the face of others' suspicions (“Juror: Didn't you know that you are not supposed to go through the park after nine-thirty at night? Didn't you know that?”). Sebold endures the ordeal of the trial with a minimum of bitterness: “While still in court I thanked the jury. I drew on my resources: performing, placating, making my family smile. As I left that courtroom I felt I had put on the best show of my life”. Sebold's experience helps to explain why, in the United States, it is believed that approximately 50 per cent of rapes are never reported to police. For many women, the ordeal of rape's aftermath is simply not worth it.

Lucky is interlarded with astonishing remarks made to Sebold by well-intentioned but unthinking individuals, including Sebold's father: “How could he have raped you unless you let him?”. Comparing Sebold with her allegedly more sensitive sister, Mr Sebold says: “If it had to happen to one of you, I'm glad it was you and not your sister”. Another classic line is delivered by a feminist psychiatrist: “Well, I guess this will make you less inhibited about sex now, huh?” After Sebold has managed to write a poem expressing hatred of her rapist a fellow (male) poet protests not to understand: “You're a beautiful girl”. Months after the rape, when Alice Sebold is trying gamely to lead a normal life, she assures a man in whom she is romantically interested that she has had sex three times since the rape, though in fact she has not had sex, and he says with approval: “That's a good amount. Just enough to know you're normal”. The most devastating of remarks, however, is delivered by the rapist himself when he sees his victim naked: “You're the worst bitch I ever done this to”.

Where The Lovely Bones ends with the greeting-card sentiment, “I wish you all a long and happy life”, Lucky ends on a more ambivalent note: “It is later now, and I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand”. That the victim-memoirist would one day make of her trauma the “runaway” Lovely Bones is a wonderfully ironic turnabout no one, surely not the victim, could have foreseen.