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Video Summaries of Lucky
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1-Page Summary of Lucky
Overall Summary
In 1981, Alice Sebold was brutally attacked and raped. She writes about this experience in her memoir Lucky (1999). In explaining why she wrote the book, Sebold said that she wanted to help remove some of the taboo surrounding rape by making it easier to talk about it. However, one book won’t solve all of society’s problems with rape; there is a lot more work that needs to be done on this issue.
In the early morning hours of May 8, 1981, a freshman named Alice Sebold is brutally beaten and raped while walking through a park just off-campus. Her assailant warns her that he will kill her if she screams. She screams anyway and he threatens to kill her with a knife before throwing her to the ground by grabbing her hair. When Alice’s head hits the ground, she loses consciousness but only for a few moments because when she wakes up, the rape is still in progress and she reasserts that fact that she was still a virgin throughout it all.
After the attack, Alice goes to the police and tells them what happened. They tell her she is “lucky” because another young woman was recently murdered in that same park. However, Alice does not feel lucky at all; she just suffered a horrible and traumatic experience.
Alice returns to her home in Pennsylvania for a time after the attack. She goes back to school and is writing under some very influential fiction writers, including Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Tess Gallagher. Gallagher is especially important because she serves as both a mentor and friend during this difficult period of Alice’s life.
Meanwhile, months pass and the police still have no leads on Alice’s attacker. One day while walking down the sidewalk, she sees her attacker who smirks at her and says he knows her from somewhere. The experience is upsetting for Alice but she refuses to be frightened into submission. She calls over a nearby police officer who apprehends Madison.
Madison is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. He’s released when Alice, the victim of his crime, mistakenly identifies him as her attacker. Later on, Madison is arrested again because police find traces of DNA that match up to hair found at the scene of the crime.
Alice decides to stay in Syracuse instead of going home to Pennsylvania for the summer. Her roommate is a woman named Lila, who gets raped by an assailant that mentions Alice’s name. Although Madison orchestrated the attack from prison, Lila blames Alice because she knows it isn’t her fault.
Alice does graduate from Syracuse, but then her life goes downhill. She briefly attends the University of Houston for a master’s degree, but moves to Manhattan shortly after that where she struggles to make a living as a writer. Throughout most of the next decade, Alice is an alcoholic and drug user; eventually she faces up to the fact that she has suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since being raped in college. Eventually, Alice leaves Manhattan and settles in California where both hope and hell lie within her palm.
Lucky is a movie about sexual assault and post-traumatic stress disorder.
