Reaction paper on the book Lucky by Alice Sebold - Essay Example

ed the course of her life when she was 18 and a freshman at Syracuse University in 1981, Sebold invites her readers into the lifelong effects of that one event. From the intricate description of police action following her report, through the days and weeks following both in facing other students back at her dorm room and in returning to her parents home for the summer break, to the recognition and trial of the man who raped her, Sebold gives a real life account of the various ways in which rape can hurt a woman, physically, psychologically, socially.

By including the stories of several of her friends and acquaintances that she meets along the way, Sebold also sheds light on the ways in which others reacted to similar experience or to herself as a victim. Told with her characteristic forthright style, Sebold paints a picture of the reality of rape as she has experienced it over the course of the approximately 18 years since it happened. I especially liked the way in which Sebold approaches the subject with a frank, tell-it-like-it-is approach that typifies her writing style.

As she described the way in which her attacker painfully manipulated her breasts, she narrates the way in which she dissociated herself from the experience. “’Nice white titties,’ he said. And the words made me give them up, lobbing off each part of my body as he claimed ownership – the mouth, the tongue, my breasts” (Sebold, 1999, p. 16). By painting the picture in such straightforward language, without appeals to sympathy or apology, Sebold immediately drew me in to her story, allowing me to sympathize with the experience in a way that has not often been presented.

“’I was raped’ I said. … I felt I had to say it. But I felt also that saying it was akin to an act of vandalism. As if I had thrown a bucket of blood out across the living room at the blue couch, Myra, the winged chair, my mother. / The three of us sat there and watched it drip” (Sebold, 1999, p. 76).