Responding to Alice Sebold's Lucky after the man she accused was exonerated

As a survivor, a memoirist, and someone deeply concerned about issues relating to cultural healing and social justice, I have a lot to say about reading Alice Sebold’s highly acclaimed memoir about rape, Lucky.

The day I started reading this memoir — BOMBSHELL news — the man sent to prison for Alice Sebold’s rape was exonerated. He was a black man wrongly convicted — after 40 years.

That horrifying tragic truth changes everything in the experience of reading this book, and I’m glad I had that insight, but even without it, I would have had some problems with Sebold’s book.

But I also think we have a lot to learn as a culture, in the wake of Me Too and Black Lives Matter especially, by having a reckoning with this book.

A couple decades ago, this was THE rape memoir. I heard feminists mention it all the time.

What was the reason it was such an impactful memoir?

Because it was the PERFECT RAPE — the kind of rape that a racist and misogynistic culture can accept.

This was the only kind of rape we were ever taught about: the stranger, (probably black — in a racist country that can go unsaid), the violence, the virgin girl, the blood, the bruises, the pure fear against the pure evil, the good cops, the good judges, the civilized white world that will avenge the ruined virgin girl (from the black man).

It’s no wonder that, decades later, Me Too has caused us all to go back and make sense of the rapes that we couldn’t see as rapes because they didn’t fit that narrative:

What if he was someone I loved? What if he was a respected man? What if he wasn’t violent, but he didn’t respect my consent? What if I didn’t fight back because I was scared or in shock? What if he was my boyfriend? My husband? My brother? What if I wasn’t a virgin? What if I was drunk? What if I was on drugs? What if I was just a bad girl?

It’s taken us so long to make sense of the nuance of this trauma because we were indoctrinated to believe that rape is what happened to Alice Sebold and virgin white girls in Lifetime movies.

That would be my biggest critique about this book had I not known its tragic truth: Sebold is hellbent on being the PERFECT victim, in a way that is actually sexist and harmful.

This is not to take away from her truth and trauma, but to identify how submersed in patriarchy she was and how that played a role in her ability to process the trauma. She mentions her virginity over and over. She highlights her absolute ignorance about sex in court, asking the judge, wide eyed, about what “put it in” meant. She refers to herself, over and over, as “a good girl” and makes sure she wears good girl skirts and good girl blouses. She even, most cringingly, says that a bailiff told her that she was “the best rape victim he’s ever seen” on the witness stand. And then she says she held onto that for years.

I’m sure that this recent exoneration has shattered a part of the identity of perfection Sebold needed to build around herself to survive as a woman in this sexist world.

She’s careful to note how her story dodges every part of rape culture: she’s not pretty, she’s not dressed sexy, she never drinks, she’s a good girl, she’s a virgin, she screamed and fought hard, she went to police, she remembered it all, she was the perfect witness, and a black man went to prison while police got promoted — she saved the day.

The perfect girl got her perfection taken away but at least she was the perfect victim.

Sebold, in every sentence of this book, is grasping for that perfection. And in order to achieve it, she has to create a very black and white world — no nuance. There’s good vs. evil and she is angelic and pure.

She hates her rapist. She sees the man on trial as guilty, gloating, pure evil. She thinks his lawyer is evil and supports rape. She struggles to understand why his father comes to court and supports a rapist son. She wants him dead. She wishes he could get the death penalty but she settles for maximum time, constantly writing courts to deny him parole, and she is adamant she will never forgive him.

Yet he was an innocent man…it was her trauma that needed to create this dichotomy.

In reality, the scene about the rape was very detailed, and it didn’t reveal a purely evil man. It seemed to reveal…someone very sick.

He was bewildered over what he’d done, then he was crying, then he wanted $8–it seemed a man with some kind of mental illness. But in Sebold’s PTSD mixed with her need to be the perfect victim, she had to make him into the most evil villain.

The truths that we need to start exposing about rape are many, but one thing we need to do is shatter this myth of the perfect rape. It’s not real. Virginity isn’t even real. Sebold’s rape was traumatic, but the good woman evil man dichotomy must be destroyed.

Because ultimately, we’ve learned that Sebold was far from the perfect rape victim: her unchecked internalized racism prevented that. And in presuming the existence of a pure evil, an innocent man lost 40 years of his life and lived in squalor while Sebold made millions off of this story.

Once again, we let the system become the very evil we say it is supposed to prevent.

Sebold’s apology is very lacking in accountability. She victimizes herself again as a product of a racist justice system. She assures us she has always tried to be good. Her need to be perfect is painfully palpable.

Yet, this book also details her witnessing police officers beat up black teenagers for no reason and gloating about it, while casually saying they should not have done that but she understands their anger because of the rapes they know about. And then she goes to praise police up, down, left, and right. Furthermore, she admits that she thinks two of the black men in the line up look like “identical” twins, and admittedly chooses the wrong one.

Ooops! But she’s SURE the other one DEFINITELY did it. 10000000%.

Yeah, Sebold can’t be the perfect victim: Sebold is a white woman in a racist society that has not forced her to confront her own biases or imperfections.

As a result, this crime took even more victims.

If we can recognize that there are no perfect rape victims, no evil rapists, but, in fact, imperfect but very wounded human beings in a complexly wounded society, then perhaps we would stop this mad rush towards punishment as justice.

It’s a cycle of trauma. It’s not a happy ending.

And I say that as someone who carries the weight of the trauma of rape daily.

True justice is healing. We need to heal our victims and our perpetrators. We also need to heal our culture from patriarchy, rape culture, and racism.

We have a lot of work to do.

For individual coaching, visit https://am-champion.com

If you’d like to support my writing, check out my books, or Buy Me a Coffee.

Follow Blooming on the Borderline on Facebook.

A.M. Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.