Alice Sebold was forced to the glass-covered ground in a tunnel outside of Syracuse University. Jennifer Schuette was thrown away in an overgrown field on top of an anthill. Both women were raped and savagely beaten. For Alice: punches and kicks to the face, for Jennifer: a knife slash across her throat, leaving her for dead. Before the attack, Alice was an eighteen-year-old freshman celebrating her last day of finals. Jennifer was an eight-year-old girl asleep in her bed. Though the incidents occurred nine years apart, both women emerged from their nightmares with a label that will celebrate their strength yet mask the years of pain hidden beneath. Alice and Jennifer are survivors.
According to the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every six American women will be the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (Author’s Note: Does the use of a clinical term like “completed” make anyone else’s stomach drop slightly?). While cynics may claim, “there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics”, there is no denying the one in six can’t account for all the cases that go unreported. After all, what must the pressure be like for the 73% of victims raped by someone known to them, 7% of which are violated by their own family members?
The same studies suggest that one in thirty-three American males will be similarly victimized in their lifetime. As a male who has not experienced anything like the pain described above, I can honestly say I have no f*ing clue how it feels, what to do, or where to go. I just have no f*ing clue about any of this.
In the improvisational theatre troupe I help direct, I describe the feeling of being raped thusly: that moment during an arm wrestling competition when you can’t possibly win. There are less than forty-five degrees separating your forearm from the table. Your opponent has dominated you, may even be toying with you. No matter what, you are going tolose. From a structural level your arm is not designed to respond to what your brain is signaling, pleading for it to do. The brain stops fighting a second before it receives the painful sensation of knuckles being driven into the ground. It’s over.
See? I told you I just have no f*ing clue about any of this. I can type it up in a dramatic fashion but at the end of the day I will never understand the horror. I use metaphor and sentence fragments to disguise my inability (not my lack of desire) to truly empathize. Just because I can type up my thoughts convincingly doesn’t mean they’re worth a damn (Author’s Note: This is the Internet). The typical treatment for someone like me, therefore, is to split me off as a member of the group who simply “Doesn’t Get It” (made up of men everywhere), existing separate and apart from the victims of the crime, that elite fraternity who “Get It”.
Then something happens that forces the issue into everyone’s consciousness, like the breaking news story of an arrest in the nineteen-year-old case involving Jennifer Schuette. The link gives you the opportunity to learn about a brave young girl who, despite being left for dead with her vocal box cut through, fought hard enough to not only survive, but to regain her voice and use it to speak out for victims silenced by the evil that exists in this world.
After reading a story like that the concept of moral absolutes tugs violently on the loose string at the center of my liberal ideologies. Some things are just evil; wrong is too soft a word for it. The accused is said to have mended his “old ways” referring to his actions (with this accusation they could be better described as proclivities) involving kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and slitting the throats of young women. No matter your left stance, it’s tough to argue that rehabilitation is something reserved for the young woman, not the perpetrator. He doesn’t get rehabilitation in my book. He gets prison, he gets the chair, he gets…
And therein lies the problem. All of the passionate dialogue over rape concerns the perpetrator while the victim is left to become synonymous with the charges. She exists only in terms of the details of the case, potentially her demographics if they make for more interesting copy. There is no discussion on how to see her through the aftermath, we feel powerless in that area. Instead we speak of revenge, something we can externalize to rid ourselves of the guilt we feel inside.
A case like Jennifer’s is unique. We learned her name because she came forward and asked for her story to be told. We see her face because she has bigger balls than ACDC. Her story came up in the newspaper again because, nineteen years later, they caught the bastard.
In a more ideal world the nineteen-year delay would be the most extreme oddity in this situation (Author’s Warning: More statistics coming up. Last ones, I swear). However, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis (Author’s Note: See, told you), a reported rape has a 50.8% chance of arrest, if arrested there is an 80% of prosecution, if prosecuted there is a 58% chance of conviction, if there is a felony conviction 69% of the convicts will spend any time in prison. All of these numbers seem fairly respectable, yet the percentage of perpetrators in a reported rape case who survive the statistical gauntlet long enough to see prison time is a terrifying 16.3%. Not quite two out of every ten. As a son, a brother, and, God willing one day, a father I can’t even begin to fathom.
So as someone who “Doesn’t Get It” but isn’t Captain Barbossa (Author’s Quote Because I Can’t Find a Youtube: “I feel… Nothing”), what can I do to reconcile these things? I’ll never understand what this woman went through but how can I get just a glimpse beyond the article and into the Hell that must have been the last two decades of her life?
Enter Lucky, the memoir of author Alice Sebold beginning with her rape during her freshman year of college and ending before the completion of her best-selling debut novel, The Lovely Bones. I love memoirs for the same reason I love documentaries: every once in a while you get to witness a piece of the truth. Not a commentary on some larger, deeper meaning behind human existence, just a simple piece of the truth from a subject too exhausted to hide it anymore. Lucky has a few of these moments hidden within a tight narration that can range from captivating to frustrating.
Consisting of less than three hundred pages, the main story of Lucky can be, and was in this writer’s case, a single-sitting affair that keeps you up into the wee hours of the morning. Sebold in no way buries the lede (Author’s Note: It’s spelled correctly. Ask Alex, he lives for that sort of thing) as she launches into a no-holds-barred account of the events of that night, complete with graphic descriptions of the acts themselves and their effect on her body, the body of a virgin.
For anyone with a weak stomach for such imagery the introduction may be difficult for you do get through. For anyone who felt a little uncomfortable when the third sentence of this post revealed it’s topic to be rape, the introduction may be necessary for you to get through. Another memoirist on the subject, Patricia Weaver Francisco, believes that many people view rape as a form of particularly bad, particularly hurtful sex. Sebold’s account demonstrates with frightening clarity that, even though sexual organs are involved, no element of sex as we understand it survives the savagery of rape.
She intersperses the internal thoughts of the reader who, either through their own denial or through the hope that this will eventually turn into a fiction novel where someone, anyone comes to save the day, wonders why she doesn’t keep fighting tooth and nail. She presents herself as shutting down to the reality of the situation stating, “I would die by pieces to save myself from real death”. She did whatever it took to survive. Alice is a survivor. It’s just one of those things that the people in my group will never understand.
Survivor. It’s why friends and family generally discuss the incident in hushed tones, as though not talking about it would save Sebold rather than isolate her. Those who don’t get it only focus in on the results, “She made it, she’s alive so let’s not make her go back to that place”, while the victim is left alone in her view that survival was a choice rather than a gift. Gifts come free; choices have consequences.
We see those consequences throughout the remainder of the book as the narrative goes chronologically through her return home and the accompanying interactions with her family, her return to Syracuse and the interactions with her friends, the legal proceedings surrounding her case, and finally her life after college. It’s in these environments that the truth sometimes sneaks out, often during her interactions with other characters and their inability to cope with the powerlessness that washes over them in her presence.
The most frustrating parts of the memoir are when Sebold, for lack of a better term, is being a complete jerk to anyone trying to help her. While one could comment on the honesty required for the author to paint her friends and family in a positive light while presenting her own bitchiness unfiltered, you just can’t help but want more of her as a character. She is clearly an enlightened woman, capable of articulating her thoughts, she simply… can’t. It’s just one of those things that the people in my group will never understand.
Perhaps that complaint is one of the things that makes the book so compelling; there is no heroine, just a woman trying to deal with her own survival. She is as raw as her writing style and the need for warm fuzzies is satiated by her depiction of those who became closest to her during her trials. I guess the reader just craves that transformation in Sebold because of the aforementioned powerlessness. Bad things happened to Alice so we want desperately for good things to happen to her.
Lucky is ultimately successful because, when confronted with an overwhelming subject matter, it chooses to focus on the people. We learn Sebold’s thoughts not through numerous prolonged diatribes as can sometimes be found in memoirs, but through her interactions with others. For those who have ever had an English teacher worth their spit: Sebold doesn’t simply tell us about how the rape changed her life, she shows us.
She shows us that you don’t escape from Hell; you claw you rway back one day at a time because, according to Sebold, “you save yourself or you remain unsaved”. It’s just one of those things that people in my group will never understand. I pray to God we never have to.
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