Papers On Lucky By Alice Sebold

Lucky, by Alice Sebold, is a memoir that sheds light on the experience where Alice was attacked and raped as a college freshman at Syracuse University. She tells her story to show not only how her life was changed afterwards, but how the trauma also affected her friends, family, and peers (Sebold, 2017). More importantly, she tells her story to bring awareness to the topic of sexual assault. Personally, this is the most important aspect of the memoir because Alice shows her readers that, even though it felt as if it did at first, such a horrific act does not define or make a survivor any less worthy of the person they were beforehand. In the United States alone, there are about 22 million women who have survived sexual assault (Munro-Kramer,

Growing up, Alice’s parents did not show much affection to each other or to their children. When Alice was a young girl, she would play “house” with Barbie and Ken where they were married and would divorce because Ken “does not touch.” Alice would beg her father to kiss her mother goodbye when he was leaving for his long trips to Spain, making a scene from the backseat of the car. Alice mentions that once on a playdate with one of her neighborhood friends, the girl told her how her mother thought Alice’s family was weird. It was at this moment that Alice recognized her family was different from others, that her parents did not kiss each other or play games with their children like other parents did. Instead, Alice’s family always locked themselves away. Her mother would stay locked away in her room, where she would throw up blood from being an alcoholic. Her father would lock himself away in his study, when he was home. Her sister would lock herself away in her room. Alice craved affection and attention so badly that she would purposely let the basset hounds run around with maxi pads so that the entire family would be chasing them around the house. Eventually, however, the dogs were caught and everyone would retreat back into their own rooms (Sebold, 2017). Another time Alice craved attention was when she and her father were visiting colleges. They stayed at a hotel overnight and Alice placed ice cubes under the covers by her father’s feet. She could not contain her laughter when he got into bed and this led to an ice-war inside their hotel room. Alice informs the reader that she had never seen her father so care-free before (Sebold, 2017). Another time Alice mentions her desire for affection from her mother is when she would lay on the couch next to her mother and slowly inch her way into her mother’s lap. She would complain of having a headache just so that her mother would rub her head, until a