True Crime: The Pressure to be the Perfect Victim and Wrongful Convictions

Responding to Alice Sebold’s memoir 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 BLM 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…