Memoir Book Review: Lucky She Term Paper

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She says to her renowned teacher she cannot attend class for the day -- but Wolf usually accepts no excuses. Then, when he hears why, he tells her to remember everything, so she can put it down later. "Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing," says Barrington and Sebold is honest on the stand as a prosecution witness and later as a narrator of her own imperfect grappling with her experiences.

Sebold's memory yielded, what she was later told, one of the most credible testimonies the prosecutor had ever seen from a violated woman on the stand. But she did not emerge unscathed from the rape. Physically, she was no longer a virgin. Emotionally, she was traumatized. In the last chapter of the book, she chronicles how difficult it was for her to trust men after she graduated, despite the support she received from many sympathetic male students at her college. Judith Barrington states in the first chapter of her book on writing memoirs that "modern memoirs aim to speak intimately to their readers, and those readers like to experience them as if they were sitting in a comfortable chair listening to a series of confidences.
" Although Sebold's memoir is intimate in the ways it discusses what it was like to be subject to a rape kit, to be violated again after being violated, and to shower for the first time after her experience, comfortable is hardly the world one would use to describe the events of Lucky.

Barrington also cautions memoirists that they do not have to write their whole lives, only provide a specific focus, only write a piece of find a connecting thread between their experiences. But Sebold says the rape created a dividing line in her own existence -- before and after. Thus, although she by and large holds true to Barrington's advice, ultimately Lucky tells such a powerful tale of life-altering experience that it transcends some of the conventions of the modern genre of memoir, and creates its own terms as a work of literature.

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Latest APA Format (6th edition)

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"Memoir Book Review Lucky She" (2004, November 20) Retrieved May 16, 2025, from
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/memoir-book-review-lucky-58734

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"Memoir Book Review Lucky She" 20 November 2004. Web.16 May. 2025. <
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/memoir-book-review-lucky-58734>

Latest Chicago Format (16th edition)

Copy Reference
"Memoir Book Review Lucky She", 20 November 2004, Accessed.16 May. 2025,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/memoir-book-review-lucky-58734