![]() ![]() In its first hundred pages, Lucky succeeds as a first-person chronicle of brutality and its aftermath. True crime memoirs take this idea to a greater extreme, as writing about the worst thing that has happened to you-rape, the murder of a loved one, or some other horrific type of violence-offers broader meaning for those who have survived similar events, and those wishing to understand how it’s possible to survive them. Memoirs are governed by the idea that subjective truths can stand in for more universal perspectives. Sebold recently apologized to the man wrongly convicted of raping her in 1982. (Mucciante, for his part, is at work on Unlucky, a documentary about the Broadwater case.) What happens when one sets out, as Sebold did, to transform trauma into literature-and the foundation turns out to be utterly wrong? I accept her apology.”Īpologies, however, merely begin a new chapter of a story that encompasses a brutal rape, a mistaken eyewitness identification, unconscious racial bias, a best-selling memoir, and now, a wrongful conviction. Broadwater, who burst into tears upon seeing the statement, told the Syracuse Post-Standard: “It comes sincerely from her heart. “I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you, and I know that no apology can change what happened to you and never will,” Sebold writes. 30 statement, seems to inhabit both states, owing perhaps to extensive legal vetting before its release. ![]() Sebold’s most recent apology, given in a Nov. Some of the apologies in the book (recently pulled from circulation by its publisher, Scribner) are genuine. The result probably never would have happened if Timothy Mucciante, a one-time executive producer of a since-abandoned film adaptation of Lucky, had not begun his own independent investigation. This shocking turn came about after the court reconsidered Sebold’s eyewitness account, which initially identified a different man, and a now-discredited hair analysis linking Broadwater to the crime. ![]() And in other instances in the book-when she identifies the wrong man in a lineup, or gets tripped up in cross-examination-Sebold seems set upon apologizing to those she feels she let down.Īs we now know, the person most let down was Anthony Broadwater, the man whose conviction for Sebold’s May 1981 rape was overturned in late November, more than 20 years after the end of his prison sentence. Earlier, Sebold had been the one who “never stopped apologizing,” saying whatever it would take for her to survive the attack. You’re a good girl,” repeats the man, sometimes in tears, after brutally raping and beating her in a park near Syracuse University. While reading Alice Sebold’s 1999 memoir Lucky for the first time in about two decades, I was struck by the prevalence of apologies in the narrative. ![]()
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