“I hoped to be judged innocent by them”

Alice Sebold’s Lucky, innocence and narrative judgement

Abstract

Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky (1999), is one of the most well-known accounts of sexual violence prior to #MeToo. It begins with a vicious attack on Sebold as a young, white college student and speaks of its consequences, making a key turning point for Sebold her participation in the trial and conviction of Anthony Broadwater. Although not popular on original publication, it became a bestseller following the success of Sebold’s 2002 novel, The Lovely Bones, and in 2019 it was in the process of adaptation to the big screen. Then, the reception of the narrative began to shift. Various participants expressed discomfort with the racial politics of the film, which was being produced in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. The racial identity of Sebold’s assailant was rewritten as white, and the film ceased production altogether when an investigation unearthed doubts about the validity of Broadwater’s conviction, which was overturned in 2021. Following this, Lucky was also withdrawn from publication while a film about Broadwater’s story—provisionally titled Unlucky—was announced, but never made. While we usually think of the legacies of movements like #MeToo in relation to the stories that they help to make tellable, I am interested in how to think about the ‘untelling’ of Lucky and the creation of an archive of ghost texts, alongside the ‘cancellation’ of Sebold herself. It is a useful way to consider the shifting relationships between personal narratives and the cultural politics of gender, race and justice in the post #MeToo era, and of thinking about the intertwined legacies and tensions between #MeToo and racial justice movements.