Tanya Serisier: "The Untelling of Alice Sebold’s Lucky: Injustice, Memoir and Sexual Violence"

Beskrivning:

Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, published in 1999, is one of the most well-known and commercially successful accounts of sexual violence published prior to #MeToo. Lucky begins with a vicious attack carried out on Sebold as a young, white college student. The book speaks of the aftermath of the assault, making a key turning point for Sebold her participation in the trial and conviction of Anthony Broadwater. Although it was not well-known on original publication, it too became a bestseller following the success of Sebold’s 2002 novel, The Lovely Bones, and in the decades following Sebold’s personal account received significant critical, media and academic attention, and it was, in 2019, in the process of being made into a film.

This is, however, when the reception and understanding of the narrative began to shift. Various participants, which was being produced in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, expressed discomfort with the racial politics of the film. Eventually, in a late script draft, the racial identity of Sebold’s assailant was rewritten as white. The film ceased production altogether, however, when a private investigation initiated by a former producer unearthed significant doubts as to the validity of Broadwater’s conviction. The conviction was overturned in 2021, after Broadwater had served 16 years in prison and two on the sex offenders register. Following this, Lucky was also withdrawn from publication while a film about Broadwater’s story, provisionally titled Unlucky was announced, but has never been made.

In this talk I am interested in the untelling of Lucky and the creation of an archive of ghost texts, a withdrawn memoir and two unmade films, alongside what has been described as the ‘cancellation’ of Sebold herself. The withdrawal of a previously celebrated narrative and set of cultural texts is, I suggest, 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.