Truth Behind A Novel’s Rape Scene
Jessica Knoll’s “Luckiest Girl Alive” was a wildly successful literary debut. The tale of a successful young woman who struggles with the lingering trauma of a sexual assault, it sold more than 450,000 copies and spent four months on best-seller lists. Foreign rights sold in more than 30 countries. The actress Reese Witherspoon optioned the film rights, and Ms. Knoll wrote the screenplay.
Still, Ms. Knoll couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that she had let her readers down. Even though her book was fiction, she felt she hadn’t fully told the truth.
Recently, Ms. Knoll published a raw and chilling essay describing how the gang rape in her novel was drawn from her own experience in high school, when she was assaulted by three boys, then tormented by classmates who labeled her a slut.
“I was so conditioned to not talk about it that it didn’t even occur to me to be forthcoming,” Ms. Knoll said. “I want to make people feel like they can talk about it, like they don’t have to be ashamed of it.”
In the essay, published on Lenny, a newsletter and website for young women, Ms. Knoll described how some of the most harrowing scenes in her novel came from her fragmented memories of a party that went devastatingly wrong: blacking out and then regaining consciousness when a boy was assaulting her; waking up later in a bathroom, seeing a toilet bowl of blood-tinged water, and not understanding where it came from; finding herself in a strange bed the next morning beside a different boy, who laughed it off as a wild night; going to a clinic for emergency contraception and asking the doctor if what happened to her counted as rape, and feeling stunned when the doctor said she wasn’t qualified to answer the question.
The essay sparked a flood of supportive messages from readers who thanked Ms. Knoll for coming forward.
Ms. Knoll, 32, grew up in a Roman Catholic family in the Philadelphia suburbs, and attended a prestigious prep institution. She was a happy, social 15-year- old who played sports and was on the dance team. After the assault, she said, she shut down and felt crushingly isolated.
“No one was treating me like a victim,” she said. “They were treating me like I was a perpetrator, like I was getting what I deserved.”
Ms. Knoll said that she took no action against her attackers. She does not name them in the essay. “It’s not directed at them,” she said. “It’s more like, ‘I’m going to tell the story this time.’ ”
After college, she moved to New York City and worked at Cosmopolitan, where she rose to become a senior editor.
There have been hard moments for Ms. Knoll, both in reliving that night and in painful conversations with friends and family.
There has also been relief. A few months ago, at a book event in New Jersey, a woman asked her if she had interviewed rape victims for the novel. For the first time, Ms. Knoll answered honestly. “I said, ‘ Yeah, that happened to me,’ ” Ms. Knoll said. “It was kind of like, ‘ Why have I waited so long to say that? What was so hard about that?’ ”