Jessica Knoll’s 2015 debut thriller, Luckiest Girl Alive, is soaring up the Amazon charts once again due to a raw, confessional essay the author wrote for Lenny, a newsletter and website founded by Lena Dunham along with Jenni Konner, the showrunner for Girls.

Knoll discloses in the essay that the horrific rape segments of her novel are based on her own life story, events she first said were entirely fictional.

“The first person to tell me I was gang-raped was a therapist, seven years after the fact. The second was my literary agent, five years later, only she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about Ani, the protagonist of my novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, which is a work of fiction. What I’ve kept to myself, up until today, is that its inspiration is not.”

The New York Times also reports the story, extending on the essay with an interview with Knoll who told the paper of the aftermath of the rape:

“No one was treating me like a victim; they were treating me like I was a perpetrator, like I was getting what I deserved … The message I internalized was that nothing bad happened; you did something wrong.”

Luckiest Girl Alive remains in high demand in every library we checked with holds queues still present at many. Reese Witherspoon optioned the film rights, and Knoll is hitting the road for a book tour to support the paperback edition of her novel (S&S, April 5).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2016 at 11:05 am and is filed under Fiction, Thriller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.