46 pages • 1 hour read
Jessica KnollLuckiest Girl Alive
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
In Chapter 15, film crew in tow, Ani visits Arthur’s mother. She and Mrs. Finnerman stayed in touch, but Ani is not prepared for the toll the tragedy has taken on her. Her sadness is in her face, her eyes, and her slouched shoulders. At the director’s suggestion, the two page through family photo albums over tea. Mrs. Finnerman insists that her boy had emotions, that he was no psychopath: “He was no monster” (294), she says, as much to Ani as to the camera. Ani agrees, saying Arthur was always kind to her. The media’s narrative from the shooting demonized Arthur as the mastermind of the attack. Ani knows differently. Arthur did not have a hit list. The shootings were not revenge or even personal. His anger was more general; he saw the two homemade bombs as a way to kill everyone: “We were all fair game” (295). When Mrs. Finnerman mentions that Arthur’s father remarried, Ani confesses that she took the framed photo and offers to return it. Arthur’s mother is incensed that Ani stole the photograph. Her outrage triggers a migraine that abruptly ends the meeting.
Ani agrees to meet her mother for dinner at a posh restaurant, her last night before returning to New York. To her surprise she sees Andrew at the bar. The two meet briefly in the parking lot. Andrew confesses he does not want to see Ani just as a friend; he wants more. Ani’s initial reaction is anger: “I actually needed a friend. But you’re just another guy who wants to put it in the Bradley slut” (304). Ani storms back to her mother. Her mother cautions Ani not to mess up her approaching wedding, saying that Luke is exactly what she needs and telling her Luke called complaining about her odd behavior: “He says you are not you, TifAni. You’re combative. Hostile” (307). Success, she tells her daughter, “is marrying some like Luke Harrison” (309).
The following morning, before she is to leave for New York, she arrives at the remote place formerly known as The Spot where the reunion segment with Dean is to be filmed. Dean is there in his wheelchair. Dean is now something of celebrity, with a huge social media following. When Ani angrily suggests he apologize for raping her, Dean stops the shoot and instructs the crew to step back.
Alone, away from the mics, he admits to Ani that he made up the story about her part in the shooting but says he believed in his heart that she was involved in the planning: “You came running in and I know you and Arthur are friends and I know how angry you must be with me and he hands you the gun and basically tells you to finish me off and you reached for it” (313). Pushed by Ani, he admits finally that the sex at the party was rape and that he was sorry he slapped her. He wants her to forgive him on camera for the story about the shooting because it would play well with his fans on social media to see how traumatized he was by the shooting. Ani, appalled by the self-aggrandizement, goes through the hokey scene anyhow. She understands now that had she been handed the rifle she most surely would have “blown that motherfucking cocksucker’s cock right off. Arthur would have gone second” (318).
Chapters 16-17 Summary
Ani talks Luke into allowing the documentary crew to shoot the wedding for the feel-good closing sequence of the film. Ani understands now that Luke has never believed that the assault was rape, only an “unfortunate” incident, the sort of hijinks that happen when “hornball kids get together and drink too much” (323). Before they leave for Nantucket and the wedding, Ani tries to locate Arthur’s framed photograph in their apartment. She cannot find it. Luke says only that it will turn up. When she is packing up for the flight, she happens to find colorful bits of the shattered photo frame in a waste basket.
That night at the rehearsal dinner on Nantucket, Ani confides in Nell, her maid of honor, her plan to confront Luke. After the insincere and corny toasts, Ani excuses herself to the bathroom, and Nell follows. When Luke comes to the bathroom door to find out if everything is OK, Ani confronts him with a piece of the shattered frame and demands he return the photo. Luke smiles sheepishly and admits that during an impromptu bachelor party, he and his college buddies snorted cocaine off the photo. Stoned, they broke the frame, and afterward Luke threw the photo away. He explains: “I just thought it was better. And better for you. To move on. Why would you want to hold on to something like that anyway?” (332). Please, he begs with mock drama on his knees, do not let this ruin the night. Ani, with Nell in tow, storms out of the reception. They take the last ferry off the island. She returns to New York and gathers some things and stays with Nell until the “shitstorm” blows over. She quits her high-profile job and accepts a position where she will have greater freedom in the topics she writes.
The ending of the documentary has to be reshot as the wedding is now off. Ani agrees to reshoot an ending. When she arrives, the director tells her that the remote mics picked up everything Dean said and that, if she agrees, the confession will now be the end of the documentary. Ani agrees. Feeling at last vindicated, Ani settles down in front of the camera and slowly, proudly says her name: “I’m TifAni FaNelli” (338).
Chapters 15-17 Analysis
These final chapters move Ani to her closing redemption, the reclamation of her name, her identity, and her liberation from the people who have tried to reshape her and redefine her into something or someone they can use. She rejects the self-imposed dead-end drama of endless reinvention. Her closing declaration, spoken with calm confidence into the documentary cameras, is her defiant declaration of emotional and psychological independence. It is time for Ani’s liberation, suggested by the early fall weather on Nantucket, the “ever-present fog” (331) caused by a temperature inversion in which layer of fresh, brisk cold air has been trapped by a smothering blanket of hot thick air.
The movement toward her liberation begins with her plan to torpedo the wedding when she discovers the loss of Arthur’s photograph. For Ani, the photograph is more than a memento of the friend she killed. It represents to her the sanctity of her individual experience. Luke’s cavalier decision to use his wife’s valued personal property for his cocaine finally reveals to Ani what she has suspected since she fingered the knife months earlier and fantasized about stabbing Luke to death. More than just his insensitivity to her boundaries, the destruction of the photograph reveals how trivial Luke believes Ani’s traumatic experiences are; he has simply tolerated her need for closure and healing.
Following her abrupt split with Andrew when she experiences a similar moment of insight in which she sees all too clearly his intentions to use her pain and her trauma as a tool for his own agenda, Ani sees here that these two men are in fact exactly what she does not need. The fiancée reveals himself to be demanding and myopic, a cloying, smothering control freak eager to assert his right to direct her life-narrative; Andrew reveals himself to be fawning and weak-souled, a cloying, smothering control freak eager to assert his right to direct her life narrative. They are both “someone else to tell [Ani] what will make [her] happy” (304). Both pity her and dismiss her as broken—someone they need to take care of and whom they can feel sorry for to make themselves feel better. The indictment of both men places Ani in a position of strength and autonomy.
Her detonation of the wedding rehearsal dinner, then, metaphorically parallels Arthur’s homemade bombs. She destroys it only after one wedding guest after another rises to deliver the standard cliché toasts that hymn the joys of marriage and the miracle of Luke and Ani. Ani’s flight is a single bold dramatic stroke designed to level everything and everyone, to lay low, at least symbolically, all the phonies, all the emotional cripples, all the hypocrites in both families. It is, as Nell describes it, “a shit show” (331).
If the novel sets up a kind of slow-motion revenge tale in which Dean, caught by the film crew’s microphones confessing at last to his misdeeds is finally outed as a moral hypocrite and punished for the criminal that he is, this is not Ani’s agenda. That drama would not be making peace with herself and with her experience; it would be inciting emotional turmoil and delaying the process of healing. She just wants to hear Dean admit to his wrongdoing. She does not manipulate the microphones to capture Dean; is the director’s decision to use the rape revelation as part of the documentary. Ani gets her release from his admission of what he had done. Once Dean admits what he did, Ani knows that had Arthur given her the rifle, she would have shot Dean freely and gladly and only then dispatched Arthur. She offers herself as no perfect moral paradigm, nor does she pretend that Dean’s confession somehow makes everything right.
What she has left then is all she needs: herself. When Andrew dispatched back to his wife, Luke and his family left to rearrange the shattered bits of the wedding she destroyed, and her own mother unwilling to understand why her daughter walked out on what she sees as a perfect marriage, Ani in the end reestablishes the tie she rejected the day she was expelled from Catholic school—her tie with somebody named TifAni FaNelli. In a first-person narrative where the first-person narrator has slipped with chameleon-like tenacity between and among names, she finally declares who she is, the name’s elaborate and individual capitalization reflecting Ani’s hard-earned right to assert her unique person. She is ready now to begin, finally the luckiest girl alive.
