Luckiest Girl Alive

In the narrative present—Ani preparing for the wedding—and in the narrative past—the immediate aftermath of the sexual assault, what is consistent is Ani’s willingness to pretend, to act as if her emotional reality, her true doubts and fears, her insecurities, and her deep sense of helplessness are somehow not authentic. In the early chapters, Ani begins to master the difficult art of reinvention; later, she begins to suspect that reinvention itself is the problem.

The assignment meeting at the women’s magazine where Ani works reveals the implications of her pretending. While another writer is assigned a potentially important piece on sexual harassment and a woman’s right to say no, Ani must be content to write trivia, a fluff piece on how sex can burn calories. Ani denies her own voice. She refuses to speak up and to claim her earned right to head up the sexual harassment investigation. She dismisses her work, successful as she is, as giving advice on sex, ironic given her own experience as a survivor of rape.

In the narrative present, when Ani and Luke go for a run after sampling a wide array of wedding appetizers and Ani starts to slow down with stomach cramps, Luke challenges her to work through it because she is a “survivor.” The word carries only the dimension of toughing out physical stress and discomfort to Luke, who is entirely insensitive to the dimensions of Ani’s sexual assault. For Ani, the term is freighted with the psychological dimension of a victim courageously fronting that experience as the only way to recover, a process she has for more than a decade carefully and deliberately avoided. At that moment, then, Ani is and is not Ani, playing the role of fiancée, happy and centered. Ani voices that sentiment when, as she settles into another dreary dinner with another dreary rich couple her husband is trying to make richer, she asks herself who could be happy with this sort of superficial life, which is, ironically, her own life.

The reunion with Andrew Larson appears to create the opportunity for Ani to at last reclaim her past, to exorcize those ghosts, and to begin the authentic work involved in surviving trauma. After all, the reunion appears serendipitous, a kind of unexpected blessing. Mr. Larson, Ani reveals in the chapters set immediately after the attack, emerged as someone she could trust. She confided in him, and he believes her. His serendipitous return into her life seems like the intervention of fate giving her a chance to reclaim her identity. He is everything Luke is not: “Luke and Andrew might as well have been at different dinner tables, part of different conversations. His expression was as sour as Mr. Larson’s was delighted” (85). Much later, Ani learns that the reunion was hardly fortuitous: The very married Andrew manipulated Luke to arrange the dinner as a desperate ploy in what emerges as his cliché midlife crisis. For now, Andrew appears to offer Ani the consolation and friendship that her fiancé does not.

The account Ani provides about the Monday after the attack reveals not only her fears over the health risks of having unprotected sex with multiple partners, but also how Ani coolly, deliberately begins the work of creating a persona. She maintains her public profile at school. Other than sharing with Mr. Larson, she tells no one. She reassures Dean, one of her attackers, that she will say nothing; in return, it is tacitly assumed, she can maintain her position with the cool kids. That reassurance seems confirmed when just a week later Ani is invited to another party with the same circle of friends. There, however, she finds her public persona, and her decision not to pursue charges or even report the boys’ crime, earns her the reputation of being easy.

When she first arrives at the party, Dean assures her with a snarky smile that she was pretty much out of it during sex at his party. It is a joke for him. Not so much for Ani: “It was one of those awful moments where you have no control over your reaction, when the pain is too exposed to hide. I laughed, the sharp contrast between the sound and the look on my face only making it worse” (131). Dean escorts her outside at Olivia’s house and begins the clumsy sexual advances of a boy who believes this is a sure thing. Like at the dinner with Andrew Larson much later, at that moment Ani’s persona collides with Ani. She resists. She is not what or who she pretends to be. For that assertion of her identity, Dean slaps her hard, realizing angrily and selfishly that he is not going to have sex with her.

In the end, however, these chapters reenforce Ani’s willingness to deny her trauma in return for maintaining what she hopes will be her public persona as Finny, one of the cool kids. When Dean, in a panic the morning after he struck her, calls her and apologizes, the apology is insincere: “I won’t be able to live with myself if you don’t forgive me” (141), he says, in a calculating narcissistic gesture that foreshadows his attempt to stage an apology years later at the documentary filming. That Ani agrees marks the nadir of her story. She rejects the school’s help, denies Mr. Larson access to her emotional pain, and resolves that her place is with the cool kids, pretending to be one of them. This moment begins her life of studied reinvention and her gradual alienation from herself.