Luckiest Girl Alive

The documentary film that Ani agrees to participate in symbolizes a tonic element of truth and unblinking honesty for Ani, who admits freely to living behind masks, reinventing herself deliberately and consciously, and sharing half-secrets with some people and tentative confessions to others.

The project, tentatively titled Friends of the Five in a reference to the five victims of the Bradley shooting, offers Ani the opportunity that she has consistently refused since the morning after the gangrape, really since her expulsion from the all-girls Catholic middle school where administrators believed that she was the ringleader of a group of pot-smoking girls. Unlike a mainstream film with made-up people doing made-up things, all interpreted by the camera angles of the director or by the insights of a screenwriter, a documentary is pared down. Ani simply sits in front of the camera, with no script, no rehearsal, and no scenes. This is raw testimony, the chance she has at last, as she says frequently, to tell her story. Indeed, Chapter 12, the graphic account of the shooting, is that testimony, periodically interrupted by Ani interacting with the camera crew. The documentary symbolizes the freedom of honesty. Not surprisingly, Luke counsels her against participating in the project. He believes, given his shallow perception of the world untroubled by complication, that revisiting trauma is pointless.

The documentary provides Ani with the opportunity not merely to recollect the shooting but to exorcize the ghosts of the attack by the boys on the soccer team. In agreeing to the hokey staged reunion with Dean Palmer, Ani inadvertently uses the technology of the filming crew to get on record Dean’s admission that he lied about her being part of the shooting rampage and, far more important, that he raped her. It is important for Ani to get Dean to use the word rape. That moment, recorded by mics, not only promises a stunning close to the documentary but also represents the moment when Ani steps free of the self-imposed prison of her memory and begins at last to get in touch with herself. Truth, then, is her freedom.

The novel is a first-person account of deep trauma. As such it raises significant questions about the reliability to the narrator herself. It is telling that Ani, reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, initially finds Holden Caulfield appealing, both funny and quirky. Both her mother and then later Mr. Larson caution Ani that perhaps her response to Holden disregarded the reality that the narrator, as sympathetic as his uncompromising honesty and his aggressive self-preservation might seem, is in fact in an institution, his surly crankiness edging close to psychotic misanthropy: “Tif,” her mother tells her, “he has a serious mental breakdown” (28).

As a first-person narration, Luckiest Girl Alive plays a variation on a literary convention in which readers are cautioned to distance themselves from the narrator, sensing a bias that might compromise the narrator’s account. In unreliable narratives, the action is often less about the plot points themselves and more how those plot points are shared by a narrator who brings a limited and often untrustworthy perspective.

In Luckiest Girl Alive, however, it is the narrator who represents uncompromising evolution into honesty. She begins an accomplished liar, a performance artist, and ends with such guises dropped. She earns reliability. Unreliable narrators are accomplished and slick liars; here, Ani is candid as narrator but an accomplished poseur in the life she lives and relates. To survive at Bradley and then later to maintain equipoise as her wedding approaches, Ani understands she must confess only parts of the dark secrets she harbors. In her account of her experiences, however, she is honest, establishing her credibility even as she deliberately pretends to be someone she is not. It is in her dealings with others that she is compelled to shade the truth, deleting, like Holden, “crucial elements of the story” (28), creating a version of herself that she believes others will tolerate, accept, even love. She pretends to be someone she is not in her workplace, in her advice columns, with Luke, with the wedding planners, with her parents and her future in-laws, and with Mr. Larson. That charade, her acceptance to be an unreliable character in her own life narrative, is the unreliability from which Ani finally steps free. Only then can she begin the difficult work of defining an authentic reliable identity.

The school shooting that rocks Bradley symbolizes two ideas: 1) how quickly and absolutely the innocence of childhood can be compromised and ultimately lost, and 2) the impact of the so-called harmless psychological games that adolescents play in the name of promoting their own social status in school.

During the afternoon Ani spends with Arthur when she is reeling from the humiliation of having her gym shorts tacked to the bulletin board in the student lounge, Arthur Finnerman calmly shows her the hunting rifle his father left him. The narrative is immediately charged with the potential for real violence: “He brought the gun closer to his face, resting his fleshy cheek against the handle and hooking his finger around the trigger” (168). The gun changes the novel. The novel recognizes that in post-Millennial culture since Columbine, school shootings have become another part of the news; the culture becomes anesthetized to the reality that a school has been attacked by a student. The novel works to upend that indifference. The reality of Arthur and Ben’s attack on the school is a sobering reminder of the impact of violence against adolescents. Unlike the sanitized accounts offered by media after an attack, Ani’s testimony for the documentary brings the reality of a school shooting into stark relief.

The account of the attack, capturing as it does the graphic violence and the confusion and panic among the students, makes vivid and immediate the generic news accounts that have become another part of America’s love/hate affair with gun violence and the belief that an ability with guns is a measure of a boy’s transition into manhood. After all, Arthur tells Ani that his father left him the rifle. His father abandoned the family when Arthur was young in part over his frustrations with a son whom he found repellently effeminate. The rifle, he told his son, was “to make a man out of” him (169). Like the gangrape that destroys Ani’s childhood and reveals the depth of violence of which supposed children are capable, the school shooting marks the end of the students’ innocence and reflects the very real anger and frustration that adolescents feel.