knoll essay lenny letter

What I Know

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, (1), which is a work of fiction. What I’ve kept to myself, up until today, is that its inspiration is not.

Since the book was published last May, my list of unsuspecting supporters has expanded. The list includes critics and editors, publicists and Hollywood executives. It might even include you, if you are one of the thousands of readers who reviewed the book on Amazon and Goodreads, or who reached out to me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You probably didn’t realize you had acknowledged what happened to me when you acknowledged what happened to Ani, partially because I’ve never publicly discussed that flashpoint in my life and partially because *Luckiest Girl Alive* is not a memoir or even a roman à clef.

Or maybe it’s because I have been so adamant about the fact that I am not Ani FaNelli, despite a few toothless parallels to my own life: Ani is 28 in the book; I was 28 when I wrote the book. Like Ani, I grew up in the suburbs and attended a tiny private high school where, surrounded by old-money Ivy League strivers, I was a bit of an outlier. In adulthood, Ani writes about sex for *The Women’s Magazine*; I was an editor at *Cosmopolitan* for the first five years of my career. (Also, it’s a reference to *Bright Lights, Big City*, which is one of my favorite books.)

Still, it is as though people sense a deep connection between Ani and me, especially those who ask about my dedication, which reads:

To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world, I know.

*It means I know what it’s like to not belong*, I waffle in response to readers, usually women whose albatrosses I can sense, just as they sense mine. What I don’t add: *I know what it’s like to shut down and power through, to have no other choice than to pretend to be OK.* I am a savant of survivor mode.

I’ve spent the past year throwing bum grenades like that and running for cover. I dodge left by pointing to all the ways in which my fictional protagonist and I differ. Ani’s heritage is Italian, mine is German. Ani is planning a wedding in Nantucket, I got married in New Jersey (which, if you’ve read the book, you know would not have flown with Ani). I’ve been running and I’ve been ducking and I’ve been dodging because I’m scared. I’m scared people won’t call what happened to me rape because for a long time, no one did. But as I gear up for my paperback tour, and as I brace myself for the women who ask me, in nervous, brave tones, what I meant by my dedication, *What do I know?*, I’ve come to a simple, powerful revelation: everyone is calling it rape now. There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know.

> There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know.

I know that before I was old enough to drive, I liked A Boy. I know that I went to a party at which the ratio of guys to girls was not in my favor, where I drank, flirted with A Boy, was dazzled by A Boy, drank some more, and slipped away from the waking world. I know I came to on the floor of a bedroom, A Different Boy’s head between my legs. I remember A Different Boy from a flare of coherence earlier, trying to help me walk when my anesthetized legs failed me.

I know that the pain is what woke me next. That I was moaning Ow, over and over, before even opening my eyes. This time A Boy was there, his shoulders rising and falling above me in an excruciating rhythm. I went under again, coming to on my knees in the bathroom, staring into a toilet full of blood. I know I was too young to understand. I thought I must have cut myself.

I know that next, I tasted something disgusting, and that months later, on a morning when I could no longer face my sniggering peers, I skipped the first few periods of the day. I wandered around town, idling before a Chinese restaurant that had just set out fresh trays of food. I piled vegetable lo mein onto a plate even though it was 10 a.m. and I wasn’t hungry. Like Ani, I figured out food sometimes has to substitute for compassion.

I know I bit into what must have been a pocket of pure MSG. It burst in my mouth, salty and foul. I froze, a stitch of memory opening, realizing that was the only way to describe what I tasted that night.

In the morning, I know I woke facing a bare back. There was a nauseating moment where I had no idea where I was and whom I was with, but that if it had to be anyone, at least let it be A Boy. Please let it be A Boy. Then he turned over. He wasn’t A Boy. He was Another Boy, A Third Boy, one I didn’t like or find the least bit attractive. He laughed about how hungover he was, how crazy the party had been, how the reason I couldn’t find my underwear was because it was downstairs. I had cut my hand on a broken bottle, evidently, and I’d left a murderous smear of blood on the wall as I stumbled around in front of everyone wearing nothing from the waist down — because I’m a party animal like that. I know I laughed, because laughing was easier than tending to my heart, which felt like a hot coal in my chest, on fire with shame.

I know I visited a clinic to get the morning-after pill. I know I was 15 years old and aching for guidance and protection, for someone to release the mute button on my voice. The doctor, a woman, listened to me describe the events of the evening, 65 hours prior — just made it! — and I know that when I asked if what had happened to me was rape she told me she wasn’t qualified to answer that question.

I know my classmates called me a slut. (Plus a teacher, a cruel wisp of a woman, whom I have just described using the appositive in a nod to how she chose to explain the grammatical tool to the class: “For example, ‘Jessica, a cheap mallrat.'”) No one called it rape. Well, not no one. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the two boys who came close, who had left the party early that night. One put his head in his hands when he found out what happened and said he should have stayed. If he had stayed, he wouldn’t have let this happen to me. The other told me that there are some things in life I should never be expected to forgive. One of those boys died before we graduated high school and the other before I graduated college, and I must acknowledge that they were the only ones to comfort me when it wasn’t the cool thing to do. I must acknowledge their fine memories, which they deserve.

> No one called it rape.

I called it rape, once. In a drunken confrontation with A Boy. The next day, terrified the herd might come after me even hungrier (*trash slut* had appeared on the inside of my locker just days before), I called A Boy and apologized. I apologized to my rapist for calling him a rapist. What a thing to live with.

From then on, I submitted to my assigned narrative. What was the point in raising my voice when all it got me was my own lonely echo? Like Ani, the only way I knew to survive was to laugh loudly at my rapists’ jokes, speak softly to the mean girls, and focus on chiseling my tunnel out of there. I know that once I was free, I became obsessed with reinventing myself. Not because I didn’t want anyone from my past to find me, just the opposite, in fact. I was sure that with the right wardrobe, a glamorous job, and a ring on my finger before the age of 28, I could transcend my reputation. That if everyone from my past could see me so put together, so accomplished in New York City, so *settled down*, my voice would finally be worth hearing.

I know that I am very, very angry. I learned in therapy that anger is easier to feel, that when it’s present, it is near impossible to experience other, more anguishing emotions. My anger is carbon monoxide, binding to pain, humiliation, and hurt, rendering them powerless. You would never know when you met me how angry I am. Like Ani, I sometimes feel like a wind-up doll. Turn my key and I will tell you what you want to hear. I will smile on cue. My anger is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. It’s completely toxic.

> Blockquote

I know that I made the mistake of thinking that living well is the best revenge. That I figured out, eventually, that the appearance of living well is not the same thing as actually living well. And even if it were, revenge does not beget healing. Healing will come when I snuff out the shame, when I rip the shroud off the truth. If I were a victim of the other horrific crime in my book, I would talk about it openly. I wouldn’t pretend like it hadn’t happened to me, like I don’t still hurt about it, like I don’t still cry about it. Why should this be any different?

I’m trying, but I’m rusty at speaking the truth. The day I pitched this essay, a woman approached me at a book event in New Jersey. “You said you did some research for your book,” she said. “Did you interview a rape victim?”

I told her I had researched the other major event in my book.

“So how did you—” she stopped. “I mean, it was just so real. What you said about not screaming until it was over? Until you knew you were safe?” I started to internally chant *Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck* at the same time tears sprang to her eyes. I’m also rusty with compassion. I’ve been conditioned to prefer an economy-sized bag of chocolate-covered pretzels to that. “Because that almost happened to me,” she said.

Fuck it. “Something similar to what happened to Ani happened to me,” I responded for the first time ever, and she grabbed my wrist and held it tight, blinking tears, while I smiled brightly, insisting in a foreign falsetto, “I’m fine! It’s fine!”

I’m not fine. It’s not fine. But it’s finally the truth, it’s what I know, and that’s a start.

*Jessica Knoll is the* New York Times *best-selling author of* (1).​

1) (http://amzn.to/1VRLCaz)

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Luckiest Girl Alive Author on Her Decision to Reveal Her Rape in Wrenching Essay

By Maggie Mallon

In a gut-wrenching essay published Tuesday in Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter, best-selling author Jessica Knoll revealed that she was a victim of gang rape as a teenager.

Like Knoll, the Luckiest Girl Alive protagonist grew up in the suburbs, attended a respected private high school, and became a successful editor at a women's magazine after college. They also share a devastating secret—one that Knoll is now making public.

"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," Knoll wrote. "What I've kept to myself, up until today, is that its inspiration is not."

In the New York Times best-seller, Ani is a highly successful writer for the fictional The Women's Magazine and planning a wedding of her dreams. Despite a facade of success, she remains haunted by the sexual assault she experienced as a teen. In describing the horrific act, Knoll penned a scene so harrowing and descriptive that many readers have asked her how she was able to capture such a devastating moment so accurately. In Knoll's Lenny essay, she discloses that she was able to do so by drawing from her own experience.

In the essay, Knoll relives her sexual assault—an incident that occurred when she was just 15-years-old. The author was raped by several male classmates at a party and for many years she was tortured by feelings of confusion, shame, and helplessness. She was derided as a "slut" by other students for the remainder of her time in high school. Even adults in her life denied her support after the incident, and, when visiting a clinic after the incident, Knoll described the exchange she had with the physician treating her, saying: "The doctor, a woman, listened to me describe the events of the evening...and I know that when I asked if what had happened to me was rape she told me she wasn't qualified to answer that question."

Even more heartbreaking, Knoll never spoke openly about what had happened because she feared how people in her hometown would respond.

"I submitted to my assigned narrative. What was the point in raising my voice when all it got me was my own lonely echo?" she wrote. "Like Ani, the only way I knew to survive was to laugh loudly at my rapists' jokes, speak softly to the mean girls, and focus on chiseling my tunnel out of there."

Now, 17 years after her assault, Knoll is opening up and sharing her story, publicly. Glamour spoke to the best-selling novelist about her decision to open up, how public discourse about sexual assault has changed in the years since her attack, and what she hopes other victims of sexual assault can learn from her essay.

Glamour: What has the response to your Lenny essay been like?

Jessica Knoll: It's been completely overwhelming. I anticipated a bit of a response, but I didn't think that I would be parked in front of my computer and my phone since 7 A.M. this morning and still unable to answer everyone who's reached out to me.

__Glamour: You mentioned in the essay a woman that you met at a book event in New Jersey whose emotional response to the rape scene in Luckiest Girl Alive allowed you to share, for the first, something similar to what happened to Ani happened to you. How did this interaction affect you and make you want to share your story with the world? __

JK: That happened either the day of or the day after I had pitched the essay idea to Lenny. They were very supportive and very happy to work with me on it. It just happened that I had this book event and it just happened that someone asked me about it there. I had a moment where I was just going to give my usual B.S. response and I was like, This is what I'm trying to avoid doing. Just say it. Be forthcoming about it for once . And that was the first time I really came clean about how I was able to write that scene so accurately.

Glamour: What was it about Lenny that made you want to share your story?

JK: Lenny Letter was a place where I could speak and say what I had to say. I was able to be open and honest. I felt really comfortable sharing it in that space. They're so supportive of women and women's voices, and I knew that I would be really supported there.

Glamour: Do think victims of sexual assault are becoming more vocal and more open to sharing their stories with the public?

JK: I definitely do. It's part of the reason why I felt [comfortable doing so]. A lot of people tell me, "you're so brave," "you're so courageous," and I'm so grateful for someone to tell me that. It's so amazing to be told that, but I have to give credit where credit is due. I'm able to tell this story because a lot of women before me over the last couple years have stood up and told their own stories. They were the ones who were brave, they were the ones who were courageous first. It was a chain effect for me—one woman sharing her story led to another woman sharing her story. Eventually you get to a place where you're like, if they're doing it, I can do it too. Cases like [the Bill Cosby accusers speaking out] laid the groundwork for me to be able to feel comfortable telling my story.

By Emily Tannenbaum

Glamour: Do you think there is more of an awareness and understanding of sexual assault today than there has been in the past?

JK: A thousand percent, yes. I think it's night and day between what it was 17 years ago and what it is today. We're still not where we need to be but it's been a vast, vast improvement. I can speak to it today—I have maybe gotten one or two negative responses and everything else has been wholeheartedly supportive and full of warmth and love and respect. It far outweighs the naysayers out there.

__Glamour: In your essay you wrote, "If I were the victim of the other horrific crime in my book, I would talk about it openly. I wouldn't pretend like it hadn't happened." Why do you think many victims of sexual assault, unlike other crimes, are so afraid to speak out? __

JK: For me, I tried. I woke up in the morning and was like, This is not OK. Something bad has happened . That was all I could metabolize at that age with my limited understanding of what consent was and what rape was. All I know is that I felt like something very, very wrong had happened to me. I felt very violated. I expressed this to the doctor, I expressed this to my friends, I expressed this to my rapist, and everybody shut me down everywhere I turned.The message I ended up internalizing was, Sorry you feel really shitty but nothing bad happens here [in this town]. You've just got to deal with it now . I was so young I couldn't process what had happened. I knew I felt horrible and I knew it felt wrong to me. I called it rape even but everyone around me said "No, no, you're wrong." I felt like, OK, I guess I'm wrong. Everyone's telling me I'm wrong, I guess I'm wrong .

It really wasn't until I got to college and sought therapy for it that all the pieces started coming together. In college they give seminars about what consent was and how if you're drunk you can't legally consent. We started talking about it more and my initial instincts were right. I was raped. At the time I was completely shut down at every turn and that's why I didn't speak up about it at the time or didn't speak up more than I initially tried to. Because I did try.

Glamour: Do you wish you had pressed charges against your attackers?

JK: That's a difficult thing to think about. It's a double-edged sword. Looking back at the way everyone handled it, I don't regret not pressing charges because I think I would've been completely slaughtered. I don't think even the police would've taken me seriously. If a female doctor at a clinic didn't even take me seriously or didn't take my claims seriously...we know how the police tend to handle most of these claims. I don't think I would have had much of a shot at [a case] coming to fruition. That being said, it does haunt me to think about, well, I'm pretty sure one of these guys is a really bad egg and went on to do this to more women. If it could have stopped him in any way then yes, I wish had done it. I just don't think I would have gotten anywhere with it at the time.

Glamour: After publishing your essay, has anyone from your past reached out in support?

JK: Well, today I've gotten a lot of messages. [ Laughs. ] I think everyone was really young and people didn't know how to react or to respond to this. Some people did acknowledge that something bad had happened, like the two guys I write about in the essay. And I remember on Monday morning coming in and a girl I wasn't even friends with getting up from her desk and hugging me and asking me if I was OK. I think I even laughed and said, "Of course, I'm fine. What would be wrong?" Meanwhile I was splintered up inside. But yes, today I'm getting really nice messages of support from people from my past.

Glamour: Is there any other message you want to send beyond what you wrote in your essay to young women who have experienced sexual assault?

JK: What I've come to understand and what I've learned in therapy is that not talking about it is what makes it shameful. It's what makes it hard to heal from. That's why I'm talking about it. I don't have anything to be ashamed of—I'm not the one who did something wrong. I hope that other women hear that message and that message resonates with them. They don't have anything to be ashamed of and they're not alone. When I was younger, I felt so very alone and it was the worst feeling in the world. If I had read an essay like this when I was 15 years old, I would have held onto it with all my might. It would have given me so much encouragement at a time when I really needed it.

By Jessica Radloff

By Jenny Singer

By Whitney Perry

By Meghan Rose

Why Luckiest Girl Alive Is Sparking New Discussions on Trauma

Author Jessica Knoll details the intensely personal journey of translating her best-selling novel for the screen.

Every product on this page was chosen by a Harper's BAZAAR editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

With this week’s release of Luckiest Girl Alive on Netflix, Knoll is reflecting on the novel’s winding journey to the screen. Determined to keep creative control of this incredibly personal story, Knoll managed to retain sole writing credit on the film adaptation and also served as an executive producer. But it was an uphill battle after the initial production deal fell apart. “There were many times over the last seven years where I was like, it had a good run. Something else I’ll write one day will get made, but it’s just not going to be this. It’s just too hard,” Knoll recalls thinking. The project came together again when Mila Kunis agreed to take on the lead role, a raw depiction of a guarded woman shaped by violence, ready to deceive in order to thrive, but yearning to show her authentic self.

Now 38 and living in L.A., Knoll speaks with BAZAAR.com about the many parts of her own life that found their way into Luckiest Girl Alive , and how her years as a magazine editor in New York City prepared her for Hollywood (“It just gave me the sharpest elbows”).

What finally fell into place to get this movie made after the initial deal fell through?

Netflix was the one that said, “We want you to go to Mila Kunis.” I remember our director, Mike [Barker] saying, in his British accent, “That feels dangerous and sexy.” I was a little like, “Yeah, this would be amazing, obviously, but she’s going to turn it down. … These huge actresses, for whatever reason, are not into this role. It’s too dangerous, too unlikable. You need someone who’s hungrier than a Mila Kunis.” Then she read the script and was like, “This is really cool and kind of weird, and I’m in.” And I was just on the ground! I couldn’t believe it.

The movie really dissects Ani FaNelli’s anxieties and coping mechanisms as she prepares for her dream wedding. Seeing it on the screen now, does anything about the character strike you in a new way?

Definitely the eating stuff is really a shift for me, perspective-wise, in terms of how I thought about that character. Also how much of my own issues around eating were embedded in that character. Around 2020, when we were editing the script with Mila as a creative producer, I was returning to my book a lot to pull out different passages. It was pretty amazing because I had, at that point, sought treatment for disordered eating, which I clearly was suffering from when I wrote the book.

When I would read Ani’s obsession with food and working out and being thin, I was just like, “I cannot believe that I used to be like that.” I’ve just moved into such a more peaceful place. So I think when I see that onscreen and see her worrying about how she looks and how much she eats and fitting into her wedding dress, the bingeing and trying to hide it from people—which is also something I used to do—I’m really struck by how much I was suffering. And I think when you are , you don’t realize it. You’re like, “No, it’s just my life. Everything’s fine.” And then, you get better and you look back, and you’re like, “Wow, I wasn’t doing too well back then.”

In the latter half of the movie, there’s a flashback where young Ani is on a field trip to New York City and encounters a stylish woman who “cut a path through New York City simply because she looked like she had more important places to be than anyone else.” Young Ani makes the goal to become like that woman. You spent years in New York as a magazine editor. What did you want to capture about that world?

For me personally growing up, I was obsessed with magazines. I had every magazine, I had Jane, I had Allure, I had Cosmo. I had all of them. I think I still have so many old copies at my parents’ house. As someone who was suffering and in a lot of pain in the place that she was in, magazines were escapism for me. I loved reading about these career women and their lives. There’s a meme that’s blowing up right now about how women’s magazines really convinced a lot of people that going “day to night” was going to be a big part of their lives. And I remember, yes, that’s what I felt when I would read them.

Like, “Oh, my God, these women have these crazy, cool lives. I want that. I want to be one of these women. I want to wear high heels. I want to work 10 hours a day, and then go out to dinner.”… And magazines allowed me to envision a life for myself where I was powerful and respected and smart. Those were not the things that I was when I was in high school reading them. When I got to New York, it was honestly everything I dreamed it would be when I was a little kid.

There’s a key relationship between Ani and her editor in chief, Lolo, played by Jennifer Beals. They work at the very Cosmo -like publication The Women’s Bible. What was your experience in a largely female work environment like that?

I don’t think it’s any great surprise to anyone to hear that working with a lot of women can be treacherous at certain points. But there’s something about that world that it just gave me the sharpest elbows. It truly did. I felt like it was boot camp for the world.

In writing this script—or any script that I’ve worked on—the notes documents are insane. They are coming from all the different producers. Then the studio people. Then if the actress is a producer, they have their own set of notes. And this is on every single draft you write, every single scene that you’ve already written 30 different times. … People would say to me, “As a writer, what we respect about you the most is that you’re really good about taking notes. You don’t complain, and you find the ones that you know are good, and you find ways to work with them while still remaining true to your voice.” I realized, it’s because of women’s magazines. It really prepared me well for this world. That’s what it takes to get a good piece of writing. You have to be able to take criticism.

Are there any moments from production with these cast members that have stayed with you?

We filmed partly in Toronto and partly in New York. Once we got to New York, I realized how special it was to have been in Toronto, because the paparazzi in New York around Mila was so intense that she couldn’t go anywhere, which I just didn’t expect. But in Toronto, we could all go out to dinners and get drinks and hang out like coworkers.

The thing that was the most fun was being on a set. It was like, these are your coworkers. You go to happy hour after and you’re having a dirty martini with Connie Britton and talking about the new moisturizers that you guys like, all of those things.

The next question contains a few spoilers. Near the end of the movie, there’s a scene where Ani’s on the subway, surrounded by people who have read an essay that she wrote. They’re feeling very seen by her frank account of rape and its aftermath. It’s not a scene from the book. It seems drawn more from the similar essay that you wrote for Lenny Letter. How did that scene develop?

It is definitely drawn from real life. We set the film in 2015, when the book came out, because it was important that it was pre-Me Too. Because it wasn’t yet commonplace for women to write these essays. We didn’t know yet if the world was ready to embrace them in kind. … Some of the things those women are saying [in the subway scene] are pulled from all the various messages that I got from women the day my essay came out.

One thing what we wanted to do in the movie was move past this idea that it was just about Ani and her experience and how it affected her. We wanted to show that this was more epic. That it was bigger than her, this story and what she had learned from it. That there were so many women out there who could connect with it. … While we were talking about how to accomplish that, I was in New York and I was in my hotel room, and there were only a couple of TV channels that worked. And First Wives Club was on. Love it, seen it a million times, obviously. In that movie, the women get to this point where they’re like, “Okay, we’ve gotten our revenge, but it still doesn’t feel good enough. It still doesn’t feel like we’re doing enough for our friend, Cynthia. How can we turn this into something more?” And from there, they opened the center in honor of their friend who died, and they’re helping other women. It was that moment where things suddenly clicked—I saw how this other movie did this similar thing, how powerful it was, and we figured it out from there.

For Ani, a lot of the novel is about the true shift in her perspective that happens after she discloses what happened to her. During the movie’s ending credits, viewers are directed to a website called wannatalkaboutit.com . How do you see the film as part of the conversation about the resources that rape and assault survivors could benefit from?

I think, clearly, we don’t do enough to support people in this country, although things have massively improved since I was a teenager. The biggest surprise for me when I wrote my essay was not just how many women I didn’t know who reached out to me, but how many women I did know who had a story. What I would hope to see is more moments like that, where the movie becomes a catalyst for someone turning to their partner of five, 10, 50 years and saying, “I have to get this off my chest finally,” because it’s a real unburdening when you can do that. And it’s a big step toward healing and growth.

Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Carl Kelsch is the managing editor of Harper's Bazaar and Oprah Daily. Apart from interviewing today's most inspiring content creators for Hearst, he is also a screenwriter and filmmaker.

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Jessica Knoll on the true story that inspired 'Luckiest Girl Alive'

Warning: The story contains spoilers for the movie "Luckiest Girl Alive."

In case you're not already aware, the title of "Luckiest Girl Alive," a 2015 book by Jessica Knoll turned into a 2022 Netflix movie, is meant to be taken ironically.

On the surface, Ani Fanelli (Mila Kunis) seems to have an enviably picture perfect life: Dream writing job, a wealthy and handsome boyfriend and a killer wardrobe to match. But you can think of these aspects to her life as armor — or maybe a picnic blanket covering up a crater.

Over the course of the book, though, Ani's life unravels as she finally (and publicly) confronts the formative, traumatic moments of her childhood when asked to be part of a documentary.

Author Knoll had to do the same. Speaking to TODAY, she opened up about how her own experiences informed the character of Ani — and why she put it into her art.

As a teenager, Ani — who went by TifAni back then — attended a private high school. A scholarship student, TiffAni (played by Chiara Aurelia) feels out of place with her wealthy and confident peers.

One night at a party, Ani is gang raped by three of her male classmates. In the aftermath, Ani's experiences are downplayed by her peers and doubted by the adults in her life. She was left alone to question what really happened to her, and whether she somehow bore responsibility.

As a student in a private school, Knoll experienced a similar gang rape, and turned her experiences into a "Luckiest Girl Alive" plot point.

At first, Knoll attested the bestselling debut was fiction, but then wrote an essay for Lenny Letter in 2016 explaining the biographical resonances.

“I always feel a little undeserving of being called like brave or courageous, because I had to (open up) in fiction. There were these dueling things inside of me. I desperately craved the release of getting my story out on paper, and the validation of recognizing what had happened to me as rape. I needed that.

“But on the other hand, I was frightened that people would read it and come to the same conclusion that people did when I was in high school, which was that no violation had occurred and that I had somehow participated in it," she told TODAY.

Knoll, who wrote the screenplay and executive produced the movie, chose not to be on set when the assault scene was filmed.

"A lot of that had to do with the fact that I didn't want to make the actors feel uncomfortable," Knoll said. "I'm an executive producer and I wrote this thing and everyone knows that it's inspired by my real life experience. I could tell people were nervous around me. I was like, 'This is a job people need to do and I don't want to make it any more uncomfortable than it needs to be."

While watching the scene during playback, Knoll said she was unable to do what she often does, still: Minimize what happened to her.

"Oh, there’s no rationalizing here. I don’t need to minimize this. This was really bad."

Jessica Knoll on watching the sexual assault scene in "Luckiest Girl Alive"

"I think I normalize what happened to me so that I can live with it. Then when you see it, you're like, 'Oh, there's no rationalizing here. I don't need to minimize this. This was really bad," she said. 

Ani's school year goes from objectively bad to worse later on in the movie, when two of her classmates take guns to the Gothic hallways and begin to shoot.

In the harrowing scene, two of Ani's assailants are killed. Another, Dean, is paralyzed from the waist down. He goes on to become a gun control activist running for Senate. A symbol of resilience to some, Dean is a haunting reminder for Ani of violation.

Knoll was in high school when the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado took place, an event she said always stuck with her — but that's not why she included the sequence in her book.

"I still had the idea in my head that what happened to Ani wasn't bad enough, because that's what happened to me. I thought I had to make it worse," she said.

The shooting also complicates Ani's decision to share what happened to her.

“I still had the idea in my head that what happened to Ani wasn’t bad enough, because that’s what happened to me. I thought I had to make it worse."

Why Jessica Knoll included a school shooting in the book

"She's now carrying the fact that they are 'good victim.' They've been gunned down. The community is mourning their deaths. Then, on top of it, Dean does something good and powerful with what happened to him. It becomes even harder for her to come forward," she said.

But both Ani and Knoll eventually do come forward in their own ways: Knoll, with the book. Ani, with an essay that lands her in the public eye — and on TODAY.

Knoll said that the conversation around sexual violence has changed since the book was published in 2015, thanks in large part to the #MeToo movement (#MeToo was coined by activist Tarana Burke ).

But she hopes the release of the story on Netflix exposes Ani's journey to more audiences and keeps the conversation going.

"I think the biggest thing would be that maybe more men come to this story, because we're on a platform like Netflix, " she said.

Knoll recalled seeing a sole young man in the audience at a book event in Boston. At first, she worried he was a men's right's activist, arriving to yell at her. "I was so scared," she said.

Then, when he lined up to get his book signed, he asked Knoll if the events were always "like this" — as in, mostly attended by women. Knoll answered in the affirmative.

"He was like, 'Just because the protagonist is a woman doesn't mean that this isn't a book that guys can enjoy too,'" Knoll recalled.

"It was one of those moments in life where you're like, 'I completely judged someone.' You have to give people grace and allow them to surprise you," she said.

Many viewers of the film, which reached No. 1 in the streamer's top movies chart, have expressed their shock over its violent content, demanding a trigger warning .

The twists of "Luckiest Girl Alive" likely surprised you — but the title ends with the most important part. After all that, Ani is still alive. Now, she's living on her terms.

Elena Nicolaou is a senior entertainment editor at Today.com, where she covers the latest in TV, pop culture, movies and all things streaming. Previously, she covered culture at Refinery29 and Oprah Daily. Her superpower is matching people up with the perfect book, which she does on her podcast, Blind Date With a Book.

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Jessica Knoll reveals gang rape in new essay

In Lenny Letter, Jessica Knoll writes that the events in her best-selling novel happened to her.

Author Jessica Knoll made a splash last May when she released Luckiest Girl Alive , a dark, twisted book about successful, 28-year-old TifAni Fanelli who has a secret boiling under the surface. Lionsgate bought the rights to the novel before it had even debuted and Reese Witherspoon is set to produce the film version. Now, in a new essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter, Knoll has come out to say that one of the harrowing events depicted in the book, a gang rape, actually happened to her.

“You probably didn’t realize you had acknowledged what happened to me when you acknowledged what happened to Ani, partially because I’ve never publicly discussed that flashpoint in my life and partially because Luckiest Girl Alive is not a memoir or even a roman à clef,” Knoll wrote.

The author says she chose to speak out about her experience now, as she’s about to embark on the paperback book tour to support the book. “I’ve come to a simple, powerful revelation: everyone is calling it rape now,” she wrote. There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know.”

Knoll goes on to describe the events that took place when she was 15, and the after-effects of one night at a party. “From then on, I submitted to my assigned narrative,” she wrote. “What was the point in raising my voice when all it got me was my own lonely echo? Like Ani, the only way I knew to survive was to laugh loudly at my rapists’ jokes, speak softly to the mean girls, and focus on chiseling my tunnel out of there.”

In the essay, Knoll reveals the first time she acknowledged that Ani’s story came from a deep place within was when a reader asked her if she had interviewed a rape victim. “‘Something similar to what happened to Ani happened to me,’ I responded for the first time ever, and she grabbed my wrist and held it tight, blinking tears, while I smiled brightly, insisting in a foreign falsetto, ‘I’m fine! It’s fine!'”

In introducing Knoll’s piece, Dunham wrote that her first reaction to reading the essay was “gratitude.”

“The experience of reading this piece was a bittersweet one for me. Bitter because of the pain of recognizing, in Jessica, a woman who has been forced for too long to bury the truth of her own experience, hiding it under a façade of apologies and feigned chill,” Dunham wrote. “But also sweet — powerfully, thrillingly sweet — in that she has expressed it now, with such generous and poetic honesty. In telling her own story, Jessica makes way for so many still untold. In turning her writerly gifts to this topic, she emancipates an army of experiences and gives survivors back their voices. I know, deep in my bones, that this piece has the power to change lives and I am honored that Lenny gets to share it.”

See the whole essay by subscribing to Lenny Letter .

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The Story Behind Netflix’s Luckiest Girl Alive

A ni FaNelli ( Mila Kunis ) sits in front of stained glass windows in her former high school, the private and prestigious Bradley School in suburban Philadelphia. She’s on edge, talking with an independent documentary filmmaker about a school shooting that unfolded here two decades ago—and the accusations surrounding it.

“You’re lucky you have a mother who got you a lawyer and supported you,” the filmmaker tells her. “Not everyone has that.”

Ani is silent, recalling a memory of her mother failing to believe her version of events. “You disgust me,” her mother hisses. “You are not the daughter that I raised.”

She flashes back to the present. “Hmm. Yes. Very lucky,” she responds, barely containing her pain and anger. “Luckiest girl alive right here.”

Luckiest Girl Alive , an adaptation of a 2015 book by the same name, releases on Netflix on Friday. Its ending has changed, but the powerful core of the story persists.

What to know about the novel

Author Jessica Knoll’s mystery novel Luckiest Girl Alive found resounding success upon its publication in 2015, spending four months on the best-seller lists and selling more than 450,000 copies. Written in the first person, the book itself is predominantly fictional. It tells the story of Ani Fanelli, formerly known as TifAni, and her phoenix-like rise and reinvention from the traumatic ashes of her teenage years.

“The knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss Ani as vain and vapid,” Knoll told the New York Times. “But when we reward women for showing their full range of humanity, warts and all, when we give their struggles weight, we allow for the possibility that their flaws and stories can endear, inspire and move us, just like those of men.”

The novel worried less about the likeability of its protagonist than her truth, drawing comparisons to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl , which came out three years prior. Like Gone Girl, Luckiest Girl Alive dissects crime, gender, and class, reassembling femininity through a contemporary lens.

“One woman’s carefully orchestrated, perfect life slowly cracks to reveal a dark underbelly in Knoll’s knockout debut novel,” read the review in Publishers Weekly. “What sets this novel apart is the author’s ability to snare the reader from page one, setting the tone for a completely enthralling read as the secrets are revealed.”

Read More: What to Know About the Beloved Book Behind Lena Dunham’s Catherine, Called Birdy

Who is Jessica Knoll?

Although the book is fiction, it was also partially based on author Jessica Knoll’s personal experience—a fact that the public didn’t learn until a year after the book’s release.

In the lead-up to the shooting in Luckiest Girl Alive , Ani experiences rape by three separate classmates consecutively, which all three boys deny. (Later, her mother also rejects this reality, making it nearly impossible for Ani to report the crimes.)

In March 2016, Knoll wrote an essay for the online feminist newsletter Lenny Letter, titled What I Know , about the fact that Ani’s gang rape was based on her own traumatic experience at age 15.

“My anger is carbon monoxide, binding to pain, humiliation, and hurt, rendering them powerless,” Knoll wrote. “You would never know when you met me how angry I am. Like Ani, I sometimes feel like a wind-up doll. Turn my key and I will tell you what you want to hear. I will smile on cue. My anger is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. It’s completely toxic.”

In the film, Ani recites these lines almost word for word, spitting them out as she finally confronts one of her rapists. “Do you know the difference between me and someone like you, Dean?” she asks, seething. “My anger is like carbon monoxide. It’s odorless, tasteless, colorless, and completely toxic. But only to me. See, I don’t take my anger out on anyone other than my f–cking self.”

After the essay, readers flooded social media with messages of support and thanks to Knoll for coming forward. While the author did not experience a school shooting firsthand, the damning details of the rape scene came from personal pain.

“I was so conditioned to not talk about it that it didn’t even occur to me to be forthcoming,” Knoll told the New York Times. “I want to make people feel like they can talk about it, like they don’t have to be ashamed of it.”

Read More: Here Are the 12 New Books You Should Read in October

How the ending Luckiest Girl Alive departs from the novel

The liberation of sharing her story encouraged Knoll to adapt the novel into a movie herself—not always typical for authors when their work is optioned. But the film diverges from the novel in one key place: the ending.

After Ani ultimately leaves her fiancé—a symbol of the posh upper crust she worked so hard to assimilate into—she goes on to take a job at the New York Times Magazine, publish an essay à la the one in Lenny Letter (although this time in the magazine), and take the subway—a mode of transportation that formerly gave her PTSD.

On the subway, she is enveloped by the voices of women’s comments on her essay, seemingly coming from the everyday people around her on the train. “I was also assaulted by a guy I thought was a friend,” says one. “Hearing your story gives me hope that one day I can tell mine too.”

The 28-year-old brings her account to Good Morning America , where she’s interviewed about the essay. “I’m hearing from women who have never shared their stories, from women who have carried this horrible thing with them alone for 38 years, and I just hope that no one has to ever do that again,” Ani says. “I hope that people feel compelled to share their stories, to talk about what happened to them, and to know that you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“It’s very meta that it’s a fictional story, a fictional character, but there are even more elements that are inspired by my real life,” Knoll told Entertainment Weekly of the changes to the adaptation. “I like that we looked at the year that followed me writing the book and writing my essay and the reaction to it and going on a TV show to talk about it.”

While Knoll did change the ending of the film to make it more true to her own life, she was aided in doing so by Mila Kunis, who plays Ani with a haunted tenacity. The actor and the author worked together to shape the ending into something that felt communal.

“I know the ending is polarizing, which is what I think makes this movie so interesting. It’s not cookie cutter, and not everybody experiences this movie the same way,” Kunis told Entertainment Weekly. “A lot of people didn’t like it, but I fought so hard for it to stay in. I’m really glad that we won this fight because it’s so powerful.”

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Jessica Knoll, Author Of 'Luckiest Girl Alive,' Wrote A Harrowing And Powerful Essay About Rape

By Nina Bahadur

Jessica Knoll, the best-selling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and a former SELF staffer, has written a beautiful and haunting essay about rape that everyone should read. In today's Lenny Letter , Knoll explains that she was gang-raped as a teenager just like her book's main character TifAni FaNelli. Her essay touches on the bullying she experienced after the fact, and how unwilling people around her were to accept that what had happened was rape. She talks about the burning anger she has felt, and how for a long time she believed that living well was the best revenge.

"Revenge does not beget healing," she writes. "Healing will come when I snuff out the shame, when I rip the shroud off the truth. If I were a victim of the other horrific crime in my book, I would talk about it openly. I wouldn't pretend like it hadn't happened to me, like I don't still hurt about it, like I don't still cry about it. Why should this be any different?"

Knoll shares that she is ready to tell the truth, and will no longer pretend to people that she is fine. She writes:

"I'm not fine. It's not fine. But it's finally the truth, it's what I know, and that's a start."

We are incredibly moved by this piece, and think you will be, too.

Read it here.

SELF does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any information published on this website or by this brand is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, and you should not take any action before consulting with a healthcare professional.

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'Luckiest Girl Alive' Author Jessica Knoll Speaks Out About Being Gang-Raped as a Teen

"I've been running and I've been ducking and I've been dodging because I'm scared, writes Jessica Knoll

Bestselling author Jessica Knoll revealed on Tuesday that she was gang-raped as a teen – just like the protagonist in her hit novel, Luckiest Girl Alive .

In an essay published in Lena Dunham‘s Lenny Letter , Knoll opens up for the first time about the devastating experience that continues to haunt her, explaining why she kept it hidden for so many years – and why she’s choosing to speak out now.

“The first person to tell me I was gang-raped was a therapist, seven years after the fact,” Knoll begins the heart-wrenching essay. “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.”

“I’ve been running and I’ve been ducking and I’ve been dodging because I’m scared,” she continues. “I’m scared people won’t call what happened to me rape because for a long time, no one did.”

“But as I gear up for my paperback tour, and as I brace myself for the women who ask me, in nervous, brave tones, what I meant by my dedication, what do I know? I had a simple, powerful revelation: everyone is calling it rape now. There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know,” she writes, referencing the dedication included in the opening pages of her novel: “To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world, I know.”

TifAni FaNelli is the main character in Luckiest Girl Alive – which has been optioned by Reese Witherspoon to be turned into a movie – a successful young woman who is tormented by memories of being gang-raped in high school by several male classmates.

Knoll’s essay describes in agonizing detail the similar events that happened to her in real life, and the shame, confusion and heartache that followed. Knoll coped by going into what she calls “survivor mode;” she learned to “laugh loudly at my rapists’ jokes” and “speak softly to the mean girls.” Once, she mustered up the courage to confront one of her rapists – only to feel compelled to apologize to him later. “What a thing to live with,” she writes.

Now that the former Cosmopolitan editor fully understands the truth about what happened to her, she’s ready to confront it.

When a tearful reader recently asked Knoll how she was able to so accurately portray TifAni’s rape, the author finally opened up.

” ‘Something similar to what happened to Ani happened to me,’ I responded for the first time ever, and she grabbed my wrist and held it tight, blinking tears, while I smiled brightly, insisting in a foreign falsetto, ‘I’m fine! It’s fine!’ ” Knoll recalls.

But, she concludes, “I’m not fine. It’s not fine. But it’s finally the truth, it’s what I know, and that’s a start.”

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Bestselling author Jessica Knoll reveals she was gang-raped at 15

Knoll’s novel Luckiest Girl Alive tells of a woman who was raped as a teenager. In Lena Dunham’s e-newsletter, the author reveals she shared a similar trauma

Jessica Knoll, the American author of the New York Times bestselling novel Luckiest Girl Alive, has published an online essay revealing that the rape suffered by the protagonist, TifAni FaNellis (Ani), was based on a gang-rape she survived when she was 15.

In the essay published to LennyLetter , an e-newsletter edited by Girls showrunners Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, Knoll admits she has been regularly deflecting questions from readers about her similarities to the thriller’s main character, and about the dedication she left at the beginning of the book: “To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world, I know. ”

It means I know what it’s like to not belong , I waffle in response to readers, usually women whose albatrosses I can sense, just as they sense mine. What I don’t add: I know what it’s like to shut down and power through, to have no other choice than to pretend to be OK . I am a savant of survivor mode.

In harrowing scenes, Knoll relates her violent and traumatic rape by three boys, after she “slipped away from the waking world” at a party when she was 15 years old. She recalls flitting in and out of consciousness while being raped by different boys, and “waking up later in a bathroom, seeing a toilet bowl of blood-tinged water, and not understanding where it came from”.

The doctor she saw for the morning after pill wouldn’t call it a rape; neither, she says, would her classmates, who tormented her and called her a “slut”. The one time Knoll used the word “rape”, she backed down from the word the following day. “I apologized to my rapist for calling him a rapist. What a thing to live with,” she writes.

Knoll’s therapist was the first person who told her she was gang-raped, when she was 22. Now 32, after coming to terms with what happened to her, she writes that she is “very, very angry”.

My anger is carbon monoxide, binding to pain, humiliation, and hurt, rendering them powerless. You would never know when you met me how angry I am. Like Ani, I sometimes feel like a wind-up doll. Turn my key and I will tell you what you want to hear. I will smile on cue. My anger is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. It’s completely toxic.

The protagonist of Luckiest Girl Alive shares similarities with the author. Ani, a 28-year-old editor at a women’s magazine, returns to her prestigious high school to work on a documentary, and is confronted by the rage she has carried since being raped as a teenager. Knoll, who was 28 when she wrote the book, is a former editor at Cosmopolitan who had a similar upbringing.

“I’ve been running and I’ve been ducking and I’ve been dodging because I’m scared,” Knoll writes, of her unwillingness to admit she was writing from experience. “I’m scared people won’t call what happened to me rape because for a long time, no one did.”

But 17 years later, Knoll says she’s finally ready to use the word publicly: “As I gear up for my paperback tour, and as I brace myself for the women who ask me, in nervous, brave tones, what I meant by my dedication, What do I know? , I’ve come to a simple, powerful revelation: everyone is calling it rape now. There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know.”

For 17 years I was too ashamed to share this. Today I am not ashamed. Proud to tell #WhatIKnow https://t.co/m2HFDgfIAz — Jessica Knoll (@JessMKnoll) March 29, 2016

Knoll told the New York Times that she was compelled to write the essay after readers wrote to her saying they had survived similar experiences. “I was so conditioned to not talk about it that it didn’t even occur to me to be forthcoming,” she said. “I want to make people feel like they can talk about it, like they don’t have to be ashamed of it.”

Reese Witherspoon has optioned the film rights for the novel, which sold more than 450,000 copies, and was on best-seller lists for four months. Knoll has written the screenplay.

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‘luckiest girl alive’ author reveals she was gang-raped as a teen.

"There's no reason to cover my head. There's no reason I shouldn't say what I know," writes Jessica Knoll in Lena Dunham's latest Lenny letter.

By THR Staff

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Jessica Knoll, the author of Luckiest Girl Alive , reveals that her New York Times best-seller may have been fiction but its inspiration is, in fact, real.

In an essay published Tuesday in Lena Dunham’s latest Lenny letter , Knoll opens up about the time she was gang-raped as a teen — not unlike the novel’s main character, TifANi FaNelli , a successful woman who seemingly has it all but is tormented by her past.

Though she’s been trying to hide her secret for years, Knoll explains why she’s choosing to speak out on the situation now.

“I’ve been running and I’ve been ducking and I’ve been dodging because I’m scared. I’m scared people won’t call what happened to me rape because for a long time, no one did,” she writes. But as Knoll prepares for the novel’s press tour, she’s come to “a simple, powerful revelation: everyone is calling it rape now. There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know.”

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Knoll details the pain she suffered when recalling the events that happened to her (“I know my classmates called me a slut,” she recalls). But she did her best to survive, learning to “laugh loudly at my rapists’ jokes” and “speak softly to the mean girls.”

The former Cosmopolitan editor is no longer afraid to speak her truth as she’s come to understand what happened to her.

When a reader recently asked how she was able to tell Ani’s story so honestly, Knoll responded for the first time: “Something similar to what happened to Ani happened to me.”

Although she tried to alleviate the situation by insisting she was fine, Knoll concludes, “I’m not fine. It’s not fine. But it’s finally the truth, it’s what I know, and that’s a start.”

Luckiest Girl Alive  has been optioned by Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Pacific Standard Films, to turn the best-seller into a film with Lionsgate .

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Luckiest Girl Alive true story: The inspiration behind Mila Kunis's Netflix movie

The real-life Jessica Knoll.

Note: The following article contains discussion of sexual misconduct.

And once viewers realised it was inspired by a true story, it's surely kept them reading about the true story since their watch.

The movie sees Mila Kunis play Ani FaNelli, a New Yorker who appears to have it all including a sought-after position at a glossy magazine. However, she is forced to confront a dark truth about her teenage years when a director of a crime documentary asks her to tell her side of a shocking incident.

Luckiest Girl Alive is based on the book of the same name by Jessica Knoll, who adapted her own book for the movie. And both the movie and the book were inspired by a harrowing real-life experience of Knoll's.

Since it's kept as a reveal in the movie, we're flagging that there are spoilers ahead for Luckiest Girl Alive if you haven't seen the movie yet.

Luckiest Girl Alive true story

It's revealed in Luckiest Girl Alive that as a teenager, Ani was gang raped by three of her male classmates, who all denied it took place, leading Ani to be doubted by everybody, including her own mother.

Later in the movie, a school shooting takes place and two of Ani's rapists are killed, while the third, Dean, is paralysed from the waist down. He goes on to become a gun-control activist for the Senate.

It wasn't until a year after the book was published that Knoll revealed in a personal essay on Lenny Letter that she experienced a similar gang rape when she was a student at a private school.

"I always feel a little undeserving of being called, like, brave or courageous, because I had to [open up] in fiction. There were these duelling things inside of me. I desperately craved the release of getting my story out on paper, and the validation of recognising what had happened to me as rape. I needed that," she told Today .

"But on the other hand, I was frightened that people would read it and come to the same conclusion that people did when I was in high school, which was that no violation had occurred and that I had somehow participated in it."

In the movie, Ani recites (almost word-for-word) one section of Knoll's piece when she confronts Dean: "My anger is like carbon monoxide. It's odourless, tasteless, colourless, and completely toxic."

While what Ani experiences is inspired by Knoll's life, the shooting was fictional for the book. "I still had the idea in my head that what happened to Ani wasn't bad enough, because that's what happened to me. I thought I had to make it worse," she told Today .

"She's now carrying the fact that they are 'good victims'. They've been gunned down. The community is mourning their deaths. Then, on top of it, Dean does something good and powerful with what happened to him. It becomes even harder for her to come forward."

Like Jessica Knoll did in real life, Ani is also able to tell her truth when she gets a job at the New York Times Magazine , publishing an essay like Knoll did of her experience. This wasn't in the original book, meaning the movie ends in a different way .

"It's very meta that it's a fictional story, a fictional character, but there are even more elements that are inspired by my real life," Knoll told EW .

"I like that we looked at the year that followed me writing the book and writing my essay and the reaction to it and going on a TV show to talk about it. I liked that we embedded that into the movie because I think it makes for a more epic journey that Ani goes on."

Kunis is aware that the ending – which sees Ani on the subway watching people read her story, before she confronts somebody who criticises her on the street – might be divisive, but that's part of the reason why they did it.

"It's not cookie cutter, and not everybody experiences this movie the same way. So many people had such a different experience while watching the same piece of content, including the ending," she added.

"A lot of people didn't like it, but I fought so hard for it to stay in. I'm really glad that we won this fight because it's so powerful."

Luckiest Girl Alive is now available to watch on Netflix.

If you've been affected by the issues raised in this story, you can access more information from Rape Crisis England and Wales, who work towards the elimination of all forms of sexual violence and sexual misconduct, on their website or by calling the National Rape Crisis Helpline on 0808 802 9999. Rape Crisis Scotland’s helpline number is 08088 01 03 02.

Readers in the US are encouraged to contact RAINN , or the National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800-656-4673.

Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies , attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy , initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.  

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Luckiest Girl Alive Author Jessica Knoll on How the Film Portrays Her Experience of Sexual Assault

“It was a much more intense experience than I ever imagined.”

Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

Warning: This story contains an extensive discussion about sexual assault.

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit rainn.org for support online.

When Jessica Knoll penned her 2015 debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, she never imagined that it would lead to a major Netflix movie starring Mila Kunis—or to difficult revelations about her own past.

Simon & Schuster Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel

After her essay went viral, Knoll received an overwhelming response from women who had survived similarly harrowing ordeals. Their messages impacted the author profoundly. “A shared experience is really powerful in coming to terms with this kind of trauma,” says Knoll. “There’s so much shame surrounding it—being made to feel like you did something wrong, like you somehow invited this, or there was something about you that made [your attacker] choose you. But when you hear women from all walks of life say, ‘No, that happened to me, too,’ it really does leech that shame.”

When writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of Luckiest Girl Alive, which stars Kunis in the lead role and Chiara Aurelia as the younger version of her character, Knoll reflected on her own journey. Inspired by the events of her life since 2015, she decided to completely overhaul the end of the movie to reflect her writing her essay and Ani taking “full control of her narrative.” And the author’s involvement wasn’t just limited to the writing room; she was on hand throughout the entire production—especially for discussions about filming the graphic sexual assault scene. “We really needed to get it right so that people would understand the depths of Ani’s rage,” says Knoll. “Not shying away from the violence of that night helps the viewer empathize with why she is so angry at everyone and everything.” Here, Knoll opens up about watching that chilling scene for the first time, trying not to take on others’ trauma, and navigating the nuances of being labeled a survivor.

It’s been seven years since your book came out, and since then you published an essay and wrote a screenplay for Netflix. How difficult has it been to revisit your story again and again? I can’t imagine having to keep talking—or writing—about something so personal in a public forum.

Each project has been pretty formative, in terms of my own process of coming to terms with what happened to me. I don’t feel like I have that much in common with the version of myself that wrote the book, or even the essay. I was so raw when I wrote those; I didn’t have the wisdom or distance to understand not just what had happened to me, but why it was handled the way it was. Because the assault on its own was not the worst part—it was the aftermath; how I was treated and how people I loved failed me. I had to really parse that apart in therapy, because it’s very complex. But all I had then was my story, my anger, and my pain.

Now I have an understanding of it, which is—I hate the word empowering—but that’s really what gives me agency in all of this. It’s the power of knowledge and understanding how this affected me and how I can shift my behavior in positive ways. I did not have the skillset to do that at the time that I wrote the essay or the book. I feel like I’m awake now in a way that I wasn’t at the time.

I read your essay about how the book’s gang rape scene was inspired by something you personally experienced. How did you prepare yourself to see the assault reenacted onscreen? Was any part of that particularly triggering?

I just felt responsible for it in a whole new way. Knowing that the actors were going to have to perform that scene was very anxiety-inducing for me, because they’re all really young. I knew I would be worried about Chiara, but once we were on set, I was surprised that I was also worried about the actors playing the guys who assault her. I hadn’t thought about how it could potentially be traumatic and difficult for them. So we had a lot of [precautions] in place to ensure everyone’s comfort and protection level for the actual scene.

What was it like for you, watching the final cut of that scene?

It was a much more intense experience than I ever imagined. I thought I had a sense of jadedness about it, almost—I’ve written and talked about it before, and it didn’t make me that uncomfortable. But seeing it on the screen made me realize that there’s a part of me that still normalizes or minimizes what happened to me. A lot of victims and survivors do that; it’s the mind’s way of accepting the level of violation and violence that was inflicted on you. Watching it, I thought, Oh my god, I need to stop doing that. This was a true act of violence against me . To this day I have empathy for everyone involved in the incident, which is not something I ever thought I’d be able to say seven years ago. But at the same time, I know that this was a crime—and it was not treated like one. We still don’t treat these incidents like crimes the way we do the other crime in the book, [the school shooting].

The book came out before the #MeToo movement gained momentum in 2017. Does the film reflect that cultural shift in any way?

The movie is set in 2015, which is really important because the stakes would be different if we were telling this story post-#MeToo. I don’t think the idea that Ani is so afraid to come out with her story would have landed in our society today. There’s a greater tolerance for women who come forward and tell their stories now, whereas in 2015, people might have believed me or they might not. We hadn’t had this kind of reckoning yet.

.css-1aear8u:before{margin:0 auto 0.9375rem;width:34px;height:25px;content:'';display:block;background-repeat:no-repeat;}.loaded .css-1aear8u:before{background-image:url(/_assets/design-tokens/elle/static/images/quote.fddce92.svg);} .css-1bvxk2j{font-family:SaolDisplay,SaolDisplay-fallback,SaolDisplay-roboto,SaolDisplay-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:normal;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.125rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-1bvxk2j{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1bvxk2j b,.css-1bvxk2j strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1bvxk2j em,.css-1bvxk2j i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1bvxk2j i,.css-1bvxk2j em{font-style:italic;} Seeing it on the screen made me realize that there’s a part of me that still normalizes or minimizes what happened to me. A lot of victims and survivors do that.”

In the movie, Ani is asked if she prefers to be called a survivor or a victim. That conversation didn’t appear in the book. Why was it important to include that dialogue now?

After I wrote my essay in 2016, I saw that people online were calling me a survivor. I hadn’t really heard that term before, and it was very jarring because I was like, Wait, I was never treated like a victim at the time that I was a victim. I haven’t experienced that stage to get to the point where I would call myself a survivor. I had a stunted growth process, and I just wanted to be a victim for a little bit. I didn’t get that when I needed it. But the lexicon and Twitter made it clear that those were the words we were using now—and that the word victim was degrading. I adapted the language of the mob out of fear because I didn’t feel comfortable challenging it at the time.

For the movie, I wanted to use a bit of humor to show how I felt then. It’s like, really, what are your options? They’re not great. When Ani hears the word survivor, she recoils. Because for this character, there’s something that feels very grandiose about calling yourself a survivor. She’d rather be called a victim. I don’t want to be defined by what happened to me; I’d rather just be a whole human being. It’s hard, but I get it. We do need terms, and the language around all of this is important. Just in my personal experience, I felt a little put off by my options.

At one point in the movie, a character implies that Ani “participated” in the assault. What did you want to convey with that scene?

I think that with all kinds of trauma, the landscape and language is constantly evolving. In one minute you’re supposed to say this, but if you say that the next minute, it’s offensive. We don’t want to create more harm, but we also have to show people grace. I’ve worked really hard to realize that no one is going to be as plugged into my trauma as I am. People who want to be allies and support women might not get it exactly right, but that doesn’t mean they should be exiled.

The film breaks from the book in its ending—Ani writes about being sexually assaulted in a piece for The New York Times and tons of women reach out to her, sharing their own experiences. Was that a nod to #MeToo?

Ultimately she decides to write about what happened to her so that she has full control of her narrative. It wasn’t about the #MeToo movement; it was about what happened to me in the wake of publishing my essay. I sat on calls with the producers and director and Netflix executives, and they would be like, “Okay, well, what happened to you after you wrote your essay?” I started talking about how many women I heard from—strangers who wrote to me, and also women in my life who I knew, but I did not know something like this had happened to them. I was getting pulled aside at dinner parties and at work, just hearing these horror stories. You start to realize, “Oh, this is bigger than me; it’s not because I wore the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, or was too flirtatious.” It helps to let go of that and understand that if this is happening on such a large scale, it’s not about you at all. And that’s a really powerful thing to realize.

You start to realize, ‘Oh, this is bigger than me; it’s not because I wore the wrong thing, said the wrong thing, or was too flirtatious.’”

How do you metabolize taking on the trauma of others, in addition to working through your own?

Not well. I’ve had to work on not prioritizing other people’s feelings over my own. It didn’t feel good to constantly read such difficult messages, but I would respond to every one. I gave them as much of myself as I could. Through therapy, I’ve learned not to minimize myself in the service of others. I’ve also realized that people might not even expect me to give them so much—that’s a burden I put on myself. I was such a people pleaser. But I no longer put that added pressure on myself where I feel like I’m letting people down if I don’t respond.

What do you hope people take away from the film?

I hope a lot of men watch it. Back when I was on the book tour, it was all women at the events. One young guy came up to me, asked if it was always like that, and I said yes. He was like, “Just because the protagonist is female, that doesn’t mean men can’t enjoy this book.” I was blown away by that. I hope that now, seven years after the book came out, men will watch the film, take something away from it, and also enjoy this female character. She’s complicated and interesting and flawed in the same way as characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper. Women are invested in male-dominated stories like Mad Men and The Sopranos —and it would be really cool if men were invested in this story in that same way.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Luckiest Girl Alive is now streaming on Netflix.

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Jessica Knoll Wrote Her Own Trauma Into Luckiest Girl Alive —Twice

By Jessica Goodman

Let’s set the scene: It’s May 2015, and the must-have book peeking out of every other beach bag is the psychological thriller Luckiest Girl Alive, written by Jessica Knoll, a former editor at Self and Cosmopolitan. Riding a wave of high critical praise and “you’ve got to read this” word-of-mouth, the book is about to spend 17 consecutive weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, its film rights are promptly scooped up by Lionsgate , with Reese Witherspoon attached to coproduce, before Hello Sunshine or Witherspoon’s book club even officially exist, and, perhaps, most surprising, first-time novelist Knoll has convinced decision-makers that she should also adapt the book herself, though she’d never done that before either. It was important to her, and not just because she’d written the story. Not many people knew it, but in many ways, Luckiest Girl Alive was also her story.

Seven years later, the film adaptation, starring Mila Kunis and Chiara Aurelia, is set to premiere on Netflix on October 7. Sure, there were many changes and some personnel switch-ups—Witherspoon and Lionsgate are no longer attached, for one—but one thing stayed the same through every iteration: Knoll as screenwriter.

The story follows successful yet prickly magazine editor TifAni (“Ani”) FaNelli, played by Kunis, as she’s about to marry the perfect Waspy man who can give her everything she’s dreamed of: Wealth, status, class, and, as a bonus, a new name, one unrelated to a tragedy that befell her in high school. When a filmmaker wants to make a documentary about that traumatic event, her facade begins to crumble.

The book captivated audiences when it first debuted, but Knoll revealed her personal connection to the material in 2016 when she wrote an essay for Lena Dunham ’s now defunct publication Lenny Letter, explaining that the sexual assault described in the book, perpetuated by three popular boys in Ani’s class, was based on an experience from Knoll’s own life. This was part of Knoll’s “fierce protection” over writing the film adaptation. “Nobody’s gonna care about certain things the way you do,” she tells Vanity Fair .

The film deals not only with sexual assault, but also gun violence in schools and how trauma, left untreated, can threaten everything in your life. Despite the dark plot elements, Knoll says that filming the movie in 2021 was “one of the most joyful summers of my life.”

Ahead of Luckiest Girl Alive ’s release, Knoll shares how she took care of herself and those around her while making the movie, and what she’s reaching for next.

Vanity Fair : You have been so vocal about wanting to adapt your own work, but not all writers are successful in doing that.

The big thing is that I really, really, really wanted this. I always assumed all authors want to adapt their things. Once I started talking to other people, I learned some have no interest in doing that. The big influence was Gillian Flynn . The fact that she had come from magazines and then wrote these blockbuster books and was going to adapt Gone Girl , I really held her up as this guiding light.

It was a combination of that and this incredibly fierce protection over Ani and the story. That was because at that point, a lot of people who were coming into the project as a producer or a potential executive at a studio—even my team at Simon and Schuster in 2014—didn’t know that there were parts of my own assault in this story. I felt like if you just give me the chance to write the screenplay, I know I can figure it out. I can prove it to you.

Since the book came out, so much has changed in terms of the way our culture thinks and talks about gun violence and sexual assault, but also not that much has changed regarding legislation. How did those evolving conversations influence your adaptation?

For the first couple of years that I was going through various revisions of the script, it was always set in contemporary times. But I remember at the end of 2020 or early 2021, I emailed our group of amazing producers and I was like, what do you guys think of setting this in 2015? It simplified the story since so many of the conversations around these issues have changed so much over the years. #MeToo would have to be acknowledged—like if Ani is going to come out with her story, it's almost like the stakes are somewhat lower because the world has shown that they're ready to embrace women who tell their truth.

By Chris Murphy

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By Silvana Paternostro

Like you mentioned, parts of this book are based on experiences you've had, specifically the sexual assault. Watching those scenes on-screen is very different from reading those scenes in the book. What was the experience like of taking what you had written and then adapting it for the film knowing that it was based, in part, on your life?

The act of actually adapting it, like sitting at my computer and writing it, was no different than writing it in the book. But I did not go to set that day when they filmed those scenes. I was really concerned for the young men who were playing [the perpetrators]. I was always worried about Chiara, but I was also trying to be careful not to overwhelm her with comments like, are you sure you're okay? Because she had made a comment to the intimacy coordinator that those were almost making her anxiety worse. So I knew this was going to be difficult for everyone to film and I decided, why would I be there and add another layer of them feeling like, okay, the woman who this actually happened to is sitting watching this? They want to do their jobs and I don't need to make it more difficult. I went shopping that day instead. I took myself out to lunch. I had a nice little time.

Watching it on screen, though, it's one of those things where you normalize what has happened to you in your head: It was rape, but like, they were also drunk. It was probably a misunderstanding. It's not as bad as it was. But seeing it, you're just like, oh my god, what the fuck is wrong with you guys? Like, that's what you did to me? No, this is cut and dry. You knew what you were doing was wrong. I almost feel like it was good for me to see it in that sense, because I still have moments of self-doubt. Like, do I really deserve to feel the way I feel about this? Seeing it, I’m like, yeah, I do.

You brought up having an intimacy coordinator on set. What other kinds of folks did you bring in to support handling this difficult material?

RAINN and Sandy Hook Promise read all the versions of the script and they would give us feedback. The other thing was that our director Mike Barker would first meet the actor, talk to them about the difficult scenes they were going to do, and go over everything the person would be comfortable with and what could not be done. Then he would write them a letter, summarizing what they talked about and it was this contract: This is what we’re filming. This is what will be asked of you. This is what we will never do, and I promise we will not deviate from this on the day that we film . And then he stuck to it. That’s how you build trust with actors.

One of the things that I am so drawn to in your writing is the way that you talk about ambition— wanting to be rich and striving for success, which, we know, are traditionally not things that women are encouraged to say out loud. But as you advance in your career, I assume the goalposts keep moving. How do you deal with those changing expectations of yourself?

The goalposts keep moving in my career, but also in my own interior world and personal life. I went through a time where I felt like the only things that brought me joy were wins in my career and I knew this was a problem. I knew I needed a little bit more balance and to have a life that I also enjoyed—good friends and potentially a family one day. For me, the goalposts have almost shifted more in that area. I’ve done a lot of work figuring out what it is that makes me happy in my regular life where I'm not writing and trying to get my next book deal or adaptation deal. I also think that the goalposts shift in terms of what makes me the happiest.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Luckiest Girl Alive

By jessica knoll, luckiest girl alive study guide.

Luckiest Girl Alive is the debut novel by American novelist Jessica Knoll . It was published in 2015, at which time Knoll was working as an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. The novel sold well, and made the New York Times Bestsellers List. The novel also struck a chord with readers who had experienced rape and sexual assault; while promoting the novel, Knoll was often asked about the source of her inspiration for the novel's plot. Initially, Knoll did not reveal the autobiographical elements of the novel (like her protagonist, Knoll was a survivor of sexual violence during her high school years). In 2016, almost a year after the novel was published, Knoll published an essay in the online Lenny Letter (founded by actor Lena Dunham). In this essay, Knoll revealed her own story; she had never publicly shared this information before, and later stated that her own brother did not know about these events when she published the essay. Knoll later explained that she wanted to tell the truth to her readers and share with them that the experiences of her protagonist were modeled after true events in the author's life.

The novel, which is part mystery and part thriller, follows the protagonist Ani Fanelli as she attempts to reinvent herself following a traumatic adolescence. As a teenager, Ani experienced both a school shooting and a gang rape, traumas that continue to haunt her in her adult life. Despite her seemingly perfect life now – she is engaged to a wealthy man named Luke and works at a popular women's magazine in New York City – the events of Ani's past leave her questioning whether this is really the life she wants for herself.

The film rights to the novel were purchased in 2015. Knoll wrote the screenplay adaptation for the novel, and also worked as a producer. The film adaptation stars actress Mila Kunis and premiered on Netflix in 2022.

Luckiest Girl Alive Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Luckiest Girl Alive is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Luckiest Girl Alive

Luckiest Girl Alive study guide contains a biography of Jessica Knoll, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Watch CBS News

Author of "Luckiest Girl Alive" talks about her own gang-rape

By Andrea Park

March 29, 2016 / 3:07 PM EDT / CBS News

Jessica Knoll, author of best-selling novel "Luckiest Girl Alive," has revealed that the book's plot is based on traumatic events that have happened in her own life.

Ani, the book's protagonist, was gang-raped when she was in high school, and in the latest Lenny Letter, Lena Dunham's newsletter, Knoll wrote that she was also gang-raped as a teenager.

Knoll penned a moving essay about her experience and how it took seven years for someone -- her therapist -- to call what had happened "gang rape." The author explained that she had passed out after drinking alcohol, and faded in and out of consciousness as she was raped by several male classmates. She also wrote that afterward, she was bullied by classmates and even teachers over the incident.

Knoll also said that she had trouble coming to terms with the rape because she thought reinventing herself and finding professional success would solve her problems.

"I was sure that with the right wardrobe, a glamorous job, and a ring on my finger before the age of 28, I could transcend my reputation," she said. "That if everyone from my past could see me so put together, so accomplished in New York City, so settled down, my voice would finally be worth hearing."

But Knoll noted, the "appearance of living well is not the same thing as actually living well," and said she realized she needed to heal by talking about her rape and coming forward. The author said it's still difficult to talk about and that when a fan approached her to ask how she knew the firsthand experience of assault so well, she started to tear up.

"'Something similar to what happened to Ani happened to me,' I responded for the first time ever, and she grabbed my wrist and held it tight, blinking tears, while I smiled brightly, insisting in a foreign falsetto, 'I'm fine! It's fine!'"

Dunham wrote in a foreword that while it was difficult to read Knoll's essay, she was glad that the author's firsthand account would make way for more people to tell their stories.

"Luckiest Girl Alive" is also set for a film adaptation, produced by Reese Witherspoon.

Andrea is an entertainment producer at CBSNews.com

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I Wanted Revenge. What I Got Was Better.

By Jessica Knoll

The barbed voice of Ani FaNelli came to me in 2013. Though fictional, the protagonist of what would become my best-selling debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive , was infused with elements and experiences from my real life, experiences that I was still too raw and frightened to claim as my own. In retrospect, I can see why that year was a personal flashpoint for me. We were post- Steubenville , the world outraged by the live Twitter documentation of a multiple-assailant assault of a girl who had become incapacitated by alcohol. Gone Girl , featuring the proverbial unlikeable female narrator, was a bonafide phenomenon. The alchemy of these two events produced Ani—someone who would allow me to get on the page the gang rape that had haunted me for years, to capture and release the fury that bubbled with comic absurdity beneath the basic bitch current of my everyday life.

At the time, I was a twenty-eight-year-old writer for Cosmopolitan , pitching raunchy cover lines by day and planning my perfect Pinterest-board wedding by night. I looked the farthest thing from someone who had suffered a humiliating trauma as a teenager, who had been ground down to nothing. My voice had expired inside of me, a carton of milk clotting in the back of the refrigerator. Speaking up for myself, in big ways and small—that was for girls whose pubic hair shape hadn’t been discussed by half the student body, who maintained a modicum of self. I became a chameleon, rearranging the little nanocrystals in my skin depending on where I was and who I was with—anything to make people like me. This abandonment of self is a virulent breeding ground for rage and resentment, and I became a split, duplicitous person, much like the character I wrote for the page and later for the Netflix movie adaptation. I smiled and said all the right things, while in my head a hateful and furious narration played on a loop.

The only way I felt comfortable speaking up was under the cover of fiction, and I poured my self-loathing and agony into the invented character of Ani. I was desperate for a voice but there were still so many people I needed to protect, myself included, and fiction allowed me to have it both ways. A twist of the knob, just enough to vent a little steam, while still keeping the lid on most everything. I was scared of hurting my family, and I was even more scared that people would read the chapter where fifteen-year-old Ani attends a high school party and comes to naked from the waist down, disoriented and bleeding, and use the word that everyone had used back then.

By Hannah Jackson

By Margaux Anbouba

In private moments, I hoped that people would use another word, the word I tried to use, once in a physical exam with a doctor, another time with one of the boys whose body I could recall moving above my mine while I moaned in pain. Is what happened to me rape? I asked the doctor, who told me she wasn’t qualified to answer that question before bolting from the room. Rapist , I exploded in a burst of dizzying liberation a few nights later at this boy. The next day, the boy called me, choking back tears at the idea that I could think of him like that. I lost my nerve. Just like I have fifteen-year-old Ani do in the movie, I apologized for making him feel bad.

I yearned, quietly, for the book to be a smash hit. I wanted people to talk about it, and talk about me , in a way that would show everyone from high school that I was A Someone. There were classist factors at play in the assault—I attended a private high school with a storied history in a wealthy area outside of Philadelphia known as the “Main Line.” Though I was far from struggling, I lived nearly an hour away, and did not share the zip code or pedigree of my classmates, some of whom were descended from oil barons and business magnates. I started at the school as a freshman, surrounded by students who were Ivy League bound and had known one another since kindergarten, whose parents were connected through their membership at the Cricket Club. I wore Victoria’s Secret tank tops with the built-in bras when I should have worn J. Crew cable knits, sparkly eyeshadow when all the other girls went barefaced. I was not just a slut, but trash too.

I was never going to be one of them, so I spent my twenties fashioning myself into someone better. At that point in my life, I blindly subscribed to the adage that living well was the best revenge. I moved to New York because I wanted to be a writer, and there, assimilation was possible for me. If you wanted to make it in New York in the publishing industry, it didn’t matter so much where you came from—were you good, were you willing to pay your dues, were you cheap labor? I was fortunate enough to be all three, and I began building a career that I was also fortunate enough to love. Still, I thought constantly about how my life looked to the people back at home. Professional success by a certain age might have been enough if I hadn’t acted like an animal at that crazy party that the guys still remembered fondly. Someone like me needed to be engaged before thirty, to a guy who came from money and went to all the right schools. This part was non-negotiable—the classmates who had scrawled “trash slut” on my locker had to see that one of their own considered me wife material. Living in a New York City doorman apartment, wearing clothes with subtle, correct labels, cutting out carbs and sugar in an effort to asexualize my licentious figure—check, check, and check.

But then the thing I thought I wanted most happened. The book was a hit, and during the year that followed, women came up to me at signings and asked me how I was able to depict a rape victim so vividly. Had I done research, or….they always trailed off here, in case I wanted to say that no, I hadn’t needed to do any research. But for that first year, my answers were evasive.

In 2016, a year after the book was published, I did what Christine Blasey Ford would later talk about doing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the world—I calculated the risk-benefit ratio of coming forward, and amazingly, I found it in my favor. I wrote an essay revealing Ani’s assault as my own. I was inundated with messages from old classmates, apologizing for any role that they may have played in the ostracizing and bullying that came after, and with messages from total strangers, sharing their own harrowing stories with me. Women I knew—friends, colleagues, family—opened up in a way that made me realize the perniciousness of the societal messaging around sexual violence. It’s terrible but it’s complicated, and can’t you just deal with it on your own? (So we don’t have to.)

This was “revenge”—a multi-media platform on which to flaunt my success and issue a retraction. The payback, the deliciousness, of those guys, experiencing the same shame and debilitating exposure that I had back then, that feeling that everyone is talking about the most intimate parts of you, looking at you askance. I ran into one of my wealthy former classmates at a party in New York, wearing an Armani pantsuit and drinking vodka neat and saying with a sly smile, Heard (redacted) is sweating bullets . The headmaster of my high school sent out a schoolwide email acknowledging my essay and claiming no knowledge of the assault I alleged—to which another former student wrote back, copying my literary agent so that it would get back to me. He accused the administration of knowing about my rape and burying their heads in the sand. This former student was a few years older than me, someone I had never met, but he had heard about the party even though he had graduated and was away at college. He wasn’t buying that the school hadn’t caught wind of it.

It was a full-fledged reckoning, but I did not revel in it the way I thought I might. I ended my essay by admitting, after many years of insisting that I was fine, that I was not fine at all, and that this, finally, was the truth, a start . I felt painfully sincere and hopeful, but I had no idea how much work it would take to finally begin the long, overdue process of healing, how ugly things would get.

By this point, I had quit magazines, gotten a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster and moved from New York to Los Angeles, where I was working on the screen adaptation of Luckiest Girl Alive . Though I had never written a screenplay before, the idea of someone else telling my story made me rabid. I needed to do it, I begged to do it, and in the end, the fact that I had never written a screenplay before became my saving grace. The studio (understandably) wasn’t going to give a first-time screenwriter a Diablo-Cody-sized paycheck, but why not take a chance? If I screwed it up they’d hire a new writer, which is so commonplace as to not even be insulting in Hollywood, and they wouldn’t be out much money. If I knocked it out of the park, they got gold for pennies.

All the while I was working on the script, I was angry. Angry that Trump had been elected president after bragging about grabbing women by their pussies. In 2017, I was angry again when the wall of silence came down around Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men. In 2018, I was incensed when Christine Blasey Ford told the truth, and still Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The anger showed up in the script and on Twitter, where my outrage over everything was quite literally liked, a corrosive reward system that produced insufferable wallowing and unchecked rage in real life.

I am ashamed to admit that my husband took the brunt of my fury during these years, for being a man, for being white, for being a popular athlete in high school, for just not getting it exactly how I demanded he get it. My therapist tried to get me to shift the way I saw things. Yes, I had a right to be angry—so did a lot of other people who experienced disparity and inequality in this country—but that did not give me carte blanche to make others feel small, especially those who had not been the ones to hurt me.

This sanctimony showed up in my writing as well. I turned in a new draft of my third book and my editor returned the copy with a note in the margins about my latest main character— she’s so victimized; enough! I even went for my therapist’s throat when she posted something online about eating “whole foods” to be healthy. From my soap box, I haughtily informed her that was the insidious language of diet culture. There was no room for nuance, grace, or rational discussion. I was a one-woman mob, pumping a pitchfork in the air, about perceived injustices of every variety. 

Enter Mila Kunis .

The book-to-screen development process had been nothing short of psychological warfare—at first, fast and exciting, then slow, then stagnant, then rejuvenated by various studio changes and executive shuffling and director developments, rewrites and notes meetings and more rewrites. Rinse and repeat, for six years. We moved the project from Lionsgate to Netflix. I did another round of rewrites for our new executive team and in December 2020, we sent the script to Mila Kunis, who I was certain would pass. The material was too unwieldy, too risky, for someone with her star power.

Instead, Mila thanked us so much for thinking of her. She was looking for a dramatic role to take her back to her Black Swan days, and she thought the story was weird and tense and compelling, but there was one caveat. The ending wasn't there. That old ending, which already deviated from the ending of the book, which I had already written and rewritten dozens of times already, involved Ani getting a big fat book deal for coming forward with her story. There’s no arc for the character , Mila said in our first Zoom meeting. It’s all about using money and status as a crutch to feel superior to others, which is exactly who she is when we meet her at the start. Either let’s hang a lantern on that or let’s show at least an inkling of change . Mila was in, but only if I could resolve that. Preferably overnight , one of my producers added, joking but not.

As a writer, I was panicked. But as a human, I was mortified . Mila could have no idea that she had called me out for being the same angry and self-loathing person I had been at the start of all this, but that is exactly what she’d done.

I spent the night chastened, mulling and soul searching, re-reading the messages from women I’d never met, telling me their stories. I read my responses to them. They were brimming with hope. That together we’d taken this first, important step of admitting that we were not fine. That from there, we could start to understand all the ways that we weren’t, that we could live in a way that would restore agency again. How had I lost touch with this person?

The next morning, I pitched a new version of the ending to Mila. She loved it.

By the time we got to set in spring of 2021, I’d deleted Twitter. I stopped expecting everyone to be plugged into my trauma by my exacting standards. I gave people grace, realizing I would hope for the same if I didn’t get it exactly right either. I caught myself in what my therapist referred to as colicky episodes, and I would apologize to my husband and walk away. Then later, when I calmed down, I would apologize again and thank him for bearing with me, for  understanding that big feelings are often tied to things that happened young, that it was not his fault that my needs were frustrated then, that it was also not anyone’s job to meet them all now. And then I tried to figure out how to better do that for myself, which is work that is hard and constant and ongoing. I don’t know , goes one of Ani’s lines toward the end of our movie, what is me, and what parts I invented to make other people like me.

What kind of person wants revenge? One freezing, windy winter evening in NYC, nearing the last month of post, I left the edit room late and turned on the TV in my hotel room. The First Wives Club was on. I’d seen this movie dozens of times over the years, but I’d never watched it with an eye to plotting before. Though we’d troubleshooted our ending ahead of filming, eight months after wrapping, there were still kinks that needed smoothing. No one could agree on a voiceover line that Mila was going to record for her character as she prepares for a Today show interview, which she is invited to do after writing an essay coming forward as a survivor, mirroring my real-life experience back in 2016. Our director, Mike Barker, kept saying that we had to show that Ani had gone from thinking about the “I,” to thinking about the “we.” I balked at the idea. I didn’t see anything wrong with Ani only thinking of herself and what she wanted in that moment—vindication.

I was puzzling over what to do when the movie reached the moment where Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton are on the precipice of getting what they set out to get—vengeance against the men who had wronged them. And yet, they’re left feeling so empty. I sat up in bed and turned up the volume. It had been five years since I’d written my essay, but I remembered feeling this way too. In the end, instead of using the dirt they dug up against their exes to destroy them, they use it to bribe them into funding a center for abused women, named in honor of their friend Cynthia, whose suicide at the top of the film, after her husband callously leaves her for a younger woman, sets the whole story in motion. The film ends on the non-profit’s opening night gala, our star trio skipping off down the street, singing the song they sang when they were young and full of hope about their futures. That scene always makes me cry, but this time I was crying for another reason: that it had taken me so long to realize that the kind of person who wants revenge is the kind of person who has no other recourse. I won’t judge myself or anyone else for wanting it when so many of us are denied justice and support from our communities. I just want you to know that you can have more.

I scribbled down a couple of lines and called our director. Read it again , he said, and I could picture him listening a second time with his eyes closed, nodding. The next morning, Mila recorded this: “When I sat down to write this essay, my goal was to avenge my reputation, maybe stick it to the people who had hurt me. But it’s become so much more than that. So much more than me. It’s about the importance of all of us speaking up, even when people want to silence us, so that we can become the type of women our younger selves would be proud of.”

I had to write the woman my younger self would be proud of before I could fully inhabit her; had to explore the depths of my anger, like one of those submersible cameras that scours the darkest parts of the ocean, revealing insights that can help us smartly respond to traumatic events like earthquakes and climate change. That's what I have now—insight into my anger that has allowed me to whittle it and wield it more effectively, to know when to set it down so that I don’t dull the edge. Smart anger, I like to think of it, now that I’ve finally surfaced.

In our new ending, Ani stands up for herself to someone she would normally defer to outwardly, raging privately in a way that would have come out sooner or later, at the wrong time, to a person who doesn’t deserve it. The same way I used to target my husband for something someone else did to me. Ani’s delivery—That Fifth Avenue Fuck You—may be rusty, but it’s trending toward of version of herself that integrates the person she is publicly with the person she is at her core, who, with curiosity and introspection, won’t always be such an enigma to her. She’s on her way to becoming whole.

The self is the first thing these guys take from you, but I don’t need revenge anymore because there is nothing left to avenge. I reclaimed what is mine. That is better, and so am I.

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