Ani FaNelli has the
perfect life. She has the body that every man and woman want, though not for
the same reason. She is on the verge of
obtaining a job that will help her realize her lifelong ambition. She has a
handsome, blue blood fiancé. Most of
all, her attitude is that of the woman absolutely does not give a rat’s ass
what you think about her.
She’s spent her entire
life making sure that’s what everybody thinks.
Unlike most of the
books in this series, Luckiest Girl Alive is not a hidden treasure or a
recent sensation you might have missed. When it hit bookstores in 2015, it became
an instant bestseller and one of the most critically received novels of the
2010s. It was a mirror of the victim culture that was already in full-fling, a
predecessor of the #MeToo era that would sweep the country just two years later
and an absolutely devastating and brutal read about what it means – and still
does – to be a woman. The novel was eventually developed into a movie for Netflix
with Mila Kunis playing Ani as an adult and the brilliant Chiara Aurelia playing her as a child. The film received
a nomination for Best Drama by the People’s Choice Award.
As is the case with so
much in our literary culture I came to the book very late; I’m not even sure I
knew of its’ existence until two years ago when I ran across it a Barnes and
Noble and kept leafing through it on several occasions. I finally got around to
reading the entire things the last few weeks.
I am not sure what I can contribute to the discourse that is not public
knowledge – it is one of the most breathtaking literary debuts I’ve ever read
and there is absolutely no part of it that won’t haunt me. I only know that when I finished it, I set aside
the book that I was planning to do for this month and was compelled to write
about Luckiest Girl anyway. I suppose a spoiler warning for an eight
years old novel and movie is redundant at this point, but I will still tread lightly.
On the cover of the
book is a blurb from Megan Abbott, who I have raved about before and who knows
more than a few tricks about writing about teenage girls and young women. It
says the novel has the cunning and verve of Gillian Flynn, but with an intensity
all its own. Abbott is spot-on, but I am
not reminded of Amy Dunne or Camille Preaker, the complicated women at the
center of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects. The closest parallel of
Ani FaNelli, in my opinion, is Libby Day, the female protagonist at the center
of Dark Places.
That novel was made
into a fairly decent but basically unfavorably received movie with Charlize
Theron in the role of Libby, so there’s little chance that many of you know
this one. At the age of three, Libby’s mother and two older sisters were the
victims of a murder in which here elder brother was arrested and is serving a
life sentence. Libby has spent her entire childhood and life to this point
using her victimhood status as a way to survive, usually taking money off of
strangers who feel sorry for her. Now,
at an age very close to the one Ani is Luckiest Girl, the offers are
running dry. She ends up taking an offer from a club of true crime buffs who believe
her brother is innocent, something Libby does not believe or perhaps even care
about. Only out of sheer desperation does she begin to look in the background
of the crime that was the defining moment of her life – and finally realize the
horrible truth behind it.
Ani FaNelli is also a
survivor of a gruesome trauma, one that she has spent her entire adult life
trying to pretend has not happened to her.
We see this in a very clear sense even before we begin hear the story.
Ani spends the opening chapter making it very clear that her life is a model of
perfection, barely eating so she does not fit into her wedding dress (we
honestly wonder if there was ever a time in her adult life she hasn’t been
hungry), having a sex life that involved pain in every way, marrying the kind
of man whose pedigree and appearance clearly make him seem like the perfect
man.
As the novel alternates
between her years at the Bradley High School in Pennsylvania and her adult
life, we very quickly see that Ani has been damaged her entire life. Her father
never offers anything resembling love or a human emotion; he is not present in
the current timeline, and never really there in the past. Her mother is clearly a social climber whose
life is a disappointment to her and is determined that TifAni make out better
than she does – not because she believes in her at all, but because she wants
to live vicariously through her.
Ani more or less gets
put into a private school against her wishes because her mother wants to get an
Ivy League education – so Ani can get a rich husband. Ani is essentially doomed
to failure before she even arrives but at fourteen, she’s not savvy enough to
see it. The first person she meets a massively overweight boy named Arthur, who
helps guide her through the problems in the school. Ani is naïve to think
because they are both bookish he is a friend.
Ani quickly finds
herself crushing on a popular junior who happens to be friends with Dean Barton,
a family so rich they have parts of the building named for her. Because Ani desperately wants to be close to
this boy she finds herself trying to hang out with the popular kids, who let
her in out of their own desire to socially climb. She gets invited to a party,
gets drunk for the first time, and when she is passed out, she is essentially
gang-raped. This is the beginning of her trauma, not even to the close to the
end.
She gets grounded by her
mother coming home the next day to the party for two weeks. Then Dean tries to
assault her again. She confides in the only teacher she trusts, but because the
novel takes place in 2001, because she is fourteen and because she so desperately
wants to bury it, she backs out and her teacher gets fired. She ends up deteriorating to the point where
she ends up hanging out with Arthur again and is so badly damaged that she can’t
tell how much of a true monster he until a certain point when he nearly kills
her. Now I will pause to go back to the present.
Ani has spent her
entire life trying to pretend what happened to her as a child did not destroy her
or define her. As a result, she is now engaged to Luke. It’s not clear if she
ever felt anything for him – affection or even friendship – but it’s clear by
the time the novel opens that she can barely be in the same room with him.
Luke’s family are the
kind of rich people the progressives believe all rich people are they are openly
racist and homophobic and are annoyed when its pointed out. They were clearly engaged during the 2012
election and are completely anti-abortion. Ani tries to why she thinks this
might have been a problem for her, and Luke makes it clear that Obama taxing
him is something he cares about more. The novel takes place in 2015; it’s clear
from this book that Luke’s entire family would have supported Trump from the
get-go and would have been the kind of people who said with each outrageous
thing he said from the moment he announced his campaign how monstrous he was
while chortling at their Nantucket beach homes at every single remark he’d make.
(I think it is that particular aspect of
Luckiest Girl that I think makes even more relevant than it was seven
years ago.)
This is the basic level
of Luke and his family, and I think that’s why Ani was drawn to him initially: he
accepted her despite her traumas. The problem is, as far as he’s concerned, if
he didn’t live through it or if it didn’t happen to him, it doesn’t matter. He
even says at much at one point to her the only time she tells her, and he doesn’t
like it being brought up. Ani is being asked to participate in a documentary
about what happened in Bradley and he doesn’t like it at all, because in his
mind, it reflects badly on him.
Ani doesn’t want to
deal with it, either; the only reason she wants to tell the story is to essentially
prove that she is fine and that the bastards didn’t beat her. She doesn’t know that’s the problem.
I’m not spoiling
anything by saying that Bradley was the target of a school shooting, that many
of her students died, and that someone she was close to was the prime mover.
What I do think is that Ani might very well have been better off if she’d died right
then. Her parents offer no warmth of compassion in the aftermath. Then the
police come and they are determined to blame her for what happened. Her parents can barely be persuaded to call an
attorney at a certain point, want her to wear makeup in the interrogation room,
and her mother is actually angrier about her daughter’s ‘poor decisions’ in the
aftermath of the rape and then shames her. She insists that they go to one of her rapist’s
funerals and actually seems angry that no one wants to sit next to them. Is it
any wonder that Ani basically abandoned her family after college and hasn’t
been back to her home since graduation?
The longer you read the
novel, it is clear that Ani has known almost no love in her entire life. There
are only two people she is clearly friends with in the book. The first is Mr.
Larson, the teacher who was her only ally at Bradley and who makes an effort to
reconnect with her in the present. Ani is so twisted and unhappy she thinks the
only way that she can make her life right is to run off with him. The fact that
he is married and has a family is irrelevant; Ani can only see her value in
being desirable.
Her only other friend
is Nell. Nell worked in finance until a co-worker openly abused her at work,
and she sued for a huge amount of money.
Ani is jealous of her because “she’ll never need to get married to feel good
about herself.” Nell is the only person who tells Ani the unfiltered the truth
about how miserable she is, how little she is eating, what a complete douchebag
her fiancée is. Nell has been the
guiding force for Ani to try and get what she wants and when Ani tells her
this, she calls her on it: “I thought this was what you wanted.” Even then, Ani
refuses to acknowledge anything is wrong.
Luckiest Girl Alive ends with Ani’s life
blowing up completely yet again, and she is fully aware as to just how
miserable much of her life maybe going forward. But Ani knows that she’s come
out ahead in the final pages because at the end of the book, after everything explodes,
she gorges herself on a meal for the first time in the entire book, eating even
as she dozes off. For the first time,
perhaps in her entire life, she knows who she is and what she wants to be. The
last line in the novel tells the reader she has finally accepted who she is and
that she can face the world on her own terms, not as the world thinks those
terms should be.
Jessica Knoll dedicates
this book “To All the TifAni FaNellis in the world. I know.” There has
been intense speculation ever since Luckiest Girl became a sensation as
to just how much of what happened in TifAni happened to her growing up. She has
made some revelations that answer those questions, but fundamentally it doesn’t
matter. The sad fact of the world is there will always be Ani FaNelli’s in this
world, no matter how hard we try to make it a better place. Our society creates them every day in some
form. We can only hope that some of them can find the courage to be like the
one in this novel and come through the other side.
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