Luckiest Girl Alive: A Perfect Life That’s a Perfect Lie
I inspected the knife in my hand.
This is the opening line of Luckiest Girl Alive, the debut novel by Jessica Knoll. The actual explanation is prosaic – our narrator TifAni FaNelli is checking out blades for her wedding registry, but it’s a strong hint of the underlying edge and violence of the novel. TifAni is the girl who seems to have it all; beauty, brains, a glamorous job writing for a women’s magazine, a gorgeous apartment, and best of all she’s about to marry a blue blooded Prince Charming. As if all this reason wasn’t reason enough to hate her, she is also an unapologetic Mean Girl who punishes a rude waitress by lying about the woman having spinach in her teeth.
But we soon become aware that all isn’t what it seems. For one thing TifAni at points shows signs of being a helluva lot more complicated and more compassionate than she usually lets on. She takes her writing seriously, and has no patience with casual bigotry by others. In one telling scene, we learn that she judges potential new interns based on how well they treat a burn victim who works at a coffee kiosk -someone that TifAni herself has befriended. TifAni is actually from a much less wealthy background than her current surroundings would suggest, or that her crass, social climbing mother would like to admit to.
Her current position (in more ways than one) is owed to her matriculation as a teenager at the posh Bradley School, where a combination of being from a less privileged background, having attended Catholic schools in the past, and having developed large breasts at an early age, mark her in dangerous ways. She endures a series of shocking humiliations and traumas that culminate in a truly horrific tragedy that she spends the next fourteen years trying to run away from.
Knoll excels not only in the twisting, weaving way the plot unfolds, with twist upon twist, each one another turn of the screw but in how utterly convincing and devastating TifAni’s psychological journey is, whether it be through a teenager trying to survive the casual cruelties of a cutthroat private school or in her adult reinvention of herself as a Park Avenue Princess about to get everything she’s ever wanted…only to find herself asking if any of this is what she wants at all.
Luckiest Girl Alive has been compared to Gone Girl but I find that an obnoxious comparison in many ways since it supposes that any women’s fiction dealing with troubling themes must be in the same vein and because frankly, I never liked Gone Girl that much in the first place. (I consider Gillian Flynn’s earlier novels Sharp Objects and Dark Places superior works.) Instead, I prefer to judge Jessica Knoll’s debut novel for what it is; an intense, enthralling, troubling book that I devoured in a single read long into the night.
Luckiest Girl Alive
Jessica Knoll
Top photo: Bigstock
