Luckiest Girl Alive follows Ani (a terrific Mila Kunis), a writer in New York City who seemingly has a perfect life. She has a job at a top magazine where her editor, Lolo (Jennifer Beals), thinks she’s a rising star whose writing is “peerless” to the rest. Ani’s also engaged to a bachelor, Luke (Finn Wittrock), who comes from a wealthy family and has a top finance job in London waiting for him, to the glee of her mother (played by Connie Britton). She is so image-conscious that she won’t eat a slice of pizza in front of her fiancé unless he leaves the table. And then she blames the server for spilling a drink on them, which leads to the food being tossed.
The Netflix film is based on the book of the same name. However, while it’s mostly fiction, the story of Ani, Mila Kunis’s character, is inspired by events that happened in the author’s life.
The author of Luckiest Girl Alive is Jessica Knoll, and in 2016, she revealed that the description of Ani being raped is based on a rape she survived at the age of 15. The truth of her ordeal was not revealed until 2016, and before then, she denied any similarities to Ani. The traumatic events that shaped Jessica Knoll’s life and, ultimately, inspired her to write the book were discussed in The Guardian:
Knoll was slipping in and out of consciousness at a party, when she was raped by 3 boys at 15-years-old. She later recalled “waking up later in a bathroom, seeing a toilet bowl of blood-tinged water, and not understanding where it came from”. A doctor gave her the morning after pill but refused to call the ordeal a rape. Her classmates found out, and referred to her as “slut”. Such was the backlash against her, Knoll wrote in the essay “I apologized to my rapist for calling him a rapist. What a thing to live with”.
Knoll’s therapist when she was 22, asserted she was raped, saying it must be referred to as such. With therapy to help her come to terms with the event, Knoll concluded that she was “very, very angry”, adding “I was so conditioned to not talk about it that it didn’t even occur to me to be forthcoming. I want to make people feel like they can talk about it, like they don’t have to be ashamed of it”
Jessica Kroll has had a busy writing life, but let’s break down the main highlights:
- In 2013, she resigned as editor of Cosmopolitan.
- Soon after, she joined Self at Conde Nast. In the background, she was working on Luckiest Girl Alive.
- Her book was subject to a bidding war, but Reese Witherspoon ultimately won the rights to create a film.
- Other work by Jessica Knoll includes The Favorite Sister. She also has four screenplays and a horror film lined up (bought by Amazon). We’ll be seeing more of Jessica Knoll’s work in the future.
From a personal perspective, Jessica has kept her personal life quite secretive, with little detail on her husband. But she is from Philadelphia and now lives in LA with her husband and dog.
Read More: Luckiest Girl Alive Ending Explained
