Luckiest Girl Alive, the 2015 debut novel of Cosmopolitan writer/editor Jessica Knoll, is a psychological thriller that investigates the long-term impact of emotional trauma. The book, which addresses women’s sexual rights, the pressures of adolescent bullying, and the dark psychology of school shootings, became an immediate New York Times best seller and was optioned as a film project for Netflix with Knoll serving as screenwriter. This study guide uses the 2015 Simon & Schuster paperback edition.

Twenty-eight-year-old Ani Fanelli, the narrator, appears to her friends and coworkers to be the luckiest girl alive. A prominent magazine writer living in New York, she is happy, successful, and engaged to marry into a blueblood family. However, she wrestles with twin traumas from her time in a swanky Philadelphia boarding school: a gangrape at a party followed within weeks by a school shooting that left five students dead, including two of her rapists. During the rampage, Ani killed one of the shooters. The invitation to participate in a film documentary on the anniversary of the shootings compels Ani to confront her demons and the implications of the elaborate public persona she has since created.

Plot Summary

The 17 chapters that make up Luckiest Girl Alive alternate between two narratives. The first is the story of Ani’s approaching nuptials and her growing disillusionment with her fiancé even as she agrees to participate in a documentary film project about the school shooting she experienced while a student at Bradley Prep, a private school on Philadelphia’s toney Main Line. The other is the harrowing story of her first six months at Bradley, which included a sexual assault and the mass shooting. Because Ani, known now by her byline name of TifAni FaNelli, has carefully kept most of her experiences at Bradley secret, the novel reveals only gradually and in fragments the dimension her traumas.

It is fall 2001. When 14-year-old Ani Fanelli, expelled from a small Catholic girls’ school for smoking pot, first arrives at Bradley, she is aware of her family’s modest means and struggles to fit it with the wealthy kids. She longs to be accepted by the cool kids, who include the hotties and the jocks, most notably a hunky soccer player named Dean Palmer. When she is invited to a party within weeks of arriving, Ani is overjoyed. Once there, however, she drinks too much, and, in and out of consciousness, she is sexually assaulted by three soccer players, including Dean. Determined to be part of the in-crowd, she tells no one of the gangrape, save a young sympathetic Honors English teacher, Mr. Larson. Despite Ani’s resolute silence, rumors circulate the school. Certain that she represents a toxic threat to their insular world, the cool kids summarily banish Ani. The only kid who will talk to her is one of the school’s biggest misfits, a brilliant nerdy kid named Arthur.

Weeks later at another party, Dean, the ringleader of the assault, confronts Ani and attempts to have sex with her. She resists, and he slaps her hard. In the aftermath of the attack, Arthur consoles Ani and, in the process, shares with her his own discontent with the cool kids clique and how they tormented a friend of his, Ben, with insinuations that he was gay and even pinned him on the ground and defecated on him. Their abuse drove him to attempt suicide. Arthur also shows her a hunting rifle his father left him before he abandoned the family years earlier. Within a week, Ani is stunned when Arthur and Ben storm the school, setting off homemade explosives, and roam the school halls hunting down as many of the cool kids as they can locate. At a pivotal moment, Ani and Arthur meet a wounded Dean on the floor. Arthur offers Ani his hunting rifle and encourages her to finish off her attacker before he himself shoots the helpless Dean between the legs. Ani pulls a steak knife she found in the cafeteria and stabs Arthur, killing him. In the end, seven students are dead, including the two shooters. Among the victims are two of the jocks who attacked Ani. In the aftermath, on the testimony of Dean, who survives the shooting and now wants to ensure the story of the gangrape never comes out, accuses Ani of being part of the planning. He tells police she took the gun from Arthur and shot him. She only narrowly avoids prosecution.

In the narrative present, Ani, now in her late twenties and a successful columnist at a prominent national magazine for women, tries to get excited over plans for her massive and expensive wedding. She is engaged to Luke Harrison, a successful financial adviser and the scion of a wealthy Main Line family. She has also agreed to participate in a documentary film project to mark the anniversary of the school shooting. The project stirs the memories and anxieties that Ani believed she had all but exorcized. When she confides in Luke, he does not entirely believe her story and discourages her from participating in the documentary. Let it go, he counsels. Ani turns then to Mr. Larson, now married and one of her husband’s clients, who helps her handle the resurfacing memories. In turn, the two try to spark passion for each other. Ani becomes increasingly indifferent to Luke and dreads the idea of marriage to someone she cannot confide in and does not love. In the course of her two-day participation in the documentary, Ani agrees to an awkward reunion with the wheelchair-bound Dean. When Dean falsely believes he is out of range of the film crew’s microphones, he admits to Ani that he raped her and that, in an effort to keep her quiet about the assault, he invented the story about Arthur handing her the gun.

Armed now with that confession, Ani feels validated; her trauma at last can now be addressed. Confident in her reclaimed identity, she ends the engagement to Luke in a dramatic flight from the wedding rehearsal, takes a new position at a smaller magazine, and begins her new life as TifAni FaNelli.