In 2017, the “Luckiest Girl Alive” bestselling author and, now, screenwriter Jessica Knoll wrote about what happened to her at age 15, and how it informed the writing of the book that became the Netflix adaptation, released Friday.
The opening of Knoll’s essay: “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, which is a work of fiction. What I’ve kept to myself, up until today, is that its inspiration is not.”
For the screen version of “Luckiest Girl Alive,” Knoll made changes and added an upbeat epilogue. The essentials, however, along with the narrative particulars and the trauma underneath it all, remain much the same, which is how presold fans of the book prefer it.
