The book cover for Luckiest Girl Alive, Jessica Knoll’s bestselling 2015 debut novel about a woman’s seemingly perfect life corroded by past trauma, features large, blaring font over a cheap-looking black rose – a symbol of rebirth rendered tacky, a bit emo. It’s of the time for a mid-2010s literary hit, but also seems to anticipate the 2022 Netflix adaptation, which wrings the novel of its caustic wit and serrated observations of New York careerists into a hollow, unearned empowerment anthem.
The film version, directed by Mike Barker from a screenplay by Knoll, suffers from a similar problem to this summer’s Where the Crawdads Sing, another adaptation of a literary smash about a jagged female protagonist tapped by Reese Witherspoon. (Witherspoon, a producer on Crawdads, originally bought the rights to Knoll’s novel but dropped out of the project.) Both films inherit and reify the flaws of its source material. Many of the movies’ problems are book problems, made worse, in the case of Luckiest Girl Alive, by decisions to sand down the novel’s more uncomfortable psychology and graft the ending on to the #MeToo movement.
