Author Of 'Luckiest Girl Alive,' About A Woman Who Was Raped, Reveals It 'Happened To Me'

Writing was supposed to exorcise the trauma, so she wrote what she remembered: The new school. The party. The way her consciousness flickered out, and then on, the dizzying pain of being raped by a succession of three classmates bringing everything into horrible, sharp focus. She remembered seeing a head between her legs. She remembered finding blood in the toilet. She remembered waking up to see a boy's bare torso beside her - when she asked what had happened, the boy laughed.

Jessica Knoll gave the girl in her story a different name, a slightly different life history, and a deluge of hairpin plot twists, then sent it to a publisher. Not long after, it was on bookshelves - then flying off of them. All the while, the only hints that the novel contained something more than fiction were two words on the dedication page:

"I know."
 In the year after her bestselling novel "Luckiest Girl Alive" was published, Knoll has gotten countless questions about the inspiration for the high school sexual assault that haunts its main character.

She would reply with the same artful elusiveness she once used to cope with her own gang-rape, "running and... ducking and... dodging," as she put it, because she was afraid of what would happen if she told the truth.

But, as of Tuesday, Knoll is ready to stop dodging.

"There's no reason," she wrote in a powerful essay for the website Lenny, "I shouldn't say what I know."

In the essay, Knoll explained how many of the most chilling and evocative elements of the main character's experience are taken from her own life. Like the character, TifAni (Ani) FaNelli, Knoll was a young girl at a new, ritzy high school when she says she was raped.

She too attended a party with too much alcohol and too many boys and no one willing to intervene. She endured the same horrible series of assaults as Ani, perpetrated while she was mostly unconscious. Afterward, she went to a clinic for an emergency contraceptive, and when she asked her nurse if what had happened to her was rape, she heard the same thing that Ani did: "I am not qualified to answer that question."

Like Ani, Knoll spent the rest of high school enduring sniggers from classmates, who called her a slut, and skepticism from others who, like the nurse, refused to identify the incident as rape. She never pursued charges against her attackers, and aside from one drunken confrontation, she never accused any of them of a crime. The next day, she called the boy to apologize, afraid that she had made her situation worse.

"I apologized to my rapist for calling him a rapist," she wrote. "What a thing to live with."

"From then on," Knoll continued, "I submitted to my assigned narrative. What was the point in raising my voice when all it got me was my own lonely echo? Like Ani, the only way I knew to survive was to laugh loudly at my rapists' jokes, speak softly to the mean girls, and focus on chiseling my tunnel out of there."

In an interview with Glamour, Knoll said that she didn't really understand what had happened to her until she went to college and sought therapy. There, she learned about the concept of "consent" and came to the realization that her instincts were right - she had been raped.

Knoll matured and changed, and so did the world around her. She watched with admiration as other well-known women came forward with their stories of rape and as sexual assault became a buzzword on college campuses and inside the Obama White House.

But still, Knoll did not speak publicly about her experience. Not even after "Luckiest Girl Alive" was published last year, earning her a spot on the bestseller lists, acclaim from Entertainment Weekly and the LA Review of Books, and a bid from Reese Witherspoon to option the film rights. In a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session last spring, a reader asked whether Ani's "dark sides" came from Knoll's own experience. She hedged her response:

"This is a tough question to answer because yes, I did draw on some real experiences for the book, but I'm not really comfortable discussing which ones," Knoll wrote. "I will say that I grew up just outside of the Main Line, and attended a prestigious high school where I was a bit of an outsider - though not nearly to the degree that Ani was . . . I also had a lot of anger over the pressures I've experienced as a woman, and I found a way to distill that anger into Ani's narrative and her experiences in a way that a lot of women seem to be able to relate to, which is a great feeling."

The response to her novel is part of what made Knoll feel ready to finally write the Lenny essay. Knoll says that the second person to ever describe that terrifying series of assaults as "rape" was her literary agent, five years ago, reading Ani's fictionalized version of Knoll's real experience. Later, when book critics and Hollywood executives and countless women in bookstores who cautiously approached her and asked, "How did you know?" all used the same term, Knoll had a "powerful revelation," she wrote

"Everyone is calling it rape now." She could too.

In an email to BuzzFeed, Knoll said she wrote the essay to push back against the notion that rape is something to be quiet about or ashamed of. "That that's what gave this event so much power over me - not talking about it," she wrote "... whereas talking about it gives me power, the power to tell my story, to use my own words, which is something I was never able to do before."

After leaving high school, Knoll said, she sought success to subsume the trauma of her rape. She went to a tony liberal arts college, moved to Manhattan, became a magazine writer, then editor, for Cosmopolitan and SELF, got married, wrote a novel. "I made the mistake of thinking that living well is the best revenge," she said.

But, "revenge does not beget healing," she continued. Healing would only come from openness.

The same day that Knoll pitched her essay to the editors of Lenny, she wrote, she went to a book event in New Jersey. A woman there asked, as so many before her had, where the details of the rape scene came from.

"It was just so real," the woman told her. "What you said about not screaming until it was over? Until you knew you were safe?... That almost happened to me."

Prepared with her usual evasive response, Knoll writes that she instead opted for the truth: "'Something similar to what happened to Ani happened to me,' I responded for the first time ever."

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)