Luckiest Girl Alive is a Netflix drama adapted from a novel by Jessica Knoll which follows New Yorker Ani FaNelli (Mila Kunis) who seems to have the perfect life everyone dreams of — a successful writing job, a dreamy fiancé and a designer clad wardrobe.
However, in both the movie and the book, Ani's perfectly crafted life begins to shatter when she is asked to be part of a documentary that forces her to confront her traumatic past that she tried so hard to leave behind.
Luckiest Girl Alive contains some harrowing scenes of Ani's terrifying experience during her teenage years, but is it based on a true story? What book is the movie adapted from?
Is Luckiest Girl Alive based on a true story?
Luckiest Girl Alive is based on Jessica Knoll's best-selling novel of the same name. In the book, a young Ani is raped at a house party by a number of her classmates at a private high school.
She tells her friends Arthur and Ben what happened, who also have experiences of being bullied by the same group who raped her. Arthur and Ben go on to do a school shooting, killing the bullies and Ani's rapists in the process and leaving one paralysed.
Initially, the author said that her novel was purely fiction and that the rape storyline was based on other women's experiences she had heard about.
However, in an essay for the Lenny Letter, she revealed that while the novel is a work of fiction the traumatic events Ani went through were inspired by her own traumatic experiences.
She explained the reason why she spoke out, revealing to TODAY: “It really killed me to see the looks on these women's faces when I would say, ‘Oh no, you know, I just made it up,’ and I just never wanted to see that look on anyone's face again."
Jessica opened up about her hesitancy to talk about what happened to her.
She said: “I always feel a little undeserving of being called like brave or courageous, because I had to (open up) in fiction. There were these dueling things inside of me. I desperately craved the release of getting my story out on paper, and the validation of recognizing what had happened to me as rape. I needed that.
“But on the other hand, I was frightened that people would read it and come to the same conclusion that people did when I was in high school, which was that no violation had occurred and that I had somehow participated in it."
The school shooting storyline was not based on a specific event, but she told TODAY about why she included it in the story.
"I still had the idea in my head that what happened to Ani wasn't bad enough, because that's what happened to me. I thought I had to make it worse," she revealed.
What book is Luckiest Girl Alive based on?
Luckiest Girl Alive is based on Jessica Knoll's 2015 mystery novel of the same name. It is written in the first-person narrative from Ani's perspective.
Luckiest Girl Alive is available to watch on Netflix now.
