Around the time survivors were telling their stories as part of the #MeToo movement, writer Jessica Knoll told hers. She’d written her bestselling debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, about a careerist who reinvented herself after a series of traumatic events during her teens. Knoll eventually admitted that the gang rape in the plot was loosely based on her own assault and the lack of support she received in the aftermath. “A narrative took hold about what had happened. I knew the real story, but no one was interested in my version of it,” she says. She wrote the screenplay (the 2022 movie features Mila Kunis), changing the ending in part to reflect the outpouring of responses she’d received from other women, who said they’d been through a similar trauma.
She wrote her new novel, Bright Young Women, after watching back-to-back TV shows about serial killer Ted Bundy. Knoll was stunned that the judge who sentenced Bundy called him a “bright young man,” glorifying him and minimizing the women he had killed. “There was a different side of the story,” she says. So Knoll set out to tell it. The result is a fictionalized version from the victims’ perspectives that doesn’t give the killer any notoriety, never even using his name. The way it always should have been. —B.H.
Healing trauma in our bodies • POOJA LAKSHMIN, MD Reframing self-care as actually taking care of ourselves • CAITLIN CLARK NCAA’s all-time leading scorer