Jessica Knoll

Jessica Knoll is an American author and former Cosmopolitan editor whose debut thriller Luckiest Girl Alive drew on her own experience of sexual assault to create a sharp examination of how privilege and trauma intersect in contemporary women's lives.

Jessica Knoll spent years as a senior editor at Cosmopolitan before publishing Luckiest Girl Alive (2015), a thriller about TifAni Fanelli, a woman whose successful Manhattan life masks a traumatic past involving sexual assault and a school shooting. The novel moves between TifAni’s adult present — where she is preparing for a wedding and narrating her story to a documentary film crew — and her teenage years at a prestigious Philadelphia prep school.

The novel attracted comparisons to Gone Girl for its unreliable female narrator and its critique of the social performance of femininity, but it is more overtly political: the teenage sexual assault at its center, and the institutional failure to address it, is treated with a specificity that reflects Knoll’s own experience. She revealed publicly in 2016, in an essay in Lenny Letter, that Luckiest Girl Alive drew on a gang rape she experienced at fifteen that was never prosecuted. The revelation recontextualized the novel as partly autobiographical and generated both admiration for her courage in using fiction to process the experience and discussion of how fiction can function as testimony.

Her subsequent novel, The Favorite Sister (2018), is a satirical thriller set in the world of reality television, following the female competitors of a fictional show. Knoll writes with a sharp understanding of the specific social pressures on ambitious women in American professional and media culture. Luckiest Girl Alive remains her most discussed and most significant book.