A Light in the Dark

September 15, 2023
In this beautifully told portrait of courage, Rubin tells her story of being a survivor. She beat childhood lupus and grew into a confident college student, and then, after she married, she beat cancer. She also survived an infamous crime: while attending Florida State University in the late 1970s, Ted Bundy brutally bludgeoned her in the Chi Omega sorority house. Rubin illuminates many of the under-examined parts of her attack and the man who perpetrated it. She reminds readers that young girls of that era were taught to trust adult authority blindly, and explains how Bundy preyed upon the naivete of many of his victims. Police investigations into the victims' personal lives were intrusive and misguided. Police officers probed female victims, interrogating them about their sexuality, religiosity, and alcohol use, clearly trying to suss out whether they were worthy of sympathy. Rubin's story demonstrates the far-reaching ramifications of violent crime, showing how it destroys families and loved ones and leaves a wake of physical pain and emotional wreckage. Rubin was saved by a light in the dark on the night she was attacked, and her book shines a light on the heroic survivors of violence who bravely navigate the darkness every day.

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November 13, 2023
Motivational speaker Rubin shares her experiences surviving terminal illness and a serial killer in this awe-inspiring debut. Born in 1957, Rubin had a difficult life even before Ted Bundy nearly murdered her in 1978: when Rubin was 12, doctors told her she was unlikely to survive the kidney damage being caused by her lupus, but a successful chemotherapy regimen kept her alive. This brush with death stayed with her, however (“I would remain haunted by the warning that my life was fragile,” she writes), and nearly a decade later, she had another near-miss when Bundy entered Rubin’s sorority house at the University of Florida. He killed two of Rubin’s sorority sisters before smashing her head with a log, but before he could kill her, he was scared off by a car’s headlights flooding the house. After a long recovery, Rubin testified against Bundy, who was executed in 1989. Then, when Rubin was in her 30s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but she resolved never to give in “to the darkness.” Throughout, Rubin is a force to be reckoned with, pushing back on the public romanticization of Bundy (“It’s time that... people stop thinking of him as charming and smart, when he was neither”) and cataloging her resilience in matter-of-fact prose. It makes for stirring, occasionally jaw-dropping reading.