A Light in the Dark

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.