My Dark Vanessa
Would you see yourself as a victim or a survivor or maybe neither one of the two?
⭐⭐⭐⭐
1. MY DARK VANESSA by Kate Elizabeth Russell
SYNOPSIS
2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher.
2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager-and who professed to worship only her-may be far different from what she has always believed?
BOOK REVIEW
My Dark Vanessa was one of the most anticipated books of 2020, exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer. Be warned now, the book dealt with rather dark subject matters, that of child grooming and protracted sexual abuse!
Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposed memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body could wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this was a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raised vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa was an era-defining novel that brilliantly captured and reflected the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.
“I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he whispers. “I can tell from the way you write that you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”
OMG! How do I even put my messy emotions into sensible words in order to properly describe the way I feel now?! I was just blown away by the powerful nature of this incredible novel. It left me angry, frustrated, and heart-broken. Vanessa was such an enigma of sorts. She was controversial… She turned out to be the epitome of human complexity, raising questions about the agency of victimhood, the nature of consent, the ownership of a narrative, the multi-dimensional viciousness and insidiousness of sexual abuse, as well as the differences between how the outsiders and the victim see the same experience.
It’s simply impossible to feel as much confused and lost as Vanessa did without going through the same experience, but my soul became one shade darker after witnessing the cruelty of our world in this book… I don’t want to give anything away and thus highly recommend My Dark Vanessa for immediate reading! Not for the faint of heart though (the book was very graphic in detail, integral to explaining the manipulated girl’s mind).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kate Elizabeth Russell is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her debut novel, My Dark Vanessa, is forthcoming from William Morrow (US), 4th Estate (UK), and will be translated into over twenty languages.
Originally from eastern Maine, Kate earned an MFA from Indiana University and a PhD from the University of Kansas.
Can you talk about what inspired you to write the book? And when it turned from a journal/memoir to fiction?
In terms of genre, it’s a little nebulous, especially when I first started writing it. But the seed of where this story came from can be traced back to my reading Lolita for the first time at 14 years old. What led me to read Lolita was this musician I adored at the time–Jakob Dylan from the Wallflowers. I read a Rolling Stone profile of him where he referenced Lolita as his favorite book and one that he got so much inspiration from. So I sought out Lolita, and I started reading it and had this moment where it was a revelation that men thought this way. I didn’t know that this was an option, that a grown man would be romantically and sexually obsessed with a girl my age. I think that was the first time that I really became aware of that part of our culture. But at the same time, this was the first adult novel that I read where I had this experience of feeling like I want to write this way, I want to try to emulate this.
Lolita figures prominently in the story of Vanessa (the main character in My Dark Vanessa). From the point of view of that character, what do you think the book gave her in terms of identity? Do you feel like it normalized things for her? Or do you think that it gave her that same sort of revelation that it gave you, like, Oh, my goodness, this is an option?
When I look back at the memories I have of reading Lolita as a teenager, I was so in love with that book. I knew it almost by heart as a teenager. And I felt like I saw Dolores (the main character in Lolita) in a way that maybe a lot of other readers, especially adult readers, maybe especially adult male readers, didn’t see her. There are these details, these glimpses into her character. At one point, Humbert Humbert mentions that she has a very high IQ and her personal hygiene is really bad. She’s lazy. She’s moody. She has a really good sense of humor. And also really heartbreaking details, like that she cries every single night after he feigned sleep. She’s there in the text, but she’s hidden. You have to be looking for her. And as a teenage girl myself, reading the book, of course I was looking for her because she was the most interesting character to me. It was a complicated thing reading a book like Lolita at that age, where I did read it as a love story. But my understanding of what a love story could be was influenced by reading Brontë novels and Phantom of the Opera. A love story to me could be full of obsession and darkness and even violence.
You just mentioned Humbert Humbert and Lolita, and that novel is told from his point of view. My Dark Vanessa is from Vanessa’s point of view, and, as you said, you have to look for these moments of what is actually going on. When I was reading this book, there were moments when I was wondering if Vanessa was a reliable narrator.
I would say ‘no’ if we’re thinking of a reliable narrator as being relentlessly subjective in narrating their own experience. I think she’s being emotionally truthful in terms of herself and her own feelings and her own understanding of this relationship. But her understanding of this relationship has been so informed by years of psychological grooming and manipulation that she's inevitably unreliable in that way. I’m not sure what a story about sexual abuse would read like if it weren’t told by an unreliable narrator. We need a little unreliability to be able to tell the story in a way that does feel emotionally accurate because the psychology is so tricky. It’s so slippery, and getting the reader in a place where they’re able to sort of surrender their own need for objectivity was really important to me.
Also, when I was reading about Vanessa and her attachment to Strane, did you research Stockholm syndrome or any of those types of psychological attachments to abusers to shape Vanessa?
Most of my research—when trying to figure out this theoretical framework and the larger cultural concepts—focused on critical trauma theory and, specifically, how symptoms of PTSD can show up on the page. How can you write a flashback effectively or how can you write a scene of sexual abuse that shows these moments of dissociation and the mind splitting off? Throughout that research, I read a lot about the long-term effects of sexual abuse specifically, and certainly things like Stockholm syndrome and this preoccupation or obsession with the relationship with one’s abuser. There is this tendency to assign almost godlike qualities to the abuser, like this feeling that he can read my mind or he created me and I was destined to be this for him. Those qualities of Vanessa largely came out of that research.
With the character of Strane, you do a good job of showing him through Vanessa’s eyes. Then there are these moments of objectivity where you see this guy is really bad news. How did you approach developing his character, and did you ever consider giving him a different ending?
I never considered giving him a different ending. I always knew that I wanted him to exit the book. I knew that he needed to get out of the story in order to allow Vanessa to connect with these other women in her life. As long as he was there, she never would have opened up to her therapist. She never would have met with Taylor. She never would have been able to even have that brief, honest conversation with her mother at the end. Getting him out of Vanessa’s world was absolutely mandatory to get her to the point where her defenses could break down, where she could have this chance for growth. But in terms of his character, I never wanted the reader to feel conflicted about Strane. To me, that’s what Lolita did and continues to do with Humbert Humbert. I feel like, as a culture, we’re very familiar with that struggle of I don’t want to sympathize with this abuser but I’m going to anyway. Having Strane be clearly bad was a way to get the reader to focus on Vanessa.
Taylor Birch is interesting in terms of her storyline and decision to go public when Strane touches her. The degree of her abuse is not as brutal as Vanessa’s, but her outrage is disproportionate to what Vanessa feels.
Taylor started out as this non-fleshed-out character who just made a social media post. She was very far removed. But as I continued to revise that present-day plotline, she emerged more and more. It’s so tempting to view abuse in terms of hierarchy–where this is the worst and that isn’t quite so bad. I wanted to try to turn that idea of hierarchy on its side and instead look at how these instances of abuse are connected and relate to each other, rather than trying to position them in competition with one another. But that is at odds with how a trauma narrative is received when it's presented on social media. It can so easily become flattened or become this thing where people can project their own emotions. I tried to approach Taylor with a lot of empathy, viewing her not as the overzealous, millennial social-justice warrior that maybe she’s made out to be on social media. She’s a character who felt that she was doing the right thing in the same way that the journalist felt like she was doing the right thing. And Vanessa, obviously, felt like she was doing the right thing. That’s the complexity of victimhood. Abuse doesn’t affect everyone the same way. And healing and closure and processing abuse don’t look the same for everyone.
- Kate Elizabeth Russell
