Notes on a scandal

My Dark Vanessa was one of the most anticipated novels of 2020, following a seven-figure advance and celebrity endorsements. But it’s become equally as controversial, thanks to its narrative about an abusive teacher-student relationship. Author Kate Eliza

My Dark Vanessa is a pretty shade of peach. It is the kind of cover that would beautify a bedside table. Or ask to be Instagrammed. But 50 pages into this debut novel by American author Kate Elizabeth Russell, I find myself shutting it in a drawer between readings so I don’t have to think about it. For a day, I can’t find it and I am glad – the story unfolding behind that bright cover is so dark, and relentlessly harrowing. One critic said it was an “exquisite, often nauseating” novel. Another called it a story that “unmoors you from your lived reality, grips the very core of you and doesn’t let go”. Which is why, the next day, I’m frantically searching for it, because I have to know the ending.

It starts with Vanessa Wye, who’s in her 30s, reading a Facebook post by a former student of the prestigious boarding school she attended, publicly accusing an English teacher of abuse. Aged 15, Vanessa was drawn into a sexual relationship with that teacher, Jacob Strane, who was then 42. The charge laid against him forces her to re-examine the nature of their affair, to determine whether it was love, as she has always believed, or if it was abuse, perpetuated over years. The first shock in the novel is the fact it is not over.

The plot and the events portrayed as Vanessa’s narrative flick-flacks between past and present were always going to inflame opinion. Ten thousand readers had rated the book on Goodreads within a month of it being published in March this year; whether they awarded one star or five, the word “disturbing” appears in their reviews with a striking frequency.

But even before it came out, My Dark Vanessa was being hailed as the most anticipated and controversial novel of 2020. The initial blaze of publicity had been sparked by the size of Russell’s advance – seven figures for an unheard-of, first-time author who had who been rejected by more than 60 publishers and agents in the few months she’d been shopping her manuscript, before it was bought in 2018.

THE COVER OF

It was stoked by the slew of high-profile endorsements that followed. Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn described the book as brilliant and stunning; Marian Keyes called it “powerful, compulsive” and Stephen King, who provided a blurb, said it was “a package of dynamite”. Kristen Roupenian, the writer of the 2017 viral New Yorker short story Cat Person, called My Dark Vanessa “a total masterpiece”.

In 2019, still unpublished, it was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, then dropped. No explanation was given, although in between Russell had been accused of plagiarism by another author on Twitter. That claim was reportedly unfounded, but, according to one of Russell’s defenders, New York magazine writer Lila Shapiro, it acted like “a match dropped onto a haystack soaked in gasoline”.

With literary Twitter now aware of the novel, it demanded to know if Russell had based it on her own life. The debate ensued: must an author have personal experience of a subject, especially a sensitive one, to be entitled to the narrative?

“I knew that was going to come into play,” Russell tells Vogue Australia, “that the book being released would ignite this interest in my personal life.” As “an older millennial” who had grown up on social media, “I had experience of how these conversations play out online, and nothing really surprised me in terms of the shape of the conversation”.

Still, to go from an unknown “writing in total obscurity and earning $14,000 a year” to becoming a millionaire at the centre of a publishing furore in such a short space of time, Russell admits, “was really, really intense and disorienting”. And it was tough, she says, “to sit by and watch yourself be the centre of it, trying to keep a little perspective and remember that it will pass, but it sucks when you’re in the middle”.

Russell had already made public the fact that while she had drawn inspiration from her experiences as a teenager and had had relationships with older men, My Dark Vanessa was not a veiled memoir. Nevertheless, she says, “I felt like these things I’d

epiphany. Instead, she equivocates. So maybe it was rape. But not “rape rape”. She desired him, she finds him disgusting. Complicit, coerced. Powerless, the one with all the power. There is a feeling of being spun, almost to the point of sickness, by Vanessa’s constantly shifting perception.

And instead of joining her teacher’s chorus of accusers, Vanessa rejects the idea of victimhood. Which is why, to some readers, the ‘Lolita of our time’ label is harder to apply.

Vanessa does not fit into a post-#MeToo paradigm, our new perception of who a victim is and what she is meant to do. “It is a really difficult thing to wrap your head around why someone in Vanessa’s position would be so loyal to someone as awful to Strane,” says Russell.

Equally as problematic is the fact Russell doesn’t step in to provide a moral conclusion at the end. She never tells us what to think, or what she thinks about her protagonist’s story.

As she sees it, her only creative obligation was to tell the story. Her only responsibility or wish as a writer is to spark conversation about the complexity of sexual violence. As her statement read: “I believe novels can help create space for readers to unpack and talk about sensitive or difficult topics.”

In that she is not alone. Author Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, about a school massacre, ignited the same kind of controversy. “Fiction is the ideal form in which to explore uncomfortable subject matter, because it can go at touchy subjects from multiple and even contradictory perspectives, and we traditionally allow characters to think and feel things that they’re not ‘supposed’ to,” Shriver tells Vogue.

“Unfortunately,” she continues, “in recent times, we have increasingly imputed to the author any views or feelings that a writer ascribes to characters, so that characters have to adhere to strict social norms just like the rest of us. This is critically wrongheaded and literarily catastrophic. It leads not only to bad art, but to the loss of a vital ‘safe space’ for the honest examination of difficult material.”

It was never Russell’s job to tidy things up and make Vanessa fit our model, Shriver believes. “Novelists have no moral responsibility to their audience. Novelists create their own worlds and their own rules, and between their own book covers can do what they bloody well want.”

That is what Russell has done, with immense originality. Whether she has written the new Lolita or just let Vanessa speak, and whether subject matter so innately uncomfortable makes good fiction is for her audience to decide. But whether readers leave it out or hide it away, the most controversial novel of this year will not easily fade from mind. My Dark Vanessa

The Motion of the Body Through Space

Vanessa does not fit into a post-#MeToo paradigm, our new perception of who a victim is and what she is meant to do … and Russell doesn’t step in to provide a moral conclusion at the end