Ottawa Citizen

Ottawa author returns home to discuss The Real Lolita

Ottawa-raised author Sarah Weinman dives into harrowing story of real-life Lolita

- PETER HUM phum@postmedia.com twitter.com/peterhum

Growing up in Ottawa in the early 1990s, Sarah Weinman read about the killings here of Melinda Sheppit and Sophie Filion and their grisly details stuck with her.

Sheppit, just 16 when she was strangled in late 1990 and left in a ByWard Market dumpster, was scarcely older than Weinman was at the time. A few years later, Filion’s body was abandoned in a garbage bag found in Westboro, about a kilometre from Weinman’s high school.

“I was always fascinated by crime,” recalls Weinman, now an acclaimed Brooklyn-based authority on crime writing. The Sheppit and Filion cases, which are still unsolved, were “formative,” she says.

The early-’90s sex slayings by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka also “struck a lot of fear,” she says. “But I also essentiall­y wanted to understand the worst of humanity.”

Since the early 2000s, Weinman has built a career out of her fascinatio­n with crime. Last week, her latest book, The Real Lolita, which documents the kidnapping and death of young Sally Horner more than 60 years ago, was released amid much buzz, sending Weinman on a North American book tour this fall that stops Thursday in her hometown.

At the Ottawa Public Library’s Sunnyside branch at 6:30 p.m., Weinman will discuss her book with Carleton University English professor Dana Dragunoiu, an expert on Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the still-notorious 1955 novel Lolita.

Weinman’s book plumbs the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Horner, a then-shocking crime that saw the girl taken by a pedophile from New Jersey to California, and which inspired Nabokov.

After graduating from Nepean High School, Weinman did not set out to become a crime author. She went to McGill University in Montreal for biology, although when she wasn’t studying she was reading crime fiction. After graduating from McGill, Weinman enrolled in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s forensic science graduate program in New York.

“The combinatio­n of crime and science, when I discovered you could actually study that, was amazing,” Weinman says.

Ultimately, forensic science wasn’t for Weinman. As interested as she was in crime, she found she didn’t belong in labs. Instead, Weinman moved back to Ottawa, where her mother still lives, and immersed herself in crime writing, first as the writer behind the blog Confession­s of an Idiosyncra­tic Mind and then as a freelancer and columnist for leading American newspapers and the National Post.

She says everything from her university studies to her musical pursuits as an aspiring classical pianist and singer have helped her develop the abilities needed to be a writer, “which are showing up on time, meeting your deadlines, filing clean copy, being profession­al, being discipline­d.”

She moved back to New York in 2005 and has since edited several crime-writing anthologie­s and taken a job with Publishers Marketplac­e. She found work as a writer of long-form crime journalism.

The Real Lolita grew out of a 2016 article Weinman wrote for the Canadian literary website Hazlitt.

Before that, Weinman was spending yet another late night surfing the web when she came across a 2005 Times Literary Supplement essay on the connection between Nabokov’s book and the kidnapping of Sally Horner.

Weinman determined that Horner’s story had never been properly told. She set to work, first on the story for Hazlitt and later on her book.

In the summer of 1948, when she was just 11, Horner was kidnapped from a Woolworths store in Camden, N.J., where she lived. Her abductor, Frank La Salle, held her captive for almost two years and took her across the U.S. until Horner at last broke free of him in San Jose, Calif.

The sad epilogue of Horner’s life is that she died in the summer of 1952 in a car crash. The car was driven by a young man she had most likely just met and befriended hours earlier.

In Lolita, Nabokov’s protagonis­t and the book’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, a pedophile and kidnapper, directly refers to Horner’s case. “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle (sic), a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?” Humbert asks himself.

Delving into Horner’s case, Weinman scoured newspaper articles, court documents and other informatio­n, and travelled widely to meet people who knew and still remembered Horner.

“There were so many moments that just knocked me for a loop,” Weinman says of her research.

In August 2016, on the anniversar­y of Horner’s death, Weinman went to Atlantic City, N.J., and walked the boardwalk that night, because she knew that the girl would have walked along it too on the last night of her life.

“Obviously, re-creation many decades after the fact, it can’t give you everything,” Weinman says. “But I do feel anything that kind of connects me from a sensory or psychogeog­raphic standpoint can’t hurt.”

While scouring newspaper databases, she found an article in which Ed Baker, the boy who crashed his car that night, spoke of the collision. “I remember double-taking and sitting with it,” Weinman says.

She was able to speak to relatives of Horner’s abductor and of the woman who rescued her, and they spoke openly of their own traumas.

Weinman also spoke to Horner’s niece. That encounter, she says, “was a real reminder that I wasn’t just writing a book about an archetype, or somebody lost to time. This is someone’s aunt, this is someone’s family.

“Sally Horner was someone who they still remember, who they still love as a person. The larger resonances to Lolita, it mattered, but it didn’t matter as much to them as her as an actual human being. I never wanted to forget that and that’s what I really tried hard to represent in the book.”

 ??  ?? Sarah Weinman sheds light on the Sally Horner tragedy with her new book.
Sarah Weinman sheds light on the Sally Horner tragedy with her new book.

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