Book wars The author forced to defend her right to write
EVERYONE KNOWS that abusive relationships are wrong. But what if you’re convinced that what you experienced wasn’t abuse – but a love story? That’s the question posed by the electrifying debut novel by Kate Elizabeth Russell that’s becoming the most buzzed-about book of the moment.
Dubbed a ‘Lolita for the #Metoo era’, My Dark Vanessa, which is published later this month, sold for a reported seven figures, has Hollywood circling and has won praise from, among others, Stephen King, who called it a ‘package of dynamite’. It even caused ripples at Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, when his lawyers tried – and failed – to get a juror who’d reviewed it online removed, for reading books about ‘predatory older men’.
Yet Oprah recently dropped it from her book club following a tweet from an Hispanic writer claiming that Russell’s book was very similar to hers, only written by a white woman. Russell countered this, writing on her website, ‘My Dark Vanessa, which I’ve been working on for nearly 20 years, was inspired by my own experiences as a teenager.’
‘It’s a tough situation,’ she tells Grazia now about being forced to out herself as a victim. ‘There were things being said that were just untrue. And so I felt I wanted to clarify my own relationship to the book. But I don’t want a fiction writer who writes about sexual abuse to be expected to share the most private and painful experiences just to communicate, “Oh, I have the right to tell this fictional story,” because I think that has potential to do a lot of harm.’
Russell says her novel, ‘tells the story of Vanessa Wye, who, at 32, discovers that the teacher with whom she believes she had a consensual relationship with has been accused of sexual abuse by another former student. The novel moves back and forth in time, following the fallout of these allegations, and also showing how this relationship started and continued.’
In its page-turning intensity, it reads like a thriller – even if some scenes between Vanessa and her teacher may be difficult to stomach. At the same time, it explores how young girls are objectified on a much broader level. Russell’s hope was to inspire the reader to look at ‘the way that Britney Spears was treated or the lyrics to a song like My Sharona’ [the catchy ’70s hit all about ‘get[ting] it up/for the touch of the younger kind’]. Although it’s her first novel, Russell is no overnight success. Growing up in Maine, she began writing aged 12: ‘It’s always been just the only thing that I want to do.’ She started working on My Dark Vanessa as a teenager, continuing through creative writing degrees and a PHD. ‘It’s surreal because I worked on this for so many years,’ she says of her book’s success today.
Time has changed the way she sees the relationship between Vanessa and her teacher. ‘In my twenties, I saw it as much more romantic: “Oh, it’s a love story. It’s dark and sort of awful, but it’s still a love story.” So I didn’t understand the element of trauma. And in the book, I didn’t.’
Meanwhile, the novel has ‘absolutely’ led to the conversation she hoped it would, from the earliest reader responses. ‘I would have people coming up to me saying, “This happened to me,” or “This happened to my friend,” “This happened at my school” – and not just young women, but older women, men,’ she says, especially when they look back at their school days through the more current prism of #Metoo.
‘It’s such a common thing. And that’s partly why I’m so insistent on this being fiction... It doesn’t belong to me any more. It’s the readers’ and they can react to it however they will. That’s so important to me.’ ‘My Dark Vanessa’ (£12.99, Fourth Estate) is published 31 March