“That seems the likely ending to this love story: me dropping everything and doing anything, devoted as a dog, as he takes and takes and takes.”

My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Summary

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.

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?

Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises 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 is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

My Thoughts

This book was a lot, to be honest. It was beautifully written by by god was it dark and disturbing at times. I very much could not stop thinking about it even in between reading chapters, and it made me think a lot about power dynamics in age gap relationships. Structurally, the chapters alternated between the past and present, but there were some issues with pacing.

While the first half of the book was very concise, it started to drag after a little bit, especially in the flashbacks. There were incredibly long sections detailing the relationship between Vanessa and Strane, to the point where I wanted more of the book to be in the present, with Vanessa reckoning with what it meant. There were points were the depictions of assault felt unnecessary and slightly glamorized—I understand that it is the point of the book, that Vanessa is an unreliable narrator and is glamorizing this relationship, but it nevertheless felt excessive. I think the book still would have stood strong with fewer sex scenes between the two to bolster the page count, because some of them just didn’t contribute to the narrative. The interesting emotional key to me was Vanessa in the present, struggling with memories of the relationship and the possibility of having to redefine what it meant. There’s a really beautiful quote: “Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out— trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.” Vanessa is very much stuck in the trauma of this relationship, and it has defined every aspect of her life since. The process of healing to me is far more beautiful and important than what happened to her, and I feel like the book focuses too much on the latter.

The former is interesting because it has the key thrust of the book: where does victimhood end and agency begin? Vanessa feels in charge for a lot of the relationship, but was she? The tension in the novel is in the idea of victimization versus agency, because while we know that Strane is a creep, Vanessa believes herself to love him, believes that she is tempting him. A lot of her inner justifications feel like a total creep got in her head and put the words in there, and one did: Strane. In reading the novel, many of her justifications come from Strane himself, who is teaching herself the language by which to define their relationship so that she feels as though she has agency—he’s very manipulative. Even after Vanessa is an adult, has graduated college, she keeps reaching out to Strane: are those the actions of a victim? At what point did Vanessa go from someone who was groomed as a child to someone with agency? Vanessa personally spends much of the book believing that “I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and if I didn’t want to be, then I’m not.” The author invites you to think on it. I personally believe that regardless of how much older Vanessa gets, she will always have been groomed by Strane, and so their relationship would be wrong in any form, always with a messed up power dynamic. I also think that regardless of whether Vanessa believes she had agency, she was too young to be making these decisions with an adult, and didn’t have as much agency as she thought she did. Other people who read the book might have different opinion; some of the interest in this novel is in the grey areas. Vanessa herself struggles with it, asking: “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that. Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it? It’s my life. This has been my whole life.”

Despite the thematic struggle, My Dark Vanessa was still excellent, and while it referenced classical literature like Lolita or poetry from Nabokov a lot, you don’t need to have read these books to understand their relationship to the novel. I personally have never consumed anything related to Lolita before, and the book was still good. It also references other old literature—Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost—but none of them are required reading to enjoy the book. In all of this literature, there is a strong focus on the sexual aspect of it all, since it is used as a method for Strane to groom Vanessa and get her to think a certain way.

Overall, I recommend this book. It is not an easy read; it is deeply uncomfortable at times, should make your skin crawl, should make you wonder how something so horrible can be written so beautifully.

Review: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫

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