My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Fifteen-year-old Vanessa is a talented writer with a love of literature. She is a deep thinker and has always felt painfully different from everyone else. Feeling alone and isolated from her classmates, she immediately takes to her English teacher, 42-year-old Jacob Strane. Like a diary entry, Vanessa describes in intricate detail every way she is attracted to him, weaving the tale of her first love. Slowly, he begins to indulge her teenage fantasies. It begins small — a touch of the knee, long hours spent in the classroom alone together — but evolves into something much bigger and more sinister.
Cut to 2017, the height of the #MeToo movement, Vanessa is now 32 and beginning to reassess her relationship with Strane when another former student accuses him of sexual abuse. Strane maintains that his relationship with Vanessa is one of “true love”, star-crossed lovers, a love neither of them can control or resist. Thus, neither of them can be blamed. This idea is unwaveringly upheld by Vanessa, even as she grows older and becomes an adult, she continues to define their “relationship” as a romantic love story between two people who simply had the misfortune of a very large age gap.
Alternating between her schoolgirl years and 2017, Vanessa struggles to reconcile her feelings. Masking her fears and deep-seated disgust at the relationship with alcohol, drugs and casual sex, it is plain to see the damage Strane has done. Despite this, Vanessa continues to defend him, clinging to the belief that with her it was different, because, as she says: “I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.”
My Dark Vanessa is a profound book and Kate Elizabeth Russell does not hold back. As a hauntingly in-depth depiction of grooming laced with erotic tension, it is at times nauseating. But it is an important exploration of the imbalances of power and the manipulation of children by sexual predators. Most poignantly, it presents the painful complexities of victimhood and confirms that there is no “right” way of being a victim.
I am yet to reread this book but one day I will. It left a mark and stayed with me for a very long time both for the good and the bad. Read this with caution but do read it.
