My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

I think the term trauma is perhaps a bit overused. I don’t mean to downplay anyone’s specific trauma, but the idea has been discussed to the point of diminishing returns, and we’ve begun to have difficulty differentiating types of trauma. There’s a difference between not getting the Christmas present you wanted and being assaulted. Both events may be traumatic, but they don’t leave equivalent scarring.  However, I also worry that backlash to this term is simply a societal defense mechanism to avoid dealing with how traumatic events (both micro and macro) shape us and the world around us.

With this in mind, I want to talk about an absolutely brilliant novel released in 2020, My Dark Vanessa. It was written by Kate Elizabeth Russell, and I cannot believe it took me this long to find it. The novel is about a fifteen-year-old girl who is groomed and raped by her forty-two-year-old English teacher. It is gripping, propulsive, terrifying, and, like all truly great novels, it stays with you after you finish reading.

Russell effectively uses history and pop culture to reflect this individual story back on our larger society. She mentions Fiona Apple, a survivor who was raped when she was twelve and became highly sexualized in her late teens as a pop star. There are references to Britney Spears, the most obvious example of how our society fetishizes young women (going so far as to dress them as schoolgirls) only to discard them later when they age. Worse, when they show long-term trauma (that word again) from having their childhoods stolen and being treated as disposable adolescent sex objects, we mock them. We follow them with cameras as they break down and go online to make fun of them. We blame them for this collapse because that’s easier than holding the mirror up to ourselves and the society we’ve created.

How do these representations affect a teenage girl? Does seeing an adolescent pop star treated as an object of desire drive young girls to seek the same kind of attention? Does it normalize that abhorrent behavior to the extent that they will excuse and even romanticize abuse?

Russell sets her novel during the latter days of the Clinton presidency and refers to the Lewinsky scandal. Even that, referring to it as the Lewinsky scandal, is a remnant of how horribly we treated her. No, she wasn’t a child, but she was 27 years younger than her boss, the most powerful man in the world. And somehow, the blame fell on her, and people joked about Bill being Bill while they shamed this young woman for her actions.

Could that have led to other women keeping quiet? Could that have scarred a generation of women into silence?

Those are just a few real-life events that leak through the foundation of this exquisitely composed novel. It shifts eras jumping from the present – where other victims are accusing her abuser during the height of the MeToo movement – to the past – her as a fifteen-year-old being groomed and abused by a man three times her age. Vanessa, our narrator, has romanticized her abuse as a defense mechanism. She pretends that this was some remarkable love story thwarted by society. By framing the story this way, Russell shows how Vannessa’s trauma is still unprocessed, creating a transparently unreliable narrator. There’s no question in the reader's mind whether this was romance or abuse. No trace that this is a societal hang-up.

Strane, her abuser, is manipulative, possessive, and revolting in every possible way. It's hard for me to think of a character I find more despicable in literature. It is not just the abuse, which is horrid enough, but how he poisons Vanessa’s mind. The way she stands up for him and refuses to acknowledge what he did both outwardly and to herself.

This novel is a perfect example of what fiction can accomplish that non-fiction has a more challenging time with. The world is not a place of clean lines. There are things that we can definitively state are right or wrong. Take, for example, a high school English teacher sexually abusing one of their students. There is no moral ambiguity there, but great fiction manages to show you the moral complexity of the world we live in. Russell does that with this novel.

In the present, Vanessa is contacted by another survivor of Strane’s abuse and a journalist trying to write an article on this story, but she doesn’t want to come forward. Initially, she frames this reluctance as a rejection of the premise itself. She claims she wasn’t abused. Furthermore, she doesn’t believe that the other victims were abused. She believes that they wanted it.

It's hard to read these sections of the novel. Almost as hard as it is to read the sections with Strane, which makes your skin crawl and your stomach contract. She’s blaming the victims. Calling them liars and accusing their teenage selves of lusting after their abuser. It’s horrible. But that’s what happens with unprocessed trauma. That is the wreckage that abusers leave in their wake. It’s not clean. It’s not all fixed by sitting down with a therapist and having a good cry. It’s dirty and messy, leaving carnage littered across the victims’ lives.

There’s a particularly infuriating passage in the novel where her mother sees proof of the affair. Vanessa has just been expelled from her boarding school after claiming she fabricated the story of Strane abusing her (always framed as a relationship). They’re cleaning out her room, and a Polaroid of her and Strane falls out. It’s not a sexual Polaroid (he kept those) but one that demonstrates that their relationship was more than a typical student/teacher one. Vanessa holds the photograph to her chest, refusing to let go of the fiction it displays – a world where they’re just two people in love who take long drives and commemorate those days with a photo. Her mother acknowledges what the photo is and what it means, but she lets her keep it. She continues to pack the room, and they leave.

I wanted to scream when I read this. Vanessa is a child who’s been abused. You don’t blame her for what’s happened, but her mother is an adult standing in the room with proof of her daughter’s abuse just an arm’s length away. I don’t have children, but I can only imagine what I would do if this situation presented itself with my partner or a family member.

I spent most of the rest of the novel hating her mother. Blaming her not only for Vanessa’s continued abuse – she keeps seeing Strane and allows him to dictate so much of her life – but for all the other victims. I pointed to this woman as the culprit. Not more than Strane, of course, but I assigned her considerable responsibility.

But, and this is just one of many examples of the brilliance of this novel, we go to see the mother in the present. We go to her house for Thanksgiving and see it in the same disarray that Vanessa keeps her apartment in. We see the fragile woman her mother has become. We see all the tell-tale signs of trauma that have been so apparent in Vanessa throughout the novel. This event, this horrific abuse, didn’t only scar Vanessa. It had ripples. I had to stop reading and think about how terrible that would be. To know that you allowed your daughter’s abuser to get away with it. That you failed your daughter, and all those future victims, in such a colossal way. It was horrible. Horrible and brilliant.

That’s what this novel is and what great fiction does. It shows the gray area in a world that has tried to draw clean lines. It allows you to be angry that Vanessa won’t support her fellow victims but understand that it is ultimately her decision. It allows you to rage against her mother while also seeing her as a victim. It shows you that we long for these clean lines because, without them, the world's chaos is too overwhelming.

This novel forces you to ask questions that only spring more questions, and in doing so, it’ll never leave you. I’ll think about My Dark Vanessa for years to come. I’ll find myself wondering how many victims stayed quiet after watching what happened to Lewinski. Or I’ll wonder what larger social responsibility a victim has to come forward. I don’t have the answers to these things now, and I won’t then, but that’s what fiction can do. It makes you think about problems without solutions, it stays with you, and it shows you the moral complexities that define our world.