My Dark Vanessa

My Dark Vanessa is a deeply dark novel that was incredibly uncomfortable to read at times and equally as difficult to process. But it is also a book that I found to be meaningful and important.

It’s the story of Vanessa, who at just 15, becomes inextricably involved with her teacher, Jacob Strane, a man twenty-seven years her senior. The relationship between them is dark from the very beginning. As a reader, we see the grooming process, see Vanessa fall under his spell, even as some part of her rejects it. But that part isn’t enough to keep her away, and she becomes obsessed. But this is not a love story, even as Vanessa often sees it as such. Far from it.

The story is told from Vanessa’s point of view, alternating between her present and her past. That sets up a juxtaposition between the memories of a teenage girl just coming into her own and the damage her obsession has done to her entire being. The dual timelines serve to underscore the effect of the relationship on Vanessa, having the advantage to see what young Vanessa can’t. By having the advantage of seeing the older Vanessa. And that’s the most heartbreaking part of the novel… the struggles that older Vanessa has in reconciling the truth of her relationship with Strane. Did she enter into it willingly, or was she groomed? Everything she is has been defined by this man, this relationship. To accept that maybe it might have been something different would mean redefining everything she is.

There are many readers who feel like there were too many sexual scenes between Strane and Vanessa, enough to make it feel as if it were gratuitous. And that they were too descriptive. That it was all too romanticized. I do not agree. To me, those things were all integral parts of the story. Does it make a reader uncomfortable? Yes, it does. But that is because we, as readers, have distance from the story. We see the situation for what it is because we are looking at it through a different lens. But Vanessa, at 15, was torn between love and repulsion, desperate to matter, to feel. And there was a weird power for her, knowing that this older man yearned for her, a power that she craved and that fueled her obsession.

This book came at a relevant time, in this post-Me Too movement time, making the story that much more thought-provoking and meaningful. It puts a spotlight on psychological manipulation, on grooming, on the long-term fallout from trauma.

Beautifully written. Compelling and heartbreaking

The relationship between a male teacher and a female student could “trigger” a lot of people. The writing is excellent and beautifully done.

This story, about the abuse of vulnerable 15-year-old Vanessa Whye by her 42-year-old English teacher Jacob Strane, is not easy to read. It brought some people to tears.

It made me furious.

Fifteen-year-old Vanessa is bright, ambitious, gifted. She is a scholarship student at Browick, a private boarding school in Maine. Unlike most of her peers, she studies hard and gets excellent grades, especially in English.

One day, Mr. Strane calls her up to his desk. This seems entirely natural as she is his best student. He invites her to sit down next to him so that they can talk about her work. The other students are bent over an assignment they have to redo as their first efforts were below par. All, except for Vanessa, whose first effort was declared “perfect” by her demanding professor. As Vanessa has nothing to do, he embarks on a friendly chat about a poem she has just written. As they talk, he marks it up with comments. But behind that enormous desk, his other hand reaches out to touch her knee. He rewards her perfect assignment with groping. After all, he needs to assess her boundaries. Is she skittish? Does she flinch at first touch? Is she likely to scream? But Vanessa doesn’t react, and so he continues to groom her for his eventual assault on her in his bed.

With that first boundary crossing, Strane spins his dark web to entrap Vanessa, a friendless teenager whose parents are absent.

When they are found out, Vanessa, in a bid to save Strane, avers that she lied about the relationship, stating that it was she who put about the rumor they were having an affair. The powers-that-be at Browick brand Vanessa as troubled (true). They say she committed an ethics violation by lying about her professor, that she deserves to be expelled. Then they force her to apologize for lying, in public, to her classmates (who are allowed to pelt her with questions).

The genius aspect of this book is how un-clichéd everything is. Just when you think things cannot possibly get any worse, Vanessa refuses to help herself. While they are packing up her dorm room, her mother discovers the photo showing Strane with his arm around her daughter. Vanessa hadn’t lied about the relationship after all. But she refuses her mother’s offer of marching back to the Headmaster’s office to set things straight. Her mother is baffled. “Why are you protecting him?”she asks. “He hurt you.”

Vanessa’s reply? “He didn’t.”

At that point her father reappears, finished with the task of packing Vanessa’s belongings into his truck, and the mother decides to become complicit in Vanessa’s scheme to protect Strane. The father realizes something is off, but when he asks about it, his wife tells him that everything is fine. He doesn’t push.

And so Vanessa is expelled from Browick. She is just 16 years old.

The father, not knowing what really happened, believes that Browick had a valid reason for kicking his daughter out, while Vanessa’s mother is in a bind. She did know what happened, but her teenaged daughter has rebuffed her attempts to help her. And so both parents let this matter drop,

In the fall, Vanessa starts a new high school, a public school, completely different from tony Browick. She makes one friend, Charley, who leaves after a couple of months. Left to her own devices, friendless, Vanessa stops eating lunch in the cafeteria, preferring instead to eat pie at a local diner. But she studies hard and gains entrance to Atlantica College, a private liberal-arts college located just outside Bar Harbor, Maine.

On her first day of college, she walks into English class where Professor Henry Plough is waiting. Coolly, she corrects another student on Nabokov. Professor Plough watches with a faint smile. She becomes his best student. When the other, ill-prepared students don’t participate, Plough has Vanessa to turn to, who is always prepared, always insightful, always brilliant. He invites her into his office, invites her to call him “Henry,” gives her extra time, flirts and jokes around, incidentally neglecting to tell her he is married…to a woman who works as a counselor at Browick.

And so Henry comes to learn about her previous relationship with Strane. He asks her about it. Naturally, he is horrified. He comforts her (with words.) But he does more, so much more. Outside the men’s room at Browick, Henry, the Knight in Shining Armor, confronts Strane, accusing him of rape. Strane, furious, partly because he is being accused of sexual assault by at least one other female student, hurls his enormous body into his boxy blue car and drives to Vanessa’s college apartment, where he bursts in, startling Vanessa and her female roommate. The roommate leaves and Vanessa bravely faces the situation alone, managing to calm Strane down. His reward for his atrocious and terrifying behavior? He gets to have sex with Vanessa. Again and again…

Vanessa’s college years are coming to an end and Henry thinks she should apply to graduate school. He writes a strong letter of recommendation. He uses his influence so that she can have a job as his research assistant while she spends the year applying. But Vanessa, exasperated by Henry’s ill-judged attack on Strane (which she had to pay for), confronts him over the existence of his wife. Henry is startled, but he explains. Disgusted, and realizing her life as his research assistant will be a funnel that will lead her ultimately into his bed (his wife was a former student), Vanessa rejects him. She rejects the research position. She rejects graduate school. She leaves for Portland, the main town in Maine, to work a series of thankless jobs in windowless, airless offices. She drinks. She smokes pot. She inhabits a trash-filled apartment, hooking up with unsuitable men she doesn’t like.

At the end of this horrible, gut-wrenching, infuriating saga, Vanessa finally stops punishing herself. She leaves her dreary job and gets a front desk position at an upscale hotel. She acquires a therapist. She makes tentative overtures to Taylor Birch, whose accusations against Strane finally brought him down. Most of all, she acquires a dog, who provides her with the love she so desperately needs, as well as the opportunity to make new friends

Although MY DARK VANESSA is Kate Elizabeth Russell’s first novel, it does not read as debut fiction, perhaps because it took the author 18 years to write. Five stars. #mydarkvanessa #kateelizabethrussell

I thought this was a great book, despite the topic. I think it’s the best book I read this year.

Incredibly sad story and very difficult to read but an important book. It needed to be written and it should be read by everyone.

Gripping, disturbing, and dark, this book was so beautifully written that I kept reading even though I wanted to put it down. It deals with a fifteen-year-old student who is seduced by a forty-five-year-old teacher and delves into the ways the incident twists her mind and choices. It’s exquisitely written and haunting, so I recommend it if you can handle the topic.

This book far exceeded my expectations. It made me at turns sad, angry, exasperated and then every one of those emotions at once. It illustrated for me in a way I don’t think I ever understood before, the complex emotions that survivors of abuse may feel toward their abusers. The many things they lose when someone steals from them agency over their own body, and in some ways, their mind as well; and the paths that their lives may have taken if not interrupted by the abuse.

In ‘My Dark Vanessa’, the main character Vanessa is fifteen when she finds herself embroiled in what she thinks of as an “affair” with her forty-year-old English Literature teacher, Jacob Strane. Throughout, not only does Strane groom her for a sexual relationship, he massages her mind as well, her perceptions of herself, of him, and of what she comes to believe is her shared (and maybe even greater) responsibility for what happens between them.

At the start of the book, it is 2017 and the #MeToo movement is in full swing. Women are beginning to revisit events that occurred to them with men in their lives, and one such woman comes metaphorically knocking on Vanessa’s door, forcing her to revisit and perhaps even revise her memories of the “relationship” that shaped her teenage years and continues to shape and distort her adulthood.

This book was dark, and painful at times. It made me cringe and set it aside more than once, just so I could stand to keep reading. It made me think about people in my own past, girls I knew who were rumored to be “having an affair” with a teacher, who were branded and set apart from the rest of us as being somehow stained, or different and almost socially radioactive, except as potential sources of information about the world of sex, into which most of us hadn’t yet been initiated.

But just as sad and difficult as the idea of the sex between a minor and an adult, often quite graphically (emotionally, if not always physically) described, was reading about the ownership that the abuser has over the psyche of the one they abuse. The confusion, the self-hatred, the blame, and the disconnectedness from one’s own body that is learned when it responds in pleasure to the very same stimulus from which the mind is recoiling in disgust, or shame.

The author also did an incredible job subtly critiquing the movement to “expose” predators, and how it at times turned predatory toward those women who either could not, or did not see their experiences through the prism of victimhood. And finally, I admired how, despite being labeled “literary fiction” the author did not indulge in unnecessarily cryptic prose which can sometimes distance the reader from the story and make it less digestible, or accessible. Still, the writing was at points quite beautiful. This is a book worth reading. It will be fodder for many an interesting book club conversation. I recommend it for everyone, but particularly for those of us who may, secretly, once have asked, ‘If it was so terrible, why did she not come forward?’

I could say so much more, but it risks giving away too much since this is a book whose strengths lie in the nuances and the tiny, incremental revelations that the main character reaches about herself and about what she had long believed to be a “great love story”. It’s the kind of book I want to talk about with a friend. I am sure you will, too. Highly, highly recommended.

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This is a heavy consuming book I’ve ever read, it’s one where it would probably be stuck in the back of your mind for a long long time. I can understand why its very popular and seeing it everywhere on articles, it being the best adult fiction or the most controversial debut novel. It’s very disturbing, dark and twisted story, you’d feel uncomfortable too where it’s very hard to read some (alot) of in the story.

The manipulation this teacher has on Vanessa is so devious, there were times I wanted to shake and yell at Vanessa for her lack of intution I want to say? I can see this book would hold alot of conversations and different opinions…I have alot to say that I know some people wouldn’t agree with or would. I found the writing style so beautifully written, so bare and raw with the ugliness of the topic most people don’t often talked enough about yet reading this is like being in Vanessa shoes, as a victim herself.

Be warned that this book holds trigger warnings such as sexual abuse, emotional abuse, drug abuse (alcohol) and smoking. I want to say that I’m glad that this kind of book is out there because it’s not your average typical mental health book, it’s more than that. It’s a very powerful and moving story that it made my skin crawl in a very disturbance yet intruging feels!

Though it may not be based on a true story but this kind of thing do happens that Kate Russell has written it so well in such a perspective way! You’re gonna want to read a light hearted book after this #bookhangover
I had a pleasure of reading and having chats with my friend Bruna about this book!

Story of the lingering damage and refusal to accept abuse of teens by older teachers and mentors. The results of the interactions are lifetime