An interview with Kate Elizabeth Russell
"I realize now that abuse and obsession and violence are not things that should belong in a love story."
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There are books that generate buzz, and then there is My Dark Vanessa, which was released last month into a veritable roar. Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel was always primed to become a book inseparable from “the discourse.” It is a book, after all, about a teenage girl who has an affair with her high school teacher and whose process to reconcile what that means about the two of them takes a decade of pain and struggle to process. When Russell started working on the book a decade ago, she didn’t know that it would be released in a post- Me Too world, where it would land in the midst of dozens of ongoing narratives of real-life stories like the one she’d written. (For the sake of full disclosure: Russell and I have the same editor at Harper Collins, but when I read her novel, I hadn’t signed yet)
A book with a topic like this has to walk through a field of wildflowers with land mines for petals, and the only thing that can save it is talent. It makes sense that a book like this, a book with a protagonist who thinks of her abuse as a love story and who struggles to understand its impact on her, would become controversial. Plus, it makes sense that it had a target on its back on publication because it sold for a seven figure advance. But unlike, uh, other books with huge advances that dropped this year, My Dark Vanessa is a tightly written, thoughtful, page-turning book. It’s good. I read it in a single day, and it forced me to think about my own experience as a teenage girl in ways I had never realized.
Earlier this week, I called up Russell to chat about what she’s reading, how she crafted this book, and how spending so long with a story affected her ability to tell it:
Okay let's start off with the current problem: are you able to read anything right now?
A little bit but only in like bits and pieces. Reading a handful at a time suits my attention span right now. I haven’t sat and read through a novel all the way through. I’ve been picking up denser stuff: stuff that is suited to be read only a few pages at a time and then you can sort of set it down. I was re-reading this novel, that I read for the first time last year but was already compelled to reread it, called Malina. The author is Ingeborg Bachmann. It’s incredible.
I was also reading the diaries of this teenage Ukrainian diarist. The collection of diary entries is called I Am The Most Interesting Book of All. She's this incredible teenage voice that has so much swagger. Marie Bashkirtseff is her name. It’s the most frustrating thing that you feel like you have so much time but can't get into the mental state to take advantage of it I guess.
One of the things that stunned me about this book was how real the teenage voice of Vanessa was. I found the classroom scenes particularly realistic and overwhelming. How did you go about making those feel true?
The classroom scenes especially, I did have early versions of those, which was helpful inevitably to draw from just for getting the voice right. It was important for me to get the details of the room right to make the reader feel fully immersed in those scenes when she's with Strane [the teacher]. I was drawing maps of his classroom and maps of the office so I knew every corner of that classroom. When I was younger and I would be setting a scene that I wanted to be very vivid in the readers mind, I would have this impulse to describe everything and there would be these paragraphs of description. It took me a while to realize that that’s all information that I as a writer needs, but then I pick specific details that are going to work the best for the reader. I don’t need to give them every thing. It was a matter of looking at old drafts and doing work off the page.
The sort of power Vanessa feels internally in those scenes I remember from being a young teen, but that now as an adult I know was a kind of false power. How did you, as the writer, manage to give Vanessa the feeling of power while indicating to the reader that this is actually an unhealthy and abusive relationship?
I think working with this character over so many years helped me maybe retain some of that teenage voice in my own psyche or let me have this entry point into that voice. It was difficult when I was working on this in my 30s in the PhD program, it was a struggle to keep myself, my moralizing self out of it. The way that I sort of kept myself out of it was by writing in the present tense. That was one of those craft decisions that worked for me. That made the narrative click into place in a lot of ways.
Vanessa sort of experiences her abuse in a way where she just sees it as sex. That's how she views it and that’s how she would describe it and that’s the level she was able to operate at. When I was younger, that was the level I was able to operate at. I was writing these scenes, in which Vanessa was being abused but there wasn’t the space for the reader to see this as abusive. I was asking the reader to see this as only sex.
But that is the way a teenage girl sees it, right? When I read this book, I realized that I had a teacher who flirted with us inappropriately, who certainly could have been a Strane-type for me if any domino had fallen differently. Now of course, I see that as extremely fucked up, but at 13 I thought that we were just so desirable that of course he must be attracted to us.
What an interesting thing to think at that age. It’s your way of making sense of it. Seeing him as helpless but yourself as really powerful.
I have the same memories and feelings with a lot of experiences in my youth. It's so cringey looking back, but I completely understand why I was drawn to understanding it in that way. In a way that allowed me to have a certain amount of power. Why wouldn’t I have wanted to see it in that sense rather than seeing myself as this victim, this helpless thing?
In every interview I've read, you talk about reading Lolita when you were young and seeing it as an epic romance and then at some point a switch flipped. You’ve also said the same thing happened with this book: that it started for you as a love story and became something else. When did that turn happen for you?
I don’t know. Something did switch. When I reread Lolita now, to a large extent, I still read it the same way that I did when I was a teenager. It's just that I realize now that abuse and obsession and violence are not things that should belong in a love story. When I was young, I still saw all the badness but that didn’t disqualify it from being a love story. I have a more healthy and nuanced view of that now. I still feel like I’m the same reader and writer that I did when I was a teenager, but I have a little bit more perspective I guess.
How long was it into the process before that happened?
I was in my mid-20s when I really started learning about trauma theory. In some ways it was a gradual thing. At the tail end of my MFA one of my thesis readers asked me if I had read this short story called "Lawns" by Mona Simpson. It was this incredible short story published in the 80s written in first person about this college freshman. You meet her, and she’s very unlikeable and doing weird stuff and then you realize that she’s been sexually abused by her father since she was a little kid.
I read this story and I recognized Vanessa in her so much. But at the same time, this was a story about incest. It felt so far removed from this "love story" that I thought I had been writing. I think that was one of my first realizations that what I was working on has more to do with sexual abuse than I ever realized. Reading that and then reading Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss and later Tiger Tiger by Margaux Fragoso. which are really narratives of sexual abuse. Beginning to learn about trauma theory for me really came out of being on Tumblr in 2010, 2011. You would see these bits of critical theory surrounded by gifs of girls in wildflowers. That was really formative for me. That was when I really started to see the cultural and theoretical framework that the book fit into.
So far, you’ve mentioned a lot of memoirs. I want to know more about your decision to write this novel in the first person.
For a long time, I resisted writing this in the first person. I don’t know if it was partly me thinking that writing in first person was somehow stigmatized especially when writing from a teenage girl point of view -- that it would be accused of being narcissistic or navel-gazey or frivolous -- but it got to the point where I really realized that this had to be written in first person because the meat of the story was in Vanessa’s psychology. Writing from a close first person point of view was the absolute right way to tell this story. That realization really came from reading about trauma and realizing that this book I was writing was a story of trauma.
Especially because that is fraught. Women's books are always kind of assumed to be diaries that they transcribed into a document.
I mean, yeah what can you do? It’s still strange for me seeing certain responses to the book that for me so easily fit into these patterns of criticism of narratives of sexual abuse or first person narratives of adolescents girlhood. At the same time, I feel like it's kind of a badge of honor.
My book is getting the same line of criticism as these other books that I really really admire got upon their publication. I feel like we're in a little clique, my book and these other books.
Since you were almost done with the book by the Me Too movement picked up steam, how did it feel to watch this book you'd been working on for 10 years become "timely"?
I feel like I always use the word "surreal" to describe how it felt in fall of 2017 when Me Too started happening and I was so deep in the writing process. I was working on the present day plot line of another student coming forward in fall 2017. I have such vivid memories of writing and taking a break and bringing up twitter and scrolling through and being like, "This is what I’m writing." It felt exciting but at the same time I struggled for a few months to figure out how I wanted to address it. I finally settled on sort of alluding to Me Too so that there was a larger movement happening in the background. It felt risky because having a timely novel isn’t something that I every anticipated or envisioned for myself because I've been working on this for so long.
I knew that by having a “timely” book there would be a really easy criticism to be made of it being opportunistic or capitalizing. That’s not something I find ultimately worth caring about because it is an easy criticism. Especially if you haven’t read the book yet. I got to the point where I decided to believe in myself and believe in the book I had written because I had been doing this work for so long that even though I was an unknown writer without known publications, I knew that I had something meaningful to say. I’ve been here. I’ve been watching and observing these conversations. I've been doing the work and writing this novel.
I had written a book that I really believed in. I knew it was nuanced and complicated. It’s scary, and it still is kind of scary to have it be part of the Me Too conversation.
Okay final question: One of the things this newsletter really focuses on is books by women that may have been forgotten. Do you have any we should keep on our radar?
I haven’t read these yet. I just discovered this writer named Heather Lewis. She published some novels in the 90s and early 2000s. They’ve been more or less forgotten. I haven't read them yet, but they are in the mail to me. Her work is supposed to be super, super dark, almost unbearably difficult to read. It deals with themes of sexual abuse and girlhood and violence, and I’m so excited to dig in. It’s this almost frustrating experience when you discover a writer who is pretty contemporary, whose work fits thematically so close to your own, and you’re like why haven’t I heard of her before? Where has she been?
I feel like especially there are women writers from the 80s and 90s who just got buried. It’s as though Laurie Moore is the only writer from that era. Especially in writing programs. And Mary Gaitskill. I love both of them, but there are so many women who have been forgotten or go out of print.
Buy My Dark Vanessa at your local independent bookstore, or at bookshop.com
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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