My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
What is it about?
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Vanessa is forced to revisit her past and re-examine the relationship she had with her high school teacher Jacob Strane – was it love, or was it something else?
OK, but what is it really about?
When she was a 15-year-old girl at a boarding school, Vanessa Wye had a sexual relationship with her 42-year-old English teacher Jacob Strane. Almost two decades later, Vanessa sees on social media that another former student Strane has accused him of sexual abuse. Other women come forward as well. Reliving the days when it all began, she begins to question their entire relationship. For her, it was romance, the greatest and possibly only love story of her life. Was it the same for him, though?
Is it any good?
The story is told from Vanessa’s point of view, and the author dives deep into the psyche of her protagonist. We see her as a lonely 15-year-old teenager, craving attention and love, and how Jacob Strane begins to groom her – through mind games and power play, through psychological manipulation, driven by fatal attraction, lust and desire. It’s stomach-churning when he gives Vanessa white cotton pyjamas, dotted with red strawberries, right before they have sex for the first time, and when he asks her to call him “Daddy.”
We later see Vanessa as a college student, continuing the relationship with Strane – now not illegal anymore, but no less abusive as her obsession with her former teacher continues to fully consume her. It is all she has ever known. She still needs his reassurance, needs him to tell her that she is “special”, even though she often despises him as much as she thinks she loves him.
Even at 32, now working at a hotel and spending her free time drinking alcohol and smoking weed, Vanessa still keeps in touch with Strane. When the accusations against him become public, her first instinct is to deny and to protect him – after all, she wasn’t a victim, they were in love, weren’t they? She had power over him, did she not? He always asked her for consent and permission, did he not? It’s a truth – her truth – she desperately clings to, because Vanessa isn’t able to realize and rationalize what actually happened. That it wasn’t her fault. That it was, indeed, abuse and also rape.
What this book does remarkably well is to show Vanessa in the different stages of her life, and how the trauma she experienced in her teenage years carries on into adulthood, defining her whole life and her entire being. When the realization slowly creeps in, that she was indeed groomed and abused, Vanessa begins to fall apart, and it is utterly heartbreaking, but also a relief.
Most memorable quote?
“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on for so long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?”
I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide-open empathy.
“It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
Conclusion?
This is an extremely gripping and well written debut. As a reader, I felt an incredibly wide range of emotions, albeit most of them were negative: anger, despair, frustration, rage, only once or twice a glimmer of hope. At times, I experienced a bit of nausea and had to take a break, only to pick up the book ten minutes later because I simply couldn’t stop reading and was desperate to know how the story ends.
So often, I wanted to jump into the pages of the book and cry out a warning, grab Vanessa by the shoulders and tell her to stop – and the helplessness I felt as the story unfolded was staggering. This book is not easy to stomach at all. It definitely lives up to the hype, but it’s a tough one to get through.
Trigger warnings: rape, sexual and emotional abuse, gaslighting, trauma, paedophilia
AT A GLANCE
Title: My Dark Vanessa
By: Kate Elizabeth Russell
Published by: Harper Collins UK (2020)
Pages: 372
Language: English