My Dark Vanessa

My Dark Vanessa tells the story of a disturbing relationship between a teenager and her teacher, and of ways this formative “romance” follows Vanessa into adulthood.

This really feels like a memoir. Some of it is the creative-writing theme, our protag excels at her English classes, loves writing, and seems poised for grad school, and that’s a pretty common tell in MFA memoir. But it’s also really raw and sometimes kinda gross, which can be another MFA memoir tell.

As a fifteen-year-old student, being groomed and seduced by her charismatic English teacher. Vanessa leans into the idea of the precocious ingenue. And this is deftly done — it feels like any of us leaning into the roles laid out by teenage crushes. The cool girl? The girl with the best musical taste? I was reminded of the section about the mythical Cool Girl in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. The cool girl eats whatever, without getting fat, she likes guy things and rejects girly things, but she’s always looking hot, she loves sex, etc. Is Vanessa leaning into the Lolita role any different?

The sexual exploitation turns out to just one of the many ways Vanessa is taken advantage of.  Her relationship with Strane costs her private school admission, any chance of  friendships with her peers, and ripples out through college and adulthood, constantly dragging her down.  Like most men in this situation, Strane gets some dirty looks and that’s, for most of the book, the extent of his punishment. (The clearest sign for me that this was a repeat predator was his careful paper trail about the bright student with an inappropriate crush on her teacher. )

Vanessa is mostly an unreliable narrator, unreliable to herself as she comes close to figuring out that maybe she’s not a free-spirited party girl, maybe she’s using all her wild habits to push something else away. Almost realizing that Strane is a repeat predator, but then pushing that away too, trying to hold the memory of their relationship as one-in-a-lifetime love. Of course those other girls are lying, he wouldn’t be groping other teenage students because he loves her so much.

But then, she questions if what happened to her was so bad. Sure, her relationship was taboo, she says, but if it wasn’t a forty-something man, it would have been a drunk frat boy or another boy using her. It’s gross, because her point is true — there are so many relationships in which men take advantage of girls, and there are so many ways to be misused. But it’s also gross because, ewww, fifteen is a child. The imbalance of power is gross. The age gap is so gross. And it’s gross and sometimes hard to read a story where the protagonist tries really, really hard not to see that as anything important.