My Dark Vanessa was published to much fanfare in March 2020. At the time, I was indecisive about whether I wanted to buy a book that I felt for sure, based on the subject matter, I was not going to like. In the end I decided not to read it. About a year later, My Dark Vanessa went on sale on Kindle books and once again I found myself dithering over whether I wanted to buy it. In the end curiosity won out and I decided to read it. It turns out that I was right, I did not enjoy reading My Dark Vanessa. I do not know how anyone can enjoy reading a novel about a 15-year-old girl being sexually groomed by her 42-year-old English teacher. However, that does not mean I think you should not read this novel.

The novel opens in 2017, when the #MeToo movement really started to take off; Vanessa Wye is in her early thirties, working as a concierge at a hotel in Portland, Maine. She has just found out that a young woman who also went to the boarding school (Browick) that Vanessa attended for a couple of years as a teenager has accused an English teacher at Browick, Jacob Strane, of sexual assault. The novel then begins to alternate back and forth between Vanessa recounting to the reader the start of her sexual relationship with Strane as a 15-year-old girl, until it ended when she was 21, and the present when Vanessa is trying to come to terms with what Strane did to her.

My Dark Vanessa is uncomfortable to read because Russell does not spare any details on how Strane grooms Vanessa, leading up to their first sexual encounter, which no matter how much Vanessa tries to deny the reality of it, was rape. My Dark Vanessa is also frustrating to read because on one hand, it seems like Vanessa is aware of how she was manipulated by Strane and there are times when she is recounting their “relationship” that she really does seem to loathe him (and she describes these out of body experiences where she is not really “present” when he is having sex with her). But on the other hand, she insists that their relationship is like the novel Lolita (which Stane gives to her, of course), which she thinks is a love story; she believes that they are star-crossed lovers like Humbert and Dolores (I have never read Lolita, which apparently is a beautifully written novel, if you can look past a middle-aged man forcing himself on his 12-year-old stepdaughter. I cannot). She believes that she is the one who has the power in their relationship. She believes that Strane really loves her and that she really loves him. But does she really believe this, or does she believe this to cope with the reality of the situation? Strane tells her at the beginning of their relationship that he is going to ruin her, and he does. She has so much potential, but ends up in a dead-end job, not able to sustain a stable relationship with another man and drinking and smoking weed constantly because she cannot come to terms with the fact that Strane was the one with the power from the start and that he likes having sex with minors.

My Dark Vanessa is also an examination of how we treat victims of sexual assault. When other students at Browick learn of Vanessa’s “affair” of Strane and go to the administration with it, Vanessa covers for Strane and says that she made it all up. The school does not seem interested in digging too deeply into the matter and accepts that Vanessa is the liar, not Strane, and kicks her out of Browick. Vanessa’s parents are aware that something happened between her and Strane, but they also do not do anything to protect their daughter and try to act like nothing happened. Even the media fails Vanessa; a reporter hounds Vanessa about coming public with relationship with Strane to back up the other woman who has accused him, and when Vanessa says no, tries to use the coercive tactic of threatening to publish portions of Vanessa’s anonymous blog recounting her relationship with “S” (which she thought was no longer viewable by the public) to get her to cooperate. It is just another example of how sexual assault victims are exploited.

I thought for sure that My Dark Vanessa was going to end up depressing the hell out of me, but it surprisingly has a hopeful ending – for Vanessa, that is. This novel helped me to better understand victims of sexual assault and why they might deny that they were even assaulted. But will books like this and the #MeToo movement make a difference that will have a lasting impact? Only time will tell, but I wish it would hurry up.