february17–march1, 2020 | newyork 65novel in college, in M.F.A. workshops,and
in a Ph.D. program. She had neverbeento
New York until her publisher invitedher
here. Now, at 35, sipping an electric-green
tarragon soda that looked to her likesome-
thing Willy Wonka might have concocted,
Russell was overwhelmed, she said,anda
little nervous. Saddled with the responsibili-
ties that come with the launch ofa highly
publicized title, she was feeling nostalgicfor
the anonymity of those years. Thepleasure
of losing herself in her work had alwaysbeen
a crucial part of her writing process.“I start
with an idea, a feeling, and leanintoit as
hard as I can to the point where I disappear,”
she said. “Then it really becomes fiction.”
The idea that shaped My DarkVanessa
had saturated Russell’s adolescence.Long
before she encountered Lolita, Russellhad
been steeped in narratives that glamorized
relationships between powerfulmenand
much younger women. Lookingbackon
that era, she recalled the Rolling Stonecover
with “teen dream” Britney Spearsinher
childhood bedroom, a Teletubbysnuggled
under her arm, her cardigan partedto
re veal a silky black bra. On TV, politicians
were castigating the presidentforlying
about an affair with a 22-year-oldintern,
but no one seemed to think of himasan
abuser—not even the intern, whomain-
tained for years afterward that she’dbeenin
love and who has only recentlysaidshe’s
“beginning to entertain the notionthat in
such a circumstance the idea ofconsent
might well be rendered moot.” Watchingit
all play out, Russell was riveted.“Ifyou
swept away the politics,” she said, “whatwas
left was what I perceived thentobean
intense, romantic affair.” One of herfavorite
stories was The Phantom of theOpera,in
which a decrepit old man kidnapsa young
woman (her age has ranged between 15 and
20, depending on the version) anddrags
her to his lair beneath the PalaisGarnier.
Russell found it thrilling. In seventhgrade,
after her teacher assigned the studentsto
write a three-page story, she turnedin 80
pages of Phantom fanfiction—oneofher
earliest literary efforts.
As she sees it now, her interestinthese
relationships was inextricablefromher
dream of leaving small-town Maineand
becoming an artist. “I saw oldermenasa
way to access art and culture andbooks—
things I didn’t necessarily feel likeI had
access to otherwise,” she said. WhenI asked
if she’d say more about these men,Russell
looked away and shook her head.Mea-
sured and serious, she’d occasionallyallow
the conversation to lapse into longsilences
before answering my questions, herheavy-
lidded eyes and high-arched eyebrows
granting her an air of inscrutability. She
didn’t want to go into details, she said,
though she didn’t mind recalling the intoxi-
cating emotions that accompanied those
relationships. “I remember feeling really
powerful and treasured and put on a ped-
estal,” she said. “Like someone is risking so
much just to talk to me. That was a lot of
what made me start writing. That’s what I
wanted to put on the page.”
When Russell arrived at the University
of Maine at Farmington for college, she had
already written some 200 pages of a draft
of what would become My Dark Vanessa.
At that stage, Russell still thought of it as a
love story. Patricia O’Donnell, her creative-
writing professor, recalled the aspiring
author as remarkably talented, focused,
and guarded. “She would leave her peacoat
on and buttoned up all the way in class, and
she would put her hands in her pockets,
and her hair was hiding her face,” she said.
“But she was open with me as her professor
that she’d had an experience in high school
that was very traumatic. She wouldn’t haveused that word, but she had been through
this fire of an experience, and now she had
an ambition. Other students didn’t seem to
have that same drive.”
One of her friends in the program, Katie
O’Donnell (no relation to the professor),
remembered Russell flirting with older
men at local bars. “It was always like the
college guys were too immature for her,”
she said. “She was always chasing some-
thing else.” O’Donnell would read Russell’s
accounts of these evenings on LiveJournal
the next day and marvel at how she had
turnedthemintosomethinglike literature.
“I’d be writing an entry,” she said, “and just
be like spewing out whatever, and see that
Kate has created this beautiful scene.” Rus-
sell drafted early passages of the novel on
the platform, and her friends watched the
book develop over countless posts. The
author was already gaining a following; at
a Spring Fling event where a group of stu-
dents wrote the names of famous writers
on their T-shirts, the name on O’Donnell’s
shirt was kate russell.Russell went straight from college into
the M.F.A. program at Indiana University. It
was a frustrating time. She couldn’t answer
the two basic questions every student of fic-
tion was asked: Why tell this story, and why
tell it now? She was still trying to frame the
narrative as a romance, which people in her
workshops always found bewildering. “Why
would someone do this?,” she remembered
a classmate wondering about Vanessa. “She
must be a slut.” People found the protagonist
unlikable, even repulsive, and some urged
Russell to abandon the project. (Later, in her
Ph.D. program, one professor wrote her a
note that simply said, “Stop turning this in.”)
After some of her workshops, she’d feel so
discouraged that she would put the manu-
script away and not pick it up again for
months. But she could never shake Vanessa.
A friend from her M.F.A. program recalled
Russell talking about the character as
though she were a real person. “I have mem-
ories of Vanessa back then the way I have
memories of an old lost acquaintance,” the
friend recounted. “Someone who comes to
mind occasionally, and you feel a tinge of
worry—How is she doing?, I wonder. I hope
she’s okay.”
After receiving her M.F.A, Russell moved
to Portland, Maine, where she worked odd
jobs—at the front desk of a hotel, as an assis-
tant to two politicians—and fell into a bad
relationship with a man her age. This
gloomy stretch of her adulthood furnished
much of the inspiration for the sections of
My Dark Vanessa that are set in the present.
Adrift and stuck in her life and work, she
began reading posts on Tumblr about criti-
cal trauma theory, which led her to a series
of memoirs about traumatic sexual relation-
ships, among them Kathryn Harrison’s The
Kiss and Tiger, Tiger, by Margaux Fragoso.
It was during this period, as she was delving
into accounts of “actual, unequivocal pedo-
philia,” that it dawned on her: The relation-
ship between Vanessa and Strane could not
be a love story. It was abuse, even if her char-
acter didn’t want to call it that. When I asked
if this epiphany had changed how she
viewed her own experiences with older men,
she shrugged. “It was a lot harder for Van-
essa to deal with this than it was for me. I
was just like, Now I finally know how to
write this.”
By the time the Me Too movement began,
the book was nearly finished. The parts that
describe a woman calling out an abuser on
social media were already in place. Russell
was writing ten hours a day, trying to finish
the manuscript in time to present it as her
dissertation, and in her brief breaks from
work, she would scroll through Twitter.
“Holy shit,” she remembered thinking, “this
is what I’m writing.” Now she could answer“I wonder how
much victimhood
they’d be
willing to grant
a girl like me.”