february17–march1, 2020 | newyork 67mental and loose. My Dark Vanessa,
meanwhile, possesses that essential fea-
ture of nearly all successful commercial
fiction—it is compulsively readable,
threaded with enough tension to keep a
reader entranced until the end. In an
essay for Gay’s online magazine, Ortiz
noted she had no interest in reading a
“fictionalized, sensationalized” version of
an experience she had lived. Few editors
in New York’s publishing world would
likely share those qualms. One agent told
me she’d always found it difficult to sell
stories about sexual abuse. “Editors are
just as squeamish as potential readers, if
not more so,” she said. “There are some
who will immediately take the book out of
the running because they personally are
not wishing to deal with that subject.” It
helps if the work is fiction, she added.
“There’s an extra layer of safety. It’s very
hard to engage with someone else’s
anguish.” Russell, too, said she required
the shield that fiction provided: “I needed
that distance to be in control as a writer.”
When these controversies play out on
Twitter, they tend to reward clear-cut
narratives. Some might have embraced
Russell if she’d come out and said, “Yes,
I was abused,” but the author had long
ago made up her mind never to go there
in the promotion of her book. “If I were
to say something in this current environ-
ment, would it help, or would it make the
situation worse?,” she asked over the
phone from her home in Madison. “What
would I gain as a human being? It’s not
anything I need, and I don’t think it’s
anything the reader needs.” Even if her
book were an account of abuse, she bris-
tled at the idea of summing up her own
experiences that way for the public. “If I
start categorizing a relationship, if I say,
‘That was abusive,’ that swallows up
everything,” she said. “I just don’t want
to relinquish everything.”a few years ago, Russell reread Lolita.
This time, she noticed something she’d
missed as a teenager: Even as Nabokov
puts ecstatic declarations of love in the
mouth of his protagonist, he occasionally
reveals through the smallest details what
he really thinks about his characters,
which is that Humbert Humbert is a
monster and Lolita a suffering child. Over
lunch, Russell brought up the infamous
scene in which Humbert first has sex with
Lolita and declares it was “she who
seduced me.” Afterward, Humbert fanta-
sizes about painting a lavish mural to
depict what happened in the hotel room:
“There would have been a lake. There
would have been an arbor in flame-flower.
There would have been nature studies—a
tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a chok-
ing snake sheathing whole the flayed
trunk of a shoat ... There would have been
poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday.
There would have been a fire opal dissolv-
ing within a ripple-ringed pool, a last
throb, a last dab of color, stinging red,
smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.”
“You read the passage,” Russell said,
“and it’s just gorgeous prose, gorgeous
prose, gorgeous prose, and then the last
image is of a wincing child. It’s so easy to
skim over. You just see it as beautiful imag-
ery. Who knows if Nabokov was trying to
make some social commentary about how
we all are complicit and we all ignore this,
but certainly that’s the way I read it.”
Nabokov was famously reticent about
his authorial intentions—“I do not give a
damn for public morals,” he once said—but
there were many interviews in which hemade his position clear. When a writer for
The Paris Review said he found Humbert
to be “touching,” Nabokov corrected him:
“Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel
wretch who manages to appear ‘touch-
ing.’ ” Véra Nabokov, the author’s wife,
went further. Lolita “cries every night,” she
told an interviewer. “The critics are deaf to
her sobs.” Still, we never learn how the
child, Dolores Haze, viewed what hap-
pened to her. In the end, only Humbert’s
perspective is captured on the page.
My Dark Vanessa can be read as a mir-
ror image of Lolita. Both Vanessa and
Humbert are unreliable narrators; both
use the language of love to mask the
trauma lurking beneath the surface of
their stories. It’s obvious why Humbert
would prefer to describe his rape of Lolita
as romantic. Russell considers why Van-
essa would entertain the same fantasy.
Early in his seduction, Strane gives Van-
essa a copy of Lolita. As Russell once did,
she buys into the lie that it was Lolita who
seduced Humbert. She sees it as the
unfurling of a previously unthinkable pos-
sibility. “I have power,” Vanessa thinks.
“Power to make it happen. Power over
him. I was an idiot for not realizing this
sooner.” The power she feels is an illu-
sion—a product of the same culture that
cast Nabokov’s wincing child in the role of
a sexy temptress. “A lot of the messiness in
Vanessa’s psyche comes from a culture
that celebrates abuse as something from
which great art can be made,” Russell said.
Even now, it can be jarring for Russell to
revisit My Dark Vanessa and remember
that she hasn’t written a love story but a
narrative of trauma. Twenty years after she
started writing the book, the insidious fan-
tasy still lingers. “When did it go away?,”
she wondered. “Oh God. It’s a process.” ■Ortiz Writes
an Essay
In a piece for Gay
Mag, Ortiz focuses
on the difficulties
she faced in
trying to get her
memoir published:
“Gatekeepers have
kept me, and so many
others, out. Now
is the time to call
out the publishing
industry ... for its
racism and small-
mindedness about
who gets published
and who does not.”RussellReleases
a Statement
Onherwebsite,Russell
postsa short statement
expressingherdesire for
privacy:“Ihavebeen
afraidthatopening
upfurtheraboutmy
pastwouldinvite
inquirythatcouldbe
retraumatizing,and
mypublishertriedto
protectmy boundaries
byincludinga reminder
toreadersthat the
novelis fiction.”The Controversy
Peaks
On Twitter, some
applaud Ortiz
for criticizing the
publishing industry,
others demand that
Russell prove she
was abused, while
more weigh in to
defend the author’s
right to privacy.FEBRUARY 1
Ortiz Releases One, Too
Responding to Russell,
she writes, “I’m troubled
by the idea that anyone
would feel compelled to
reveal their experience of
trauma under duress ...
My perspective is that
the publishing industry
is structured to elevate
some voices and not
others, and Excavation
is only one case in point.”
She adds, “The word
‘plagiarism’ has come up
in people’s comments a
number of times, and it’s
a word I have not used.”