Book review: My Dark Vanessa

My friend Trevor told me to read My Dark Vanessa months and months ago. To be completely honest, I barely read books. And of the books I read, fiction makes up a very small percentage. So that alone should probably be enough to get you to stop caring about what I think about this book. But since he’s going to want to know what I think about it I might as well share my thoughts with the internet as well.

There are probably going to be spoilers ahead so if you’re still reading and that’s not your thing, you’ve been warned.

The book is about a depressed, brooding, poetry-writing 15-year-old boarding school girl on scholarship (Vanessa) who begins an affair with her middle-aged English teacher (Jacob Strain). I listened to the book instead of reading it, so apologies if I spell things wrong.

After the book finished Audible launched into the editor of the book interviewing the author (Kate Elizabeth Russell) and the voice actor who read it. In the interview, Russell says she started writing My Dark Vanessa when she was still a teenager. And I did feel one of the book’s greatest strengths was how real the teenage Vanessa seemed. Russell said she fought her urges to insert her 30-something self into the character and I think she did a great job.

I thought Vanessa’s transformation over the pages was fascinating. The book goes back and forth in time between Vanessa as a teen and young adult and Vanessa as a 32-year-old woman grappling with her teen years after another girl comes forward claiming to have been abused by Jacob Strain.

When the book starts, 32-year-old Vanessa indicates she doesn’t believe she’s a victim and trots out talking points straight out of Quillette. Knowing nothing about the book, I internally groaned, thinking Trevor has sent me a manosphere libertarian propaganda. (As a libertarian I can make this joke. Libertarianism in a nutshell: "Actually, it's just hebephilia.")

But no. In the end, everyone, including Vanessa, sees that a parentally, socially, and economically isolated 15-year-old girl cannot meaningfully consent to a sexual relationship with her middle-aged Harvard-educated teacher.

I guess the book is brave in that it brings up the rough edges of consent at all. But at the end of the day it settles along socially acceptable moral lines.

What it brought up for me is that the boring stories don’t get told. I have another friend, also a libertarian, Avens, who has talked openly about having dated much older, wealthier, and more powerful men when she was a teenager. For her, this wasn’t traumatizing or abusive. It’s just a part of her past. But that’s not as simple or compelling a story. It complicates the narrative.

In the book, Vanessa talks about how not every 15-year-old girl is the same. In the end, that’s made to seem like cover for her not wanting to see her abuse for what it is. But what of Avens? Are we to believe she’s some amount of therapy away from accepting that her relationships were abusive? I highly doubt it.

Russell does a great job of making Strain a really pathetic, despicable character. It’s certainly true that 99% of the time if your high school teacher says he had the “bad luck” of falling in love with a teenager he’s full of shit and a serial abuser.

Which means that, a more interesting book, I can’t help but think, might have explored the rarer thing: When that’s actually true. Why not write a book about a middle-aged man who really does have the bad luck of falling for his precocious 15-year-old student? And the truth is that no one is going to write that book because we’re not ready to root for that couple. Mostly we’re not ready to root for that couple because we want better for precocious 15-year-olds than middle-aged men who can be intellectually satisfied by 15-year-olds, no matter how mature they might be.

But also because we’re not really ready to fully have the conversation about how consent is a spectrum, not a binary.

I liked My Dark Vanessa. It was well-written. It was a metaphorical page-turner (since I was listening on Audible). I wanted to know what happened to Vanessa, both back then and her “now.” I’ve never been to New England but I loved the descriptions of Maine. I applaud Russell for approaching the subject of age and consent with any nuance whatsoever in today’s climate. But it did leave me wanting more. I want an even more nuanced conversation about age, power, and consent. I appreciated Vanessa’s antihero qualities but wanted Strain to be less cartoon villain.

At the end of the day I think the question of consent comes down to: It depends. Some 15-year-olds can consent to sex. Some 35-year-olds haven’t figured out how to say “no.” My Dark Vanessa is a good first step toward really exploring how the boundary between rape and sex isn’t as bright and clear a line as we’d like it to be.