She sees it differently now.
My Dark Vanessawill be published by William Morrow on March 10.Read an excerpt.
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Kate Elizabeth Russelltraces the beginning of her obsession withLolitato an encounter with the musician Jakob Dylan.
Russells father happened to be a DJ for Kings radio station, and he arranged a dinner.
Russell and her cousin got to tag along.
Later, she read everything she could find about him.
I didnt know that was an option, she recalled thinking at the time.
Russell was not an exception.
Hers was a love story too, she told me over lunch in Manhattan a few weeks ago.
At least, thats how she saw it back then and for many years after.
But Vanessa doesnt join the chorus of voices demanding his firing.
But she didnt anticipate the trap she would fall into by refusing to be explicit about her personal life.
Russell denied the accusations of plagiarism but insisted on maintaining the boundary she had drawn around her own experiences.
When I reached her there, she pointed out the eerie similarities between the controversy and her novel.
She thinks,I wonder how much victimhood theyd be willing to grant a girl like me.
When I first metRussell, in the middle of January, she had yet to be accused of anything.
I keep reminding myself that its literally a dream come true.
workshops, and in a Ph.D. program.
She had never been to New York until her publisher invited her here.
The pleasure of losing herself in her work had always been a crucial part of her writing process.
Then it really becomes fiction.
The idea that shapedMy Dark Vanessahad saturated Russells adolescence.
Watching it all play out, Russell was riveted.
Russell found it thrilling.
When I asked if shed say more about these men, Russell looked away and shook her head.
I remember feeling really powerful and treasured and put on a pedestal, she said.
Like someone is risking so much just to talk to me.
That was a lot of what made me start writing.
Thats what I wanted to put on the page.
Patricia ODonnell, her creative-writing professor, recalled the aspiring author as remarkably talented, focused, and guarded.
Other students didnt seem to have that same drive.
It was always like the college guys were too immature for her, she said.
She was always chasing something else.
Russell went straight from college into the M.F.A.
program at Indiana University.
It was a frustrating time.
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.
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.
It was abuse, even if her character didnt want to call it that.
It was a lot harder for Vanessa 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.
Holy shit, she remembered thinking, this is what Im writing.
Now she could answer the questions that had stumped her as an M.F.A.
student: Why this story, and why now?
Me Too seemed like it came out of nowhere, but I had been paying attention, she said.
Russell began querying agents in spring 2018.
Jacobson could see the book had that extremely rare and sought-after combination of literary writing with a commercial plot.
Jessica Williams, the editor who bought it, had a similar reaction.
By the end of the year, Russell had joined an elite group.
This swell of attention is what made Russell the subject of afurious Twitter controversyweeks before the novels publication.
Several prominent authors stepped into the fray.
Im sorry that this other book is co-opting your story without acknowledgment, Roxane Gay wrote in atweetto Ortiz.
Wounded, she tweeted that shed begun working on her book many years ago.
These stories of abuse often have v similar elements, she pointed out.
Then she deleted her Twitter account.
I readExcavation,and Russell didnt plagiarize it.
But Ortizs tweet was like a match dropped onto a haystack soaked in gasoline.
The controversy has been good for book sales:Excavationsold out on Amazon.
But Ortiz told me she was disturbed by the way it unfolded.
People are taking it as me against Kate, she said.
But its bigger than that.
This fact, combined with the industrys embrace ofMy Dark Vanessa,struck her as evidence of systemic racism.
When these controversies play out on Twitter, they tend to reward clear-cut narratives.
What would I gain as a human being?
Its not anything I need, and I dont think its anything the reader needs.
I just dont want to relinquish everything.
There would have been an arbor in flame-flower.
There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday.
Its so easy to skim over.
You just see it as beautiful imagery.
Vera Nabokov, the authors 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 happened to her.
In the end, only Humberts perspective is captured on the page.
Its obvious why Humbert would prefer to describe his rape of Lolita as romantic.
Russell considers why Vanessa would entertain the same fantasy.
She sees it as the unfurling of a previously unthinkable possibility.
I have power, Vanessa thinks.
Power to make it happen.
I was an idiot for not realizing this sooner.
Twenty years after she started writing the book, the insidious fantasy still lingers.
When did it go away?, she wondered.
