My Dark Vanessa: A Novel

"So, I raced through this book. It had been ages since I’d been so conscious of a book in my house that I just couldn’t wait to get back to. But, having said that, it’s not exactly a pleasant read; it’s an uncomfortable book to read. It’s really, really gripping. Essentially, the narrator Vanessa is accepted into this very fancy boarding school, Browick, where she enters into a sexual relationship with a teacher. Because it’s articulated from the older Vanessa’s perspective, again we have an understanding as a reader of something that the character themselves is a little bit resistant to understanding. “Her ambivalence towards the school—she feels resentful of it and victimised, angry—totally mash up with her feelings about her abuser” Vanessa becomes almost stuck at, fixated on, this period when she was being groomed by this teacher. She finds herself as an adult unable to move past that moment in her life, being unable to form new relationships, and fixated on the validation that she attributed to that abuse. What makes it so interesting, I think, is that as a reader you become almost complicit in her nostalgia for her school days as an adult, when we’re aware that what’s happening to her is abusive and manipulative and horrific. Yet the narrative has this weird effect, where the period of her abuse before she leaves the school has this odd prelapsarian quality to it. We recognise as readers that that’s completely mistaken, and so the experience of reading it is one of real discomfort and uncanniness. The abuse that takes place really wouldn’t have been possible without that boarding school environment. The whole structure of her memories about the school, and the claustrophobia of the stalking and obsession, is so tied up with the school. Her ambivalence towards the school—she feels resentful of it and victimised, angry—totally mash up with her feelings about her abuser. It’s very interesting. I thought it was very perceptive about the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive traumatic ordeals. That doesn’t make it unproblematic, necessarily. But I also think it’s an interesting addition to the boarding school genre in that sense, because we’re getting the picture of a nightmare, one that the protagonist is unable to extricate herself from and convinces herself later that she was unwilling to. I’m very, very glad I did not go. I think there’s a period, maybe when you’re around 13, when there’s something so alluring and intoxicating about the independence that adulthood promises, and boarding school becomes a cipher for that—you can see your friends whenever you want, adults are not watching you and telling you what to do all the time. But once you’ve gained your independence and become an adult, that does not have any appeal whatsoever any more. It feels more like a panopticon. But I understand why that would have had an appeal for a young me eager to get out and forge an independent life. Exactly. And there’s still structure; I imagined it would be like staying at a fancy hotel with all your friends for four years, having pillow fights. I think there’s a luxury and a structured freedom in boarding school—you can’t separate those two things from its appeal."