My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

My Dark Vanessa is what’s considered, in the industry, a “big book.” It was acquired by a big publisher (William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins) for a big advance it’s getting a big marketing push it’s positioned to be a big thing. I’ve always been engaged with the line between genres of nonfiction and fiction, and always been thinking about what that shift gives us - to me, the writer, and to the reader.

And I suspect many fiction writers are this way, but there’s a stigma around it. “I’ve always been a fiction writer,” Russell explained. Russell is not Vanessa, but Vanessa is hers. The years she spent with the character made Russell “really protective of her, and of the story overall.” That’s why she’s flatly refused any sort of coy or clichéd marketing campaign and has been, in her words, “very, very, VERY careful” about offers for film and television adaptation. I picture her showing up at my door, or I’ll be out walking down the street, and I’ll see a girl who looks so much like her.” But she’s completely separate from me - to the point that I joke to friends, oh, she created me, rather than the other way around. “Vanessa is so real to me,” Russell recently told me, curled up on the couch of her cozy Madison, Wisconsin, apartment. And unlike Vanessa, who struggles as an adult to come to terms with the #MeToo movement - and surfacing allegations that Strane attempted to develop relationships with other teenage girls - Russell has been thinking about these questions, and how to weave them around the character of Vanessa, for the better part of two decades. She’s married - and has been, to a geographer, for three and a half years. Unlike Vanessa, Russell, 35, never learned to drive. There is no real-life version of Jacob Strane, the 42-year-old English teacher who grooms 16-year-old Vanessa for a relationship that lasts into her early twenties and rattles her life well into her thirties. What happened to Vanessa did not happen to her. But Kate Russell is not Vanessa - on that point she wants to be incredibly clear.

If you’ve read My Dark Vanessa, Russell’s debut novel, all of these characteristics will sound familiar: They almost perfectly match the titular character, Vanessa Wye. As a twentysomething, she wrote about her teenage experiences online. As a teen, she had relationships with older men. She briefly attended a private high school but left for “personal reasons” before graduating, and then went on to attend a state college in Maine.

Kate Elizabeth Russell grew up on a lake in the 1990s, in a rural Maine township, listening obsessively to Fiona Apple.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell