At fifteen, Vanessa Wye had a sexual relationship with her forty-five year old teacher, Jacob Strane - a relationship that has been the defining element of her life. Now, years later, other girls have come forward to say they were abused by Strane and to urge Vanessa, too, to speak out. But Vanessa can’t relate at all to those other girls. She was different; she was special. She was the one he truly loved.
She never identifies herself as a victim, reframing the experience as a great love affair. Nevertheless, it’s clear to the reader from early on that Strane is a textbook abuser, preying on Vanessa’s vulnerability and naïveté and constantly testing how far he can safely go, skilfully grooming and manipulating her to ensure her compliance and her silence.
In one of their earliest interactions, he says “I will ruin you” - it’s one of the only true things he ever says to her.
Vanessa as an adult of thirty-two is clearly deeply damaged, her potential unrealised, numbing her feelings with drugs, alcohol and sex with men she despises yet in some twisted way needs for validation.
We follow both Vanessa’s life in the present day - as further allegations about Strane come to light - and her memories of the past. As we follow the development of her “relationship” with him, it becomes very hard to read at times, as Vanessa narrates her story with unflinching and at times brutal honesty. And when rumours inevitably begin to fly around the school, the response of the authorities is appalling, compounding the harm.
Throughout, the reader can see what Vanessa, unable to face the reality of what Strane did to her, cannot. Instead she insists unconvincingly on her own power, her instigation, her willing participation... though on some level she knows full well how wrong it is, how wrong it has always been, and how badly it has damaged her. Even then she cannot attach the blame where it truly belongs, blaming her own darkness, her eagerness to “hurl herself into a swamp”, to become Lolita to Strane’s Humbert Humbert. (Nabokov’s work is a theme throughout.)
My Dark Vanessa is a dazzling, devastating exploration of the damage caused by abuse. The subject matter makes it a hard read at times, but it’s an important and powerful one.
