Books Like My Dark Vanessa: 10 Unflinching Literary Reads to Devour Next

Kate Elizabeth Russell's My Dark Vanessa is not an easy book to love, and the people who love it know that. In 2000, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye is groomed by her forty-two-year-old English teacher at a Maine boarding school; in 2017, as another former pupil comes forward, thirty-two-year-old Vanessa still refuses to call what happened abuse and insists it was love. Told in a close, unreliable, self-protecting first person, and in open argument with Lolita, which her teacher hands her, it is claustrophobic, psychologically exact and morally serious without ever being titillating. It is a character study more than a plot, and it is a book for adults.

Readers who finish it usually want one of a few things: the same experience told from inside a victim's self-deception, complicated and unreliable women narrators, teacher and student power stories treated as what they are, memoirs of the real thing, or the Lolita conversation itself. None of these books is a romance and we have not treated any of them as one. Here are ten, two of them memoirs, all of them adult, all of them worth the discomfort.

What to read after My Dark Vanessa

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The book Strane gives Vanessa, and the one her story argues with on every page. Humbert Humbert's seductive, self-justifying account of his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl is the trap Russell rebuilds from the other side, and reading the two together changes both of them. Beautiful, monstrous and a lesson in how a narrator can make you complicit.

Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Celeste Price is twenty-six, married and starting work as an eighth-grade English teacher, and she took the job for one reason: the fourteen-year-old boys. Narrated from inside her head with no mercy for the reader, it is the title readers most often offer for the same interior perspective as Vanessa, inverted and turned satirical. Far more explicit than Russell, and strictly adult.