My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

The row also raised questions about who gets to tell which stories, and whether memoirs are more authentic than novels. “It got really intense and really personal very quickly,” Russell tells me afterwards. Nonetheless, as the furore intensified on social media, Russell decided to take a step back, and deleted her Twitter account. Research was a crucial part of her process, not least because, in the final years of its creation, the book formed her dissertation for a creative writing PhD. Russell had indeed read Ortiz’s memoir while researching her novel, along with 80 or so other titles – autobiographies, novels, plays and clinical studies of sexual abuse and paedophilia among them. But as I grew up I feel like the characters grew up too I jokingly refer to the early versions as ‘teacher Twilight’. Russell emailed Ortiz and offered to send her a copy of My Dark Vanessa (Ortiz admitted she hadn’t read it), but she didn’t get a reply.

She complained that in “an industry that is continually taken to task for being extremely white and making decisions that reflect as much, here is a seven-figure book deal for a fiction book that is being marketed similarly to my book”. Ortiz, a Californian of Mexican descent, tweeted about how she had struggled to get published on account of the “difficult” subject matter. In January this year, the author Wendy Ortiz criticised Russell’s substantial publishing deal and suggested the book’s plot was “eerily similar” to her own 2014 memoir, Excavation, which described how she was groomed by a teacher when she was 13. And I really believed that I had written a good book and that I had something meaningful to contribute.”īut there were greater anxieties to come. “But then I realised those worries were about how people might perceive it and not about what my book was. “I didn’t want to come across as opportunistic or have it cheapen my work somehow,” she recalls. Initially, Russell was anxious about the timing. As women across the world were sharing stories and exposing the ways men had used power to abuse and silence them, here was a book, 18 years in the writing, that examined themes of consent, coercion, memory and the nature of victimhood.

W hen, in 2018, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s agent presented publishers with her first novel, My Dark Vanessa, about a sexual relationship between a 15-year-old girl and her English teacher, the #MeToo movement was in full flight.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell