I feel like all the small things I count on are fluttering like ash to the ground. Deaths from covid-19, the five recalls on my car, friends who are ill or their mothers are ill, the only way I can open a new post here on Chrome, but Chrome will not open my photos, my son went to the ER a week and a half ago and no one bothered to tell us, the man in the bakery was rude. The trivial and the terrifying? Conflating disease and rudeness? None of this is killing me. Yet. Challenging the ease of a white author against the injustice of struggling to find a publisher of a woman of color’s memoir with strikingly similar themes. I don’t know. Isn’t it like happy families? All abusers are alike? I haven’t read the memoir. I rarely do. #MeToo?
I read the novel, My Dark Vanessa.
I read until four in the morning, desperate to complete this incredible novel. Vanessa is an intelligent and lonely girl of 15 when she meets the man who will play on her inexperience and insecurities. She knows about rape because one of her musical heroes has told about it.
What she does not understand and fails to recognize is the selfish exploitation of her innocence and desire for love when it arrives. The author is at pains to make clear that this is fiction, not her life. It is a necessary distinction since Russell gets everything so right. The molester announcing that he is the “toughest” teacher his students will have in high school. Maybe in college. [Scary that I used to warn students that my Honors class would be their hardest in their Junior Year (an appeal to hubris), and students often thanked me for that after attending college.] The parallel visions, flipping back and forth between then and now chapters in these pages explore both how she is groomed and “seduced” at 15 and how she excuses and redefines that experience into her 30s. It is explicit, very much so. [I don’t usually read explicit sex. A warning there.] I was not molested as a child, but my tolerance for reading about abuse is very low. I have never been able to read Lolita but I admire what Russell does with the novel and other writings here. I am amazed I could stand to read it. My favorite Ninth grade teacher had an affair with a Seventh Grader. When a friend told me, I recall two powerful and simultaneous reactions: Why her and not me? and It’s a lie. I was ashamed to have felt jealous of what I thought in my naiveté must be love and knew even then that envy was unhealthy and pushed it aside. But it was years before I was forced to accept that the accusation of molestation was not a lie. Yes, he did that. He had a relationship with a child of no more than twelve. I have since witnessed men do this to vulnerable young girls—men who were trusted as teachers, coaches, a campus cop. These men NEVER acknowledge their trespasses because they serve only their personal desire. Abuse is heaped on victims of sexual exploitation. The girl is blamed, threatened, and ruined by the violator and by society. So is Vanessa. Her abuser so redefines her identity that she is ruined, truly and utterly ruined. The ending satisfied me, though I feared throughout the reading that it would not. I believe this story. It is very hard not to believe it is all true. |
And then there’s hope.
The video is fantastic:
It was pure chance. It always is. We went out this morning intending a quick walk. We were halfway home and Gary was anxious for his breakfast but I was determined to gather plastic bottle caps and poly-styrene foam anyway. I had turned back for a blue plastic bottle cap when I saw it. I knew, just knew. It was covered with sea growth and I still knew it was glass. the narrow necks at each end would have accommodated ropes in nets that might have been strung for miles in the ocean.
It didn’t look like much on the beach but to us, a glass float is a huge find. It’s been years since either of us found one on the beach. These days the floats are plastic. We’re finding those too. Bell-shaped floats in white and orange. The round ones are usually black with loops on opposite sides or a pair on one side. I hauled home a huge lime green one the other day loaded down with gooseneck barnacles.
I am always so glad when I check my emails and your blog is there. It’s a breath of fresh air.
&PRIDE Press 