One month after announcing a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins imprint William Morrow for her debut novel, My Dark Vanessa, author Kate Elizabeth Russell moved to Madison.
That was January 2019. Today, from her home on Williamson Street — where she lives with her husband, who holds a postdoctoral position at UW-Madison — the 35-year-old is navigating the thrills and perils that come with being hailed as Entertainment Weekly’s “Breakout Author to Watch in 2020” and receiving radiant blurbs from the likes of Stephen King and Gillian Flynn. Oprah even picked My Dark Vanessa as a selection for her book club but backpedaled abruptly on March 5 after controversy erupted (more on that soon).
My Dark Vanessa, published March 10, is the heartbreaking and maddening story of Vanessa Wye, a hungry-for-adulthood 15-year-old attending a private boarding school in Maine who is manipulated into a sexual relationship with Jacob Strane, her charming and conniving 42-year-old English teacher.
“I worked on this book for a really long time without any promise of it ever being published,” Russell says of the story she began writing when she was 16. “So I really didn’t have high expectations in terms of it finding readership or even a place within the publishing industry. But since the book sold, I have heard over and over again from my publication team that the book was going to start conversations and potentially be controversial.”
Her team was right.
On Jan. 19, Wendy C. Ortiz, the Latinx author of Excavation — the 2014 memoir of Ortiz’s affair with a teacher 15 years her senior— tweeted about the pending release of “a white woman’s book of fiction that sounds very much like Excavation.” Without specifically mentioning My Dark Vanessa, she sparked an online firestorm similar to the one surrounding Oprah-endorsed American Dirt, another highly-anticipated novel written by a white female, about the Mexican migrant experience.
At the time, Russell admitted reading Excavation but denied any insinuations of plagiarism, stressing “that stories of abuse often share similar elements, and that her book could be compared to any number of works involving the same subject matter,” according to Vulture.com.
Although Russell says My Dark Vanessa was inspired by her relationships with older men, an author’s note at the beginning of the book emphasizes that “this is not my personal story nor that of my teachers or of anyone I know.”
In a statement posted on her own website, Russell wrote that “Sexual abuse is a complicated subject that has a history of being silenced, misunderstood and oversimplified. I believe novels can help create space for readers to unpack and talk about sensitive or difficult topics. My greatest wish is that My Dark Vanessa will spark conversation about the complexity of coercion, trauma and victimhood, because while these stories can feel all too familiar, victims are not a monolith and there is no universal experience of sexual violence.”
Although the Excavation controversy appears to have simmered down, Russell has left Twitter, saying that “it got to the point where I really felt like my presence wasn’t going to be beneficial for anyone.”
Still, the irony of the entire situation does not escape her.
“Many of those bigger questions [people were asking] — such as whose stories get heard, whose stories get believed, and whether or not someone who experienced sexual abuse is obligated to come forward — are all themes I worked with pretty intensely in the book,” she says. “So the conversation that erupted fed into the book in a really interesting way.”
There’s no denying the similarities between Vanessa Wye and Kate Elizabeth Russell, who grew up in Maine and attended a private day school. Russell’s father works at WKIT, the rock radio station in Bangor, Maine, owned by Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha. Although King’s blurb about My Dark Vanessa (“A well-constructed package of dynamite”) will help sell books, Russell says she sent 66 queries to agents before she was offered representation.
“I had no experience with the publishing industry whatsoever,” says Russell, who earned a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Kansas and a master of fine arts degree from Indiana University.
My Dark Vanessa takes place across a timeline that alternates between 2000 (at the Browick School in Norumbega, Maine, where the toxic relationship between Vanessa and Strane evolves) and 2017 (at the cusp of the #metoo movement, when one of Strane’s other victims takes her story public).
“It was really surreal, because it felt like what I was writing was sort of playing out in the real world,” Russell says about the #metoo movement, which gained momentum as My Dark Vanessa neared completion. “I wasn’t really sure how to handle that. My first instinct was just to keep my head down and keep writing and not really pay attention to #metoo at all. But it got to the point where I realized that if my book were to be published, it would be read in the context of this movement, no matter what. And so I went into that present-day plotline and made the decision to address the movement head on. It felt like kind of a risk, but at the same time it felt like the right thing to do.”
The book is a deeply uncomfortable-but-can’t-turn-away read that even now throws Russell off balance. “It was, at times, really difficult to write certain scenes, especially the scenes that are explicitly abusive,” she says. “Now, when I pick up the book and re-read certain scenes, I’ll be surprised by how manipulative Strane is.”
Russell is in the early stages of writing a second book, about an artist who is uncomfortable with attaining a high level of success, which is another subject she relates to. Yet her prime focus will be on My Dark Vanessa for the foreseeable future.
“It’s still pretty remarkable to me that it is possible to devote your life to a creative project and then have it be received with such enthusiasm,” she says. “I’m just trying to be as grateful for that as I possibly can — through the good and the bad.”
Kate Elizabeth Russell will appear at A Room of One’s Own, 315 W. Gorham St., on March 16, at 6 p.m.
