I started copying a poem I wrote recently after starting to watch Vampire Diaries. That’s the fun of bringing the parent of a 16 year old. She finds shows she’s already watched and rewatches them with me.
The show gets better as it goes on. In the beginning it’s kind of flat but it gets richer. I’ve never watched a show that compelled me to write a poem from a character’s point of view. She liked the poem a lot.
I haven’t written anything since then, maybe 2 weeks ago. Then she gave me her copy of My Dark Vanessa and urged me to read it so we could discuss the questions at the end of the book. 40 pages in I had to restart it to focus more on the writing. I finally finished it tonight. Took about 5 days maybe? My sense of time is messed up.
The book is really well written. There’s no point when it feels like a fucked up love story as there is no real love going on. It’s good the author stuck with writing from Vanessa’s point of view. Some people told her to write it from his point of view because her voice is unrepeatable. How would reading it from the pedophile’s point of view be relatable? It’s sick to read the book and then read about the feedback. What kind of first readers were these?
Who wants another Lolita? There’s Lolita all over the book but it’s a book in a book. It’s a fantasy they share but isn’t real. It’s the old guy teacher giving the smart student books to read as he “grooms” her, slowly leading her all eager into his lair, like the witch with the candy house. The evil old women are witches that want to devour kids like food and the evil old men want to crack their little bodies open/rape their minds forever while raping their bodies.
It’s great to read it from her point of view. Her loneliness and need to be special are so relatable and sad and scary that this beast basically lures her into the cage; she goes in there so excited to feel the good feelings. It’s tragic of course.
People reading it must not believe things could happen this way, that this early breaking of a person could last for so many years but I’ve seen it in people I’ve worked with. Men too, taken advantage of the same way. The sexual part is different in some ways but it’s the same thing. It takes a long time to finally call it rape with the therapist there to translate it. I’ve seen people recover and others get sicker even when they’ve worked through it.
How relatable does she have to be? What does that have to do with anything. What makes the book more than another modern realistic “Lolita” tale is all the specifics of the character and what she does after. Not just predictable stuff like needing to feel powerful after she’s “of age” finding old men to seduce to a certain point and then drop them before it gets physical. The weirder areas of the mind where she looks at 15 year old girls and sees them through his eyes, the moment she says something mean about the other girl who has the opposite story but they’re linked by him. Her friend is shocked at her comments but they come from her 15 year old mind, jealous that he’s done the same things to her.
Anyway it’s an absorbing novel about the rape of a girl told through her still raped mind. She doesn’t want to see herself as a victim. It’s like when people manage to get out of a cult that usually involves power and sexual violation of a different kind.
I just finished it so it’s hard not to be obsessing about it but I think the questions at the end only touch on the “literature” aspect of it. They didn’t use to have author’s notes or questions at the end of books. The questions at the end if most present day books focus on the story and the character of the narrator. People get to the unreliable narrator but don’t go further.
How is this a book about books and writing and about what links the books with the pediphilic seduction of a high school English teacher? His house isn’t made of candy. The poetry he plucks and puts in her eager hand are the poison he uses, as well as his reading of her own writing she holds onto with embarrassment of a high school girl writer. It’s an intimate thing.
I’ve written about losing a key to my teenage self, my writer’s notebook with my teacher’s encouraging comments in it. It’s the one thing I’ve lost stupidly that I most want back. I remember noticing my teacher’s notes. She was female and safe; maybe if she’d been a man, even one who had no issues whatsoever with teenage girls, the comments could have looked strange, maybe only from my point of view. It’s intimate to look at the relationship I had with my English teacher in this notebook. She’s very careful with her comments. The slightest wrong step and I would have clamped the notebook shut and not written the weird stuff I wrote, from descriptions to poems to short stories that were too short and fragments. I was so sensitive it would be easy to shut that writing off.
It’s good I chose painting. I remember being a junior and seeing that choice- do I want to be a writer or artist? The art won over. I had no idea I had ADHD but I knew writing was harder for me, having to use words well and make sense and edit versus painting being fun and all the materials and process perfect for my adhd mind.
I still can’t see my book being something. I haven’t written it. Parts of it are somewhere in the blog. It took Kate Elizabeth Russell 17 years to write that book. I abandoned my graphic novel after 17 years, most of them spent avoiding it and leaving it in a Manila envelope.
It’s Thursday and time to take out the garbage. This is what I’m working on:
6 Impossible Things For Breakfast 