My Dark Vanessa - Kate Elizabeth Russell

Date: 2023-04-18
| Ariel, by Sylvia Plath.
Chapter: 2000


Date: 2023-04-18
| Edna St. Vincent Millay
Chapter: 2000


Date: 2023-04-18
| “Then let me smell your neck,” she says. “I’ve missed
| your scent.”
Chapter: 2000


Date: 2023-04-19
| Ethan Frome
Chapter: 2000


Date: 2023-04-19
| the poem Swift wrote called “Cadenus and Vanessa
Chapter: 2000


Date: 2023-04-19
| ward
Chapter: 2001


Date: 2023-04-19
| Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov.
Chapter: 2001


Date: 2023-04-22
| Then why do they keep saying it? Because it’s not just this
| journalist. It’s every woman who comes forward. But if someone
| doesn’t want to come forward and tell the world every bad thing
| that’s happened to her, then she’s what? Weak? Selfish?” I
| throw up my hand, wave it away. “The whole thing is bullshit. I
| fucking hate it
Chapter: 2017


Date: 2023-04-22
| Ruby once told me that I’m her favorite client because there’s
| always another layer to peel back, something else to unearth,
| and hearing this was as thrilling as hearing, You’re my best
| student. Like Strane calling me precious and rare, Henry Plough
| saying I’m an enigma, impossible to understand.
Chapter: 2017


Date: 2023-04-22
| None of them had had affairs with older men and they were still
| screwed up. If I had never met Strane, I doubt I would’ve turned
| out all that different. Some boy would’ve used me, taken me for
| granted, ripped my heart out. At least Strane gave me a better
| story to tell than theirs.
Chapter: 2006


Date: 2023-04-22
| ’s always going to be old. He has to be. That’s the only way
| I can stay young and dripping with beauty
Chapter: 2006


Date: 2023-04-22
| Lolita, Pretty Baby, American Beauty, Lost in Translation
Chapter: 2006


Date: 2023-04-22
| just feel . . .” I press the heels of my hands into my
| thighs. “I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so
| long. You know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it
| out. “I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I
| really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says.
| “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?” I
Chapter: 2017


Date: 2023-04-22
| He didn’t even really hurt anyone, though “hurt” is such a
| subjective thing. Think of all the thoughtless pain we inflict. A
| mosquito on your arm; you don’t even hesitate to smack it dead.
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-22
| “You really don’t need to worry,” I say. “What happened to
| that girl is nothing like what happened to me.”
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-22
| As he listens, Henry’s mouth falls open, sympathy emanates out
| of him, and the more affected he looks, the more I want to talk. A
| momentum gains within me, an increased righteousness, a sense
| that I lived through something horrible, a disaster so stark it
| split my life in two. And now, in the aftershock of survival comes
| the desire to tell. Shouldn’t I be able to tell this story if I
| want to? Even if I manipulate the truth and obscure the details,
| don’t I deserve to see the evidence of what Strane did to me on
| another person’s sympathetic face
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-22
| want to defend myself, except I don’t know if anything he says
| is wrong. Even if the word first slipped out by accident, I never
| corrected it. I kept the lie going, showing Henry the dozens of
| missed calls, letting him call Strane “deluded” and “beyond
| the pale,” all because I wanted to be wounded and delicate,
| a girl deserving of tenderness
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-22
| “You were her teacher.” “I was a professor.” “Big
| difference.” “It is different,” he says. “You know it is.”
| I want to tell him the same thing I said to Strane: that I don’t
| know what I know. Months ago, I wrote about how different it was
| with Henry, that I wouldn’t be taken advantage of this time. That
| difference now feels too subtle to locate. I need someone to show
| me the line that’s supposed to separate twenty-seven years older
| from thirteen years, teacher from professor, criminal from socially
| acceptable. Or maybe I’m supposed to encompass the difference
| here. Years past my eighteenth birthday, I’m fair game now,
| a consenting adult.
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-22
| She waits, her eyebrows jumping as though prompting me to
| agree. This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of
| fiction—once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will
| ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-22
| “If you already read it,” I ask, “why do you need me to say
| it?” He doesn’t answer, but I know why. Because he needs to
| know I’m willing. Like Strane insisting I vocalize what I want
| to shift the burden of culpability. Talking this out, Vanessa,
| is the only way I can live with myself. I never would have done
| it if you weren’t so willing.  “You’re an enigma,” Henry
| says. “Impossible to understand.”
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-23
| Looking ahead, I can see that, too—another classroom, another man
| at the head of the seminar table reading my name off the roster,
| his eyes drinking me in. The thought makes me so tired all I can
| think is I’d rather be dead than go through this again.
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-23
| One year he writes to me on my birthday, an email sent at two in the
| morning. I remember you as one of my best students, he writes, and I
| always will. I start to reply, Henry, what does that even mean? but
| I stop myself, delete his email, set up a filter so future ones go
| straight to the trash.  One of my best students. It’s a strange
| compliment coming from a man who once turned a student into a wife.
Chapter: 2007


Date: 2023-04-23
| “I don’t think she actually cared. She just wanted to ride the
| wave, get a good byline. Which I knew going into it, but I still
| thought it would make me feel empowered or whatever. Instead I feel
| taken advantage of all over again.”
Chapter: 2017