Notes on a scandal
THE COVER OF My Dark Vanessa is a pretty shade of peach. It is the kind of cover that would beautify a bedside table. Or ask to be Instagrammed. But 50 pages into this debut novel by American author Kate Elizabeth Russell, I find myself shutting it in a drawer between readings so I don’t have to think about it. For a day, I can’t find it and I am glad – the story unfolding behind that bright cover is so dark, and relentlessly harrowing. One critic said it was an “exquisite, often nauseating” novel. Another called it a story that “unmoors you from your lived reality, grips the very core of you and doesn’t let go”. Which is why, the next day, I’m frantically searching for it, because I have to know the ending.
It starts with Vanessa Wye, who’s in her 30s, reading a Facebook post by a former student of the prestigious boarding school she attended, publicly accusing an English teacher of abuse. Aged 15, Vanessa was drawn into a sexual relationship with that
