The Literary-Abuser Trope Is Everywhere

At the end of April, Eve Crawford Peyton published in Slate her account of being groomed and assaulted by the author Blake Bailey. Bailey, she wrote, had been her English teacher in middle school before he held her down and raped her when she was 22, years before he was hand-selected as the most simpatico candidate to tackle a biography of Philip Roth. (Bailey has forcefully denied this and other allegations against him, including that he raped a publishing executive in 2015.) Peyton’s account is harrowing, emotive, and masterfully written.

It’s also awfully familiar. Bailey, Peyton writes, “was a fantastic teacher; he was a sexual predator.” In a 2019 article for LitHub, the author Rachel Cline writes about her “groovy, revolutionary, married, draft-evading, girl-raping former teacher,” who “taught me how to write,” and whom she fictionalized in her novel The Question Authority. In her devastating memoir, Consent, released in English earlier this year, the French writer Vanessa Springora alleges that a feted French author sexually exploited her as a 14-year-old girl. At one point, she refers to a specific psychological injury: He began to dictate her English homework, replacing her authorial voice with his own in an act she likens to “dispossession.” (The author in question, scheduled to stand trial in September for promoting pedophilia, has called the book “unjust and excessive” while praising “the beauty of the love” that he says he and the teenager shared.)

Suddenly, this kind of abuse seems to be everywhere—in the real world and in fiction inspired by it—abuse by men who allegedly found, published last year, yet another English teacher grooms a student by giving her books and poems that supposedly remind him of her, offering her “different lenses,” she thinks, “to see myself through.” In the lead-up to ’s release, the author Wendy Ortiz noted on Twitter that the book’s plot bore striking similarities to her 2014 memoir, , about an English teacher she says exploited her sexually for five years, starting when she was 13 years old. That teacher, like Bailey, and like the man who taught Cline, had his students write journals for class, allowing him to rifle through their innermost thoughts and scrawl in the margins of their imagination. The books aren’t similar, in other words; the men depicted in them are.