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— Kate Elizabeth Russell from My Dark Vanessa

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« MY DARK VANESSA » BY KATE ELIZABETH RUSSELL

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I read My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell a few weeks ago, and I don’t have a review except to say that I immediately went back to read it again and I still want to read it again. I haven’t talked to anyone about it because the subject and how it’s dealt with is difficult for obvious reasons.

The author posted on Instagram something like “write things that make your family members not know what to say.” Which I like because I spend so much time worrying about how my friends and family would react to the things that I write and want to write about and the kind of art I want to make. And the solution I think is to try specifically to make things that will make your fears come true even if you don’t end up showing them to anyone. Because that’s the way to deal with the problem, to face it head on. If I try in any way to avoid or censor myself what I make will not be the kind of true I want my work to be.

KER had talk in interviews and on social media and on her substack a lot about how the book has made certain details of people and subjects from her past totally scrutinized. But she did it and she lives and breathes and continues to write things that make me feel things.

I love how the whole book itself is an argument against the criticism directed towards women and girls for romanticizing and aestheticizing their pain or their insanity or their trauma. You can’t be mad at Vanessa (or at least I can’t) because she, like everyone else was doing her best in an impossible situation. And she would be making playlists and blogs about what happened to her. She’s not the perfect victim and the character in the book who is kind of trying to be a good victim isn’t much better off in a lot of ways despite her efforts.

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“She stands over me as I say I’m sad, I’m so sad, small, simple words, the only ones that make sense as I clutch my chest like a child and point to where it hurts.”

— Kate Elizabeth Russell, from My Dark Vanessa

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i really love the ending (not spoiling) of my dark vanessa and vanessa’s characterization overall. i love how in terms of trauma, she’s very typical of someone who’s become their own worst enemy in the process of rationalizing their pain and has become “difficult” to be around, and there’s a point where people can’t stand to be around her because she is aware of the issue but feels incapable of processing everything. where people feel for her, but at a certain point give up on trying to help her when she’s crying out for it because as soon as they do, she back tracks and resorts to insults and deflection and dumping her trauma onto others but wanting no real solution, and no reaction is good enough for her because not even she knows what she wants from others, or what to feel. it’s this endless cycle of self destruction and deprecation until she realizes she can’t go on living that way when it couldn’t even serve the person benefiting the most from it all.

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ik no one really follows me on here or sees what i post but i need to rant about My Dark Vanessa for a minute. i read it for the first time in April of 2022 and i haven’t been able to stop myself from re-reading it over and over since then,  despite how overwhelmingly triggering it is for me. My Dark Vanessa was like reading myself on a page. 15yrs when it began, a sad little girl without a huge social net, her sloppiness, her anxiety, even the fucking color of her hair. his initials…it’s all the same. obviously he wasn’t my 42yr old teacher but he knew better. in every line, paragraph, page, i was right there behind Vanessa’s eyes. never before this novel have i had my thoughts surrounding what happened written out before me in a way that reflected EXACTLY how i feel. for the first time i felt seen. the way her abuse followed her throughout her life, the ways it influenced the way she lives every day. i was staring into a mirror through the pages. anywho, i just needed to throw that out into the universe. 

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“i can’t lose the thing i’ve held onto 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 look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “it’s my life,” i say. “this has been my whole life.”

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kate elizabeth russell, my dark vanessa // phoebe bridgers, motion sickness

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perpetually thinking of this

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my dark vanessa by kate elizabeth russell // may december (2023)

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“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."

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell Succession (2018-2023)

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Jeanette Winterson, from Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

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Naomi Shihab Nye, from Fuel: Poems; “Hidden”

[Text ID: "If you tuck the name of a loved one / under your tongue too long / without speaking it / it becomes blood"]

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June First - Jennifer Hartmann

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“She claimed me like the sunrise claims the morning sky with lightness and blush, promise and wonder. She claimed me like a cyclone, funneling through a quiet town, taking no prisoners. She claimed my good and my bad, my light and my dark. She took my broken, ugly bits and molded them into something worthy of display. She turned my agony into art. June claimed me in a way that could ultimately be defined by a single word: Inevitable.”

It has been a long time since I’ve read a romance, let alone a romance I loved. Perfect slow burn, forbidden love.

*Contains spoilers*

Brant fiercely loves the one girl he can’t have. He was put into this predicament by a choice his father made. After murdering his mom and killing himself, Brant must go live with his moms best friend.

When he does, they have a brand new baby girl. He grows up with, fiercely protective and loving her with all his being. As time goes on, this love evolves. He’s her adopted brother and he starts to love her.

Brant is the man we all want. He wants no one else but June, craves her with all his being. Only wants her to be happy, but despises the thought of her with another man. Wants to murder at the thought of another man touching her.

I looooved this book! Finished in two days, I was addicted to the love story, the tragedies in between, and the love and forgiveness that follows after.

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when ethel cain said i’m tired of you still tied to me and when gracie abrams said i see you every night in my sleep anticipating every bad dream and when noah kahan said the ghost you dressed up as sure knows how to haunt and when lee mandelo said come on i love you but this is no life and when micah nemerever said all they were — all they had ever been — was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun

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“Reading was my most reliable escape in childhood, the one way I could get away from my father while still trapped in the same space with him.”

They Never Learn

Layne Fargo

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[...] I’m so pathetically intense. I just can’t be any other way.

Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume I: 1940 - 1956 — Edward Cohen, c. 11th September 1950