Being Lolita

July 1, 2020
A New York writer recalls her affair with a predatory teacher who told her, "You're my Lolita." By the age of 18, Wood had undergone electroconvulsive therapy and taken more than 20 medications, "ranging from Prozac to lithium," for medical problems including self-mutilation and suicidal depression. Her fragile mental health had put her high school graduation at risk. As a 17-year-old senior, she began getting help outside of class from a 27-year-old male English teacher, a Lolita fan she calls Nick North. She soon fell into an abusive romance described in this uneven memoir that overstretches parallels to Nabokov's tale of a pedophile who rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter. At furtive meetings at diners, Nick read Lolita to her and ruthlessly exploited her trust. Fearful of being fired, he insisted she start dating someone else as a cover for their romance, which she did, guiltily and briefly. He refused to sleep with her until she'd graduated but cruelly told her about his interim girlfriend. He persuaded her to attend Ithaca College by implying that he might go back to school at Cornell, then visited erratically until she broke up with him and later began her own teaching career. Wood tells her tale swiftly and suspensefully, but the writing can be wooden (she wants "to impact my students in supportive, meaningful ways") and novelistically purple ("I looked up at him from inside his arms and tried to tell him Kiss me just kiss me please kiss me...and instead he squeezed me harder and let me go"). At heart, this is a potboiler with a gloss of literary street cred, and Wood may suspect it: "Sometimes I worry that the whole Lolita intertextuality is just a conceit, a clever way to elevate what happened to me, to raise it above the tawdry." Many readers will also suspect it, but others will be turning the pages too fast to care. An absorbing but flawed memoir of a male teacher's abuse of a young female student.

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August 24, 2020
Wood debuts with a unflinching account of her high school affair with a teacher. After introducing her to Nabokov’s masterwork of lechery (“he told me it was a beautiful story about love”), “Mr. North” (whose name has been changed) reveals himself as a manipulative predator. Twenty-six when he meets 17-year-old Wood, North grooms the already fragile and troubled teen, moving from inquiries about her writing into inappropriate forays (such as passing notes guessing her bra size and revealing that of his penis). In an effort to create “plausible deniability” as their relationship becomes physical, North pushes Wood to date schoolmates while still stringing her along with promises of undying love and marriage after she graduates. “It seems as if no matter how active or passive a girl is, she is still doomed,” she muses. Wood later re-examines Lolita (and the power dynamics with North) in a college class, then while working with at-risk teenagers, and again after she suffers a sexual assault. “I began to question my memory, my very self,” she writes, and, now, upon viewing photographs of herself as a teenager when she’d felt “the most sexy and seductive,” she sees a lost child. Wood’s potent memoir doubles as a cautionary tale that indicts literary and social tropes of irresistible, sexualized youths­. It’s an impressive, provocative outing.