Being Lolita: A Memoir by Alisson Wood

In many ways I still want to be like Lolita.  To create something beautiful from something so terrible is my deepest desire.  When I teach Lolita, I try to make my pain have a purpose, to impact my students in supportive, meaningful ways -- in the ways I wish had impacted me.  I can't change what happened to me.  I try to do the little I can to make sure what happened to me doesn't happen again.

Alisson Wood. Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020)

An English teacher seduces Wood in high school by first having her read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, suggesting to her that it is a "love story," which it obviously is not, though it is unclear if the teacher believed in this completely wrong interpretation of the novel or merely used it a  tool of seduction.  High schools and colleges have cracked down considerably on student/teacher relationships, now almost always banned because of the imbalance of power: high school students are dependent on teachers for college references, college students for graduate school references.  Every day one reads about teachers who have crossed the line; just after finishing Wood's book I received an e-mail from Phillips Exeter Academy, from which I graduated in 1965 when it was still all male, stating that a Princeton professor who had been giving seminars at Exeter is being currently accused of inappropriate attention at Princeton (though not at Exeter, which has its own history of scandals.)

Wood's book is sometimes painful reading, as Wood gradually fights her way out of the relationship when she goes to college, one she chooses in order to stay close to the teacher, who promises to marry her, but even when she turns eighteen insists the relationship be kept secret in order to protect his job.  In my experience growing up in a lower-class home I was taught that those in authority -- teachers and clergy especially -- were to be obeyed and not questioned, which makes it easier for predators to get away with their crimes.  I first heard about Wood's book on Jamie Loftus's Lolita podcast, which includes a thorough examination of Nabokov's brilliant novel and its unreliable narrator and pedophile Humbert Humbert.