This Is Not a Love Story

When she started writing My Dark Vanessa at 16, Kate Elizabeth Russell saw her story about a student’s affair with a teacher as a romance. She sees it differently now.

- Lila Shapiro

KATE ELIZABETH RUSSELL traces the beginning of her obsession with Lolita to an encounter with the musician Jakob Dylan. It was 1997, and the novelist was 13 years old, precocious and bored, living on an isolated lake some 15 miles east of Bangor, Maine. Dylan, then in his late 20s, was coming to town with his band, the Wallflowers, and he wanted to meet Stephen King, the local royalty. Russell’s father happened to be a DJ for King’s radio station, and he arranged a dinner. Russell and her cousin got to tag along. She remembers trembling through the meal, struggling to contain her excitement as she watched the charismatic frontman tear apart a bread roll with his hands. Later, she read everything she could find about him. In a Rolling Stone profile, he declared his favorite book was Lolita. She couldn’t check the book out from her local library—every copy had been lost or stolen—but she discovered the text on a rudimentary website and felt a thrill when she realized it was about a sexual relationship between a girl around her own age and a much older man. “I didn’t know that was an option,” she recalled thinking at the time.