Alisson Wood: Author of "Being Lolita" Discusses the Romanticization of Female Suffering, Restructuring the Abuse Narrative and Writing the Ugly Parts
I read Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita in what felt like one single breath. The power behind these prose left me emotionally spent, in the best way possible, as I learned of Wood’s deeply abusive relationship with her high school English teacher, Mr. North. While this book also touches on critical issues such as power, consent, vulnerability, control, and the way abuse can take multiple types of forms, it is also about how one woman reclaims her own narrative and rewrites her story with bravery and strength.
I spoke with Alisson over the phone where we had a fabulous discussion on the patriarchal perspective of the beautiful, suffering woman, letting go of the victim blaming narrative, writing the ugly parts, and creating her memoir, Being Lolita.
Kailey Brennan: I’m always curious when reading memoirs, what the moment was when the writer realized or knew they needed to tell this story at this specific time in their lives. Especially one that is as revealing as Being Lolita.
Alisson Wood: I had known I'd wanted to write this book for years and that it was going to be called Being Lolita. It took a lot of work, both as a writer and as a woman, to understand the story that I needed to tell. Something that's interesting about book publishing is you don't necessarily get to choose when your story is going to be told. Book publishing is such a complicated and long term process. You don’t have any real control over the transition from when you complete a book to when a book is in bookstores, in reader’s hands. Sometimes you can write a book and it never reaches readers. .
There are so many decision makers and machinations that determine if and when a book is going to be published. I can say, however, that I am so happy that Being Lolita is out now. I think it is a perfect time to have these kinds of difficult conversations about power, about consent, about abuse, not only in our country but in our schools. And I feel like our society is ready to have these conversations in a way that we perhaps never have before. So I don't think my book could have come out anytime earlier than it has.
KB: I agree. That actually ties into my next question. Your relationship with Nick was toxic in many ways, but there was also a lot of mental and emotional abuse that took place. I think because this type of abuse doesn’t carry the same visual marks as physical abuse does, that it can often go unnoticed or undetected until one is deep into the relationship. Do you think we speak about mental abuse enough in our society? Especially with young women?
AW: I did work in domestic violence and work with leadership and teen girls in high schools. I taught comprehensive sex ed. I did all of that for close to 10 years before I chose to write this book. But when I was doing that work, I was not at all consciously thinking about what had happened with the teacher, especially because at that point I had also been raped by my boss at work. I was almost killed in someone else's really dangerous domestic violence situation, which was one of those one-in-a-million happenstance events. Those events had an urgency in their trauma that I prioritized, and so didn’t put much energy into processing what the teacher had done to me. Both the rape and the attack also involved the justice system and being deposed and testifying, so they felt all encompasing, and was a multi-year process. Where was the space for me to even think about the teacher? It was a long time before I fully acknowledged the serious abuse that I suffered at the hands of the teacher.
The teacher never hit me. He never punched me. So it took me a long time to understand that and to understand that the fact that he would be physically explosive during our fights, the fact that he would throw my stuff out of his apartment, the fact that he would break things, the fact that he would scream in my face, the fact that sex was not always consensual —all of those things were incredibly abusive. And it was a subtle, steady build that eventually escalates out of control, and you’re trapped. I really wanted to capture that. I wanted to try to show the reader how that happens.
KB: While you are young, you make a kind of connection that pain and love coincide —that to receive love their needs to be pain. I think that is a fairly common thought process among young women because we have been fed images of a suffering woman in need of saving or the romanization of tumultuous relationships and codependency throughout pop culture. Do you think we can change this narrative?
AW: Yeah. I think that idea of merging beauty and pain, especially in relation to gender and women is pervasive in our culture. It is everywhere in our artistic canon in the Western world. That goes for movies from 50 years ago to more recent movies. Some of the movies we deem as the most epic romances are outright dangerous. Gone With the Wind is an incredibly, incredibly problematic movie and book for many reasons (its inherent racism, for instance). But it’s also that the relationship between Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler is wildly abusive, and that is much less acknowledged. It’s an unstable, cruel, physically abusive cycle, but it was written as passion. He can't control himself around her. A more current example is the Twilight films. The relationship between Edward and Bella is incredibly abusive. It's manipulative, it's threatening, he's stalking her. Yet that is high romance, targeted for teenagers. So I think that one of the problems is that we constantly give young women these models: if your relationship is passionate and intense, that's good. If it's a little bit scary, that's good. And it's not.
Suffering is made to be a source of beauty for women because of the patriarchy. In order for men to maintain the position of power, women need to be disempowered.
If a woman is suffering, if a woman is hurt, if a woman is in trouble, if a woman needs something, it creates this void, this need, this space for men. So if a woman is not suffering or in need of help, there's nothing for a man to do.
Nabokov said, “beauty plus pity is the closest thing we can come to art.” It's this wildly romanticized idea, that to be beautiful a desirable, a woman must be in pain and that her pain is part of what makes her beautiful. Think about all of the tragedies of Shakespeare. So much of our Western Canon is full of dead women or women who are dying. And again, being in pain creates a need for a man to help. So it's this horribly complicated thing. But in the end, it just sort of fucks women.
I think it comes into play in today's vernacular, for instance when calling a woman “bossy”. Kamala Harris was attacked for being ambitious. It’s simply not derogatory to refer to a man that way, it is seen as a compliment. As more and more women upset these power imbalances, some people really struggle with that. In particular, white men.
I love that we are seeing more and more examples every day of women who are powerful and beautiful and strong and are not characterized by suffering. Of course, everyone has pain and tragedy and loss in their lives, but it doesn't have to be defining in the way it has been for women. And I'm really excited about that. And I've really tried to offer that kind of narrative in Being Lolita.
KB: And I think you succeed. I loved the way you structured this memoir, splitting into two parts just like Lolita, but also adding a third part that was a revelatory chapter, just for you. I found it very empowering and I’d love to hear more about this choice.
AW: Structuring any kind of piece of art, be it a play, a piece of music, be it a book, is incredibly difficult. I think structure is really complicated. I struggled with how to structure my book-- until I read Lolita for the millionth time and it just suddenly hit me like, oh, this is my structure right here. This is the book— Lolita. It was the perfect structure because not only did Lolita mirror the chronology of my story, but also one of the primary totems of my story itself. The teacher explicitly modeled our “love” after Lolita, and, at 17, I didn't know to question his reading of the book, or of our relationship. Yet Nabokov’s novel and my own story diverge at a certain point. Spoiler alert: At the end of Lolita book, Dolores Haze (“Lolita”) is dead. Everybody's dead. But I didn’t die-- I survived. So my story goes on.
I chose to subvert and to push beyond the structural expectation and create a part three to try and explore the aftereffect of this sort of abuse. I think that's something we don't spend enough time on in our culture. So often when we tell the story of domestic abuse or trauma, the story ends there, at the violence against women. It's not that simple. The story is not over. Trauma is something that doesn't go away. Writing this book did not make anything better. I did not find any sort of catharsis, because that's not how trauma works. So often with women's memoir and women's stories in general, we expect it to end like fairy tales: It ends happily ever after— she's married, probably having children, a family. Everything's great. Well, that's not how it really works, not just for me, but for a lot of women. A man and reproduction do not solve problems. And I really wanted to spend time in my book to not only just explore and try to articulate this, but also to really show the impact that trauma can have on a life. Because I think we gloss over it and I didn't want to do that.
KB: I was also curious about your journals. You kept a lot of journals when you were young and referenced them many times throughout the memoir. Was it particularly difficult to face your past self in that way? How did that feel for you?
AW: Oh, I think difficult is a soft word to describe what it was like to have to go through all of these, what I refer to as primary source documents, to reread all of my journals from that year of high school, all of the letters and notes and things that the teacher had given me. It was horribly painful. It physically made me nauseous. I think my understanding of myself as a teenager in some ways is really the biggest narrative shift for me in this book. When I started working on the book, I was incredibly angry with my 17-year-old self. I was furious at her. I would read my journals, these notes and things and I would just think to myself, how could you be so stupid? What were you thinking? I wanted to reach through time and give myself the biggest shake in the world and be like, figure your shit out (Laughs) I had these very deep feelings of frustration towards her. I was experiencing my very own victim blaming.
Then throughout the process of writing the book, I came to this place where I understood what had happened. By the end I was far more empathetic and sympathetic to 17-year-old Alisson and came to the place where I was like, you know, I was doing the best that I could. I didn't know any better. And I shouldn't have because I was 17. It’s completely developmentally appropriate for a 17-year-old girl to have a crush on her teacher. That's not the problem. The problem is that an adult male in power chose to manipulate and use his power to fuck a student. That's not my mistake. That's his.
But the thing is, it's also easier, and in some ways safer, to blame yourself because you're suggesting that you had some sort of power. You're saying that, oh, I got to make choices, I was in control, so the blame is mine, too. But that wasn't what actually happened. I was being abused and manipulated from the get-go. I was selected. I was groomed. I was victimized. So part of letting go of that victim blaming narrative is also difficult, because you have to let go of the illusion that you had any power at all. And that's sad and that's hard. So it was this very complicated multilayered experience for me as I'm sure it is for all women who have been in situations like this.
And so by the end, when I sent the final book to my editor, I remember getting so upset, so suddenly. I surprised myself because I realized I'm not going to be with teenage Alisson anymore. I felt these protective feelings that I just did not have in the beginning. In some ways that really was for me, the big narrative journey —me with myself.
KB: What did your writing process or routine look like for this memoir?
AW: I tend to be a feast or famine kind of writer, which is not something I recommend. I don't think it's actually the best way to go about things, but it is my personal instinct. There are times when I won't touch a project for weeks. And then there'll be times when I'm working on it six, seven hours a day for weeks on end. I don't have any children, but I do think of my writing projects as children and I'm definitely a brooder (Laughs). I'm an incubator. I think of myself as incubating an essay or a book or a chapter. And I feel like I will sort of just walk around thinking about it and let it settle and grow and bop around in me. And then at a certain point, I'm like, oh, I'm ready. Okay. Let's go.
But that's actually a pretty stressful way to do things because then it becomes laden with pressure. I always talk to my students about a daily writing practice, about the importance of putting pen to paper every day. But I find that personally, I end up sort of doing big, big pushes of things versus chipping away every day.
KB: Is there any kind of writing advice that you could give our community that you particularly like or that you share with your own students?
AW: I believe that as artists, we are constantly trying to create things from parts of our lives, even if it's fiction. Etgar Keret, who is one of my favorite short story writers, once said in a workshop that even if you're writing a story about a bunch of dinosaurs at a dinner table, one of those dinosaurs is your mother. Even if you're writing fiction, even if you're writing these absurd things, it is all based in reality, in your life. It is coming from you, after all.
I believe that writing for publication is a different animal than writing for yourself. Writing can be an incredibly therapeutic practice. I deeply believe that and support that. But when you're writing for your reader, you have to be past the processing part. You need to be able to take criticism. You need to be able to make edits. You need to be able to think about someone other than you and your feelings, as harsh as that sounds. You need to be able to have the perspective to make a piece of writing its best self. And if you're too close to the work, to the experience, that becomes very hard. So I am a big proponent of therapy, especially if you are writing about something traumatic. If I hadn't already done a lot of processing about what had happened to me, I wouldn't have been able to do that. When you're writing to publish, you need to be ready for people to read it. Because of the internet, everything is forever.
In memoir, the “I”, the narrative voice, is a creation. It's not really you. While this memoir is about me, it's only one part of my life. It's one part of who I am now. It's not my whole self.
Some of the most painful, shameful, awful moments of my life are in this book. And I wrote about them for the world to read. Did I want to do that personally? Oh, fuck no. But I knew it was important for the book. I knew that if I was going to do this, I needed to be fully honest and lean the fuck into all of the ugly parts. Not just the ugly parts of the situation, but the ugly parts of me. And I’m proud of that.
Alisson Wood’s writings have been published in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Catapult, and No Tokens Magazine. Alisson teaches creative writing at New York University and at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the founder and Editor in Chief of Pigeon Pages, a NYC literary journal and reading series. Alisson was a winner of the inaugural Breakout 8 Award from Epiphany Magazine and Author’s Guild. You can find her on Twitter at @LiteraryTSwift and on Instagram at @AlissonWood. Being Lolita, from Flatiron Books at Macmillan, is her first book.
