BEING 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.

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