BEING LOLITA: BOOK REVIEW

As a young writer and young woman, I think this book should be required reading. I only wish it had existed sooner, and that I had it as a guide from the outset.

I first met the author of Being Lolita, Alisson Wood, at NYU during a summer creative writing program, where she was a professor and faculty of the department. She told me she was working on a novel about “being Lolita.” I didn’t quite know what that meant at the time, but, in an effort to avoid seeming ‘un-read’ or unsophisticated, I feigned enthusiasm. After later getting Lolita pushed upon me by male professors or more likely fraternity brothers, I realized I have known for the greater part of my life what it means to be a ‘Lolita,’ which can really be understood as literary shorthand for horribly deforming hyper-sexualization, and old men preying upon vulnerable young women.

Being Lolita helps Alison process her experience of being the target and victim of sexual predation by her high-school English teacher, who had first helped Alisson cultivate her writing. He also came at a particularly vulnerable time: Alisson was in the midst of her transition back to high-school, immediately following treatment for self-harm and mental illness. Alisson begins her teaching in the first chapter, “Nabakov said that all good stories are fairy tales. At seventeen, I was primed to be someone’s princess.” As Alisson came to read Lolita, she took on the real-life role of the “nymphet—" the Nabakovian narrator Hubert’s pet-name for Dolores, a.k.a Lolita. She recounts looking up nymphet, the term she recognized as “sexy,” only to realize that its true definition is simply the “stage between larva and adulthood, between a baby and grown-up.” This gap here is important, however subtle, between what is defined academically, institutionally (Mr. North tells her to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary) versus how that term exists in the world, what it means for the body, the young woman to whom it is attributed.

This seems to be what the memoir largely grapples with — the issue of subtext — what is understood but not really said, what violence is inflicted but never exactly admitted to. Alisson lives it. She sees Lolita converge upon itself, each insinuation of harm or exploit in the novel being her actual reality, reading this book as she is being read as its namesake.

The novel ends with Alisson discussing what it means to now teach Lolita, with a special note given to one class subtitled “Powerful Women.” Meeting Alisson myself, remembering how she told me to call her by her first name and how she showed me her lovely cats on a subway ride, I cannot imagine a more capable or better-suited guide for the deconstruction of the subtexts of the classics, for redefining the truths already known but not dared to be spoken. She is kind and warm, as is her writing, and I think any person should be so lucky to have such a thoughtful, incisive intellectual to help them navigate this fearsome world of narrative.