Excerpt from My Dark Vanessa by Kate Russell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I turn onto my stomach and shove a pillow between my legs. I tell him to give me a memory, something I can slip into. He's quiet as he flips through the scenes.

"In the office behind the classroom," he says. "It was the dead of winter. You, laid out on the sofa, your skin all goose bumps."

I close my eyes and I'm in the office—white walls and gleaming wood floors, the table with a pile of ungraded papers, a scratchy couch, a hissing radiator, and a single window, octagonal with glass the color of seafoam. I'd fix my eyes on it while he worked at me, feeling underwater, my body weightless and rolling, not caring which way was up.

"I was kissing you, going down on you. Making you boil." He lets out a soft laugh. "That's what you used to call it. 'Make me boil.' Those funny phrases you'd come up with. You were so bashful, hated talking about any of it, just wanted me to get on with it. Do you remember?"

I don't remember, not exactly. So many of my memories from back then are shadowy, incomplete. I need him to fill in the gaps, though sometimes the girl he describes sounds like a stranger.

"It was hard for you to keep quiet," he says. "You used to bite your mouth shut. I remember once you bit down on your bottom lip so hard, you started to bleed, but you wouldn't let me stop."

I press my face into the mattress, grind myself against the pillow as his words flood my brain and transport me out of my bed and into the past where I'm fifteen and naked from the waist down, sprawled on the couch in his office, shivering, burning, as he kneels between my legs, his eyes on my face.

My god, Vanessa, your lip, he says. You're bleeding.

I shake my head and dig my fingers into the cushions. It's fine, keep going. Just get it over with.

"You were so insatiable," Strane says. "That firm little body."

I breathe hard through my nose as I come, as he asks me if I remember how it felt. Yes, yes, yes. I remember that. The feelings are what I've been able to hold on to—the things he did to me, how he always made my body writhe and beg for more.


I've been seeing Ruby for eight months, ever since my dad died. At first it was grief therapy, but it's turned into talking about my mom, my ex-boyfriend, how stuck I feel in my job, how stuck I feel about everything. It's an indulgence, even with Ruby's sliding scale—fifty bucks a week just to get someone to listen to me.

Her office is a couple blocks from the hotel, a softly lit room with two armchairs, a sofa, and end tables holding boxes of tissues. The windows look out at Casco Bay: gulls swarming above the fishing piers, slow-moving oil tankers, and amphibious duck tours that quack as they ease into the water and transform from bus to boat. Ruby is older than me, big-sister older rather than mom older, with dishwater blond hair and granola clothes. I love her wooden-heeled clogs, the clack-clack-clack they make as she walks across her office.

"Vanessa!"

I love, too, the way she says my name as she opens the door, like she's relieved to see me standing there and not anyone else.

That week we talk about the prospect of me going home for the upcoming holidays, the first without Dad. I'm worried my mother is depressed and don't know how to broach the subject. Together, Ruby and I come up with a plan. We go through scenarios, the likely ways Mom will respond if I suggest she might need help.

"As long as you approach it with empathy," Ruby says, "I think you'll be ok. You two are close. You can handle talking about hard stuff."

Close with my mother? I don't argue but don't agree. Sometimes I marvel at how easily I deceive people, doing it without even trying.

I manage to hold off checking the Facebook post until the end of the session, when Ruby takes out her phone to enter our next appointment into her calendar. Glancing up, she catches my furious scroll and asks if there's any breaking news.

Excerpted from My Dark Vanessa by Karen Russell. Copyright © 2020 by Karen Russell. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.