My Lolita

At just 17 years old, Alisson Wood began a dangerous entanglement with a creative writing teacher at her school, who gifted her a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita. To hear “Mr. North” tell it, Lolita is the ultimate love story—a narrative the young Alisson bought into, until she grew older and learned to see the tale for what it really is: a grim account of predation and abuse.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Warning.
This episode contains discussion of self harm, grooming, and sexual abuse.
Listener discretion is advised that summer was full of presents.
It seems like every time I saw him was a
celebration of me, of us. There were always drinks, There

(00:24):
were always boxes, typed with bakery string, sometimes with candy
or a pair of panties. He thought I would like
or look gloss or grown up perfume. He said, I
shouldn't smell like a schoolgirl anymore. One night he sat
me on his couch and gave me a thin package,
wrapped in newsprint, red and white bakery string. What's this?

(00:45):
The gift was light like paper. Open it. I untied
the string, peeled back the tape. It was a book,
almost a brown folder, half the size of a piece
of notebook paper. Open it the right way. I had
had it upside down. Oh. It had a title, Revised

(01:06):
Evidence Vladimir Novakov's Collection of Inscriptions, Annotations, Corrections and Butterfly Descriptions.
I hugged it against my chest, thanking him with a kiss,
his cats leaping on the other side of the couch.
I knew you'd love it, he said, smiling at me,
inches away from my mouth. Of course, I kissed him again.

(01:29):
You know I love the book as much as you.
You're my Lolita, he said. That's Alison Wood, writer, professor,
author of the memoir being Lolita. Alison's is a story
as old as time, a story of an older man
in a position of power and a girl who is

(01:49):
his prey, and the ripple effect of that story once
that girl escapes his clutches and grows up. It's also
a story about the peep on the sidelines of the
secret who may notice, who may see, but avert their
eyes and mind their own business. I'm Danny Shapiro, and

(02:20):
this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
I hate to use the word idyllic, but you know,
my childhood was pretty great. I was a voracious reader

(02:46):
from the time when I was very little. Um. I
was always way ahead of my reading and my writing,
and my parents were very enthusiastic and proud of me
most of the time. My teachers, we're also very encouraging
I remember my first grade teacher, Mrs Tesla, would give

(03:06):
me like extra spelling quizzes and give me extra assignments
to keep me busy. But then, of course, when I
was in the fourth grade, I had this one teacher
named Mrs gross Um that was that was literally her name,
and she was very frustrated that I was so ahead

(03:26):
in sort of spelling and reading and writing, and so
she began to for half of the day send me
to the school library. So I would spend half of
my day alone in the library with no other no
other kids, just with the librarians. And that was probably
very impactful to my childhood. Looking back, the librarians adored me.

(03:50):
They doated on me. They thought it was so great
that somebody wanted to read. As I continued growing up
the library in town, I was there every week checking
out a huge old books. When I was in middle school,
my librarian was one of my closest confidence and I
just I always loved reading and writing. But at the

(04:12):
same time, looking back, there was also I always dealt
with some sort of depression, even from when I was
very young. Um recently, I was home over the holidays
and helping my mother clean out an attic and we
found all of this, you know, ephemera from my childhood,

(04:33):
and it included a book that I had written when
I was ten. So but it says Allison's book on it.
You know. It has all these stories and poems in there,
and some drawings and it has this one poem about death,
like I Wonder what it's like to be dead? And

(04:54):
drawings of this cemetery and I'm like, what what is
going on with this tenure old? Those are really amazing
moments when we when we discover something, stumble across something
that is ours, something that we did or wrote, or
or a maide as a child, and you know, the

(05:17):
feeling is sort of like, who did that? Was that me?
Who did? Like? What was what was the experience of
did you have any memory of you know, that little
girl who was uh, you know, sort of obsessed with
ideas of of death. I had no memory of writing
this book or this particular poem. The poem was rhyming,

(05:39):
but you know it was it was pretty long. It
was decent I think for a ten year old. Looking back,
I'm like, you know, Alison was trying her best. And
also inside the same book there was of course a
short story about cats, which is very on brand about
me still, But I think what it reminded me was
about that same time, when I was in fourth grade,

(06:01):
my mother became concerned that I was depressed. This was
also the same year that I had that terrible teacher
who was sending me half the day to the library
and you know, isolating me from the other students. So
my mother began having me see a therapist, a child therapist,
And all I really remember is that we talked a lot.

(06:23):
He had me like right things, like right stories or whatnot.
I got to have you who, which was a very
deal because it was I had a very like you know,
sort of um. I wouldn't say there was like no
sugar lab, but you know, no sugary seniors, like none
of that, no cookies, no candy kind of home. And
I don't remember feeling depressed. I don't remember. I don't

(06:45):
look back at myself and think, oh, I was really depressed.
I've been told this and I was sort of like, Okay,
I guess, But then I find that poem and I'm like, oh,
I guess. Ten year old Allison was kind of dark
for a ten year old, did you experience Mrs Gross
sending new to the library for half the day as punishment.

(07:07):
I knew it was to get me out of her hair.
I knew that was why she was sending me away.
And of course, as a as a teacher, as a
professor myself, I fully understand that now, But at the
time I took it all very personally, and you know,
it was like what I you know, I'd get frustrated.
I'd get grumpy about it, um be partially because um

(07:29):
that teacher was not I was not putting any effort
into trying to support me more as other teachers had.
Um they you know, she didn't see my what I
looked back now and see, she didn't see my intelligence
or my being sort of ahead of the curve as
something positive. So well, I loved the library. I'm sure

(07:53):
that the isolation and the sort of being made to
feel different, not in a good way. I'm sure that
that was impactful to how I understood myself as a child.
And you know, I'm sure that it's not a coincidence
that that was when I was writing all these times
about death. Describe your mother for me a little bit.

(08:16):
My mother is someone who i've always very much looked
up to, and I've always very much wanted to be
like because she is very resilient and she's very tough.
She's a deputy director or a nonprofit in Connecticut. Her
job for a long time has always been the person

(08:39):
who fires people. My mother has has no problem with conflict.
She's not afraid of being direct. She's someone who had
worked I worked out the same nonprofit at her, and
I just didn't understand how intimidating she was to other
people because to me, she was just mom. But she
was very intimidating to other people at times, and I
sort of admired that about her. Um. But then on

(09:01):
the other hand, at my home growing up, there were
always other kids there, in particular my little sister's friends.
There would always be other teenagers hanging around who would
call her mom. I sometimes describe my mother as someone
who takes in strays, because since I left home to
go to college, there's always been somebody staying in my room.

(09:24):
So there's very There's this very interesting dichotomy there between
who she is I think, and I think the ability
to be sort of tough and strong and resilient but
also have this nurturing this very big mom energy. What
about your father? What your father like? My father as well,

(09:44):
has done nonprofit work his entire life. He was a
concert pianist when he was younger, and he's really warm
and kind and supportive. He was always the person when
whatever I did, if I did a school play, if
I you know, it was working on a project, whatever
it was, he was always there, right in the front

(10:05):
row um being so supportive of me. Which is funny
because on the other hand, my mother was someone who,
so I did community theater for a long time, and
she was famous within community theater circles for walking out
if she did not like a play, including if her
daughter was in it. Yes, she was known for doing that,

(10:31):
and you know, people were either deeply offended or sort
of thought it was funny. I I chose to think
it was funny. But what that told me then was
when she stayed for a show, she really liked it.
That meant that when she was staying, I was like, Wow,
my mother really likes this. Whereas my father was someone
who would always be at the show, always telling me
how great it was and how amazing I was. So

(10:53):
it's this, it's this funny difference in the two of them.
My father was not quite as present in my life
growing up. He was, you know, in sort of that
typical way. He was the one who would work late
and who wouldn't always be home for dinner. My mother
took on much more of those sort of caregiving role,
the typical role for me and my little sister. Um.

(11:15):
She was. She worked part time at certain points to
support me and Lauren. Where is My father never did that.
My mother never made any of those choices growing up,
None of them. Laura and I were her number one
priority all the time. Allison's childhood may have been idyllic,

(11:36):
but as she becomes a teenager, she begins to get
into deeper and deeper trouble. She develops serious issues with
depression and begins to self harm. People found out because
in gym class in middle school. You know, you've got
the lockers you have to change to like your gym
outfit and whatnot. Two friends of mine had saw my

(11:56):
arms and brought me to the school social worker. When
I got home that your school that day, my mother
had already been notified. Obviously, I think that they sent
me home early. Um, and that is actually One of
the only times I remember seeing my mother crying was
she got on the phone to someone trying to get
me some sort of services. I'm sure because she was
always very much a kind of person who when there's

(12:17):
a problem, she's going to solve it. She was very
active and proactive in that way, in particular about me
and my little sister. If there's something wrong, how can
we make it better, Let's do things. She was all
about action. That continued throughout high school. It did not
get better. Um the cutting did, but I continued being

(12:38):
incredibly depressed. I stopped going to school at certain points.
I switched my nights and days. I was mismedicated at
one point and became manic, but was only manic because
of the medication. Like I had racing thoughts, I was
hearing voices the whole thing. At one point I was
having electro convulsive therapy because it was sort of that years.

(13:01):
It didn't make everything better, but it got me out
of bed. I was going back to school. I wasn't
thinking about killing myself anymore. So it really it really
did make a difference, a big difference. But nonetheless, streshment
and sophomore year of high school. I wasn't consistently getting
to school, getting too classes. I was failing. At the
end of sophomore year, they told me, the school told

(13:22):
me that they thought I should not come back and
that I should get my diploma through night school. And
my mother was like, I don't think so, because I,
of course already had of the had all of those
I p s and disability status, and they were supposed
to be making all these accommodations and whatnot. So my
mother fought like hell to get me into a therapeutic

(13:44):
day school for my junior year. It was great. I mean,
I felt supported in ways that I hadn't been in years.
Because one of the bad things that happens, for one
of the sort of side effects I guess of not
being in school is that your teachers don't think much
of you anymore, even if you're smart, even if you

(14:05):
know the answers in class, even if you you know
hadn't done the homework just because you know or because
you read the book already, there's this wariness and the
classroom and school had always been a place where I
felt almost always except for that fourth grade teacher, where
I usually felt very very welcome. It was a place
where I took a lot of pride, where I knew

(14:29):
I could succeed, and teachers were really important to me.
I always loved my teachers very much, and I loved
going to the library, and I would spend time after school.
You know, I was all I was always that kid.
So when that sort of larger institutional relationship fractured so
severely for me and freshman and sophomore year, looking back,

(14:52):
that was really impactful and negatively impactful in ways that
I did not understand at the time but are pretty
clear to me now. We'll be right back in her
new small school, Allison feels accepted and valued. She's reminded

(15:14):
that she's a smart kid and can do really well.
She goes to group therapy in the afternoons, takes French,
catches up on all the classes she'd missed the previous year.
She gets back on track. Nobody at the therapytic day
school called me crazy. Nobody thought I was nuts. No

(15:34):
one thought that because we were all very much in
similar boats, and school was a place where I could
succeed again because the teachers weren't constantly giving me a side.
I you know, if I missed a day. Um, I
wouldn't come back and get sort of glares, would be ignored.
The next day, it was like, okay, great, Alison, you're here,
let's catch you up. So at the end of that year,

(15:58):
you know you've done well academically, and you're given a choice,
right to go back to the school that you would
begun at the public high school or to stay at
the therapeutic day school. Right. I have the choice to
go back to my public high school, and all I

(16:19):
wanted was to be normal, So I chose to go back.
And obviously, you you can't change the past. And I
don't know if it's necessarily a terrible thing that I
went back, but it is definitely a choice that changed
them the journey of my life in some ways. So

(16:41):
tell me about the reception that you received when you
first went back. I remember that first day back in
high school, back in my in my high school, I
remember hearing other students say I thought she died as
I walked by, because we know how cruel teenagers can be,
how sort of off handedly, backhandedly cruel. And people thought

(17:06):
I was in a mental institution, which I had never been.
I've never been hospitalized. Um, people thought that I had disappeared.
People thought that I was this crazy girl. People thought
that I was this slut because I had always I
don't even even when I wasn't going to school regularly,
I always had a boyfriend. I felt more alone than

(17:27):
I think I ever had at that point. And not
only did I feel completely ostracized from the other students
and misunderstood and very much judged, but I also felt
like that from the teachers at school, from the administration,

(17:50):
from the ladies at the front desk, and to my
individual teachers. I remember on that first day there was
one teacher in particular who I felt particularly sort of
upset about how I was treated, and it was my
Latin teacher. And I had loved Latin and been really

(18:11):
good at Latin, and my Latin teacher had always sort
of adored me. And then that first day of my
senior year, I got into his class and he basically
ignored me. And he when he was assigning seats, you know,
going through role call, saying everyone's name and telling them

(18:32):
where they had to sit, he did not give me
a seat, and he told me to just sit in
the back, and he said, let's just see how this
goes because he didn't think I was going to be
showing up to class, so why bother getting me a seat?
And that made me so sad, and I remember mostly

(18:52):
being pissed and being like what the fuck? You know,
like I I didn't say that in the class, but
like in my head, but now I look back and
I that's just so sad. Well it's it's sad, and
it's also I mean, um, to to write off someone
of that age is not just cruel, but it's pedagogically

(19:14):
like so messed up. That is something that as I,
as I teach now to undergraduate students and just my
students in general, I will never do that to a
student again, because it's so obvious to me when a
student is in trouble, when a student is having a
hard time. So I never question when students say I

(19:37):
need an extension. I know I've missed class, I'm trying
to get there. I never give my students a hard
time about that. Ever, I will never fall to student
for being in a in a tough place. And you know,
of course in my syllabus I say no extensions, you know,
you've got to come to class. But then an actuality
I'm a total softie. So within this hostile environment where

(20:02):
both students and teachers shame and ostracized Allison, her English teacher,
who's new to the school, recognizes her talent and suggests
that one of her colleagues, a teacher Alison calls Nick Norris,
work with Allison outside of school hours to further her
writing and become a mentor. I came into her class

(20:25):
and I was really excited about taking her creative writing class.
And she did not come with any sort of baggage
or expectations or judgment. I was just a student who
was doing well and was happy to be there, which
was obviously, of course looking back, which was something great,
you know, I'm sure, I'm sure she was excited. It
was her first year teaching, and she thought that I

(20:48):
had talent and some you know, possibilities of doing better.
So she introduced me to Mr North, who was a
also first year teacher, and she introduced him as my
potential mentor and said, why don't you two start meeting
after school and it'll be great because I just I

(21:12):
just tront of the capacity to do that, but I
think Mr North would be a great fit. And I
was over the Moon. I was so excited. The idea
of having someone a teacher again sort of take interest
in me and want to support me was just so

(21:35):
I don't even think I can possibly I can properly
describe how much it gave me hope that I could
still be the kind of student, the kind of person
that I wanted to be and that I used to be.
It sort of seemed like, here's an opportunity for me
to prove everybody wrong. Here's an opportunity for me to
get some support and to do better not just with

(21:57):
showing up to class, but with my grades and with
what I was writing, and to really kind of bed
Allison I wanted to be, and which just so happens
as well. Mr North was young, and he was very handsome,
and all the girls thought he was like so cute,

(22:19):
and he played guitar and would play guitar at the
coffee shops downtown where all the all the high school
kids also would play guitar and like you know, do
their little cover bands and things he did that he wore.
This was nearly two thousands, so Abercrombie and Fitch was
a very big deal, so you would wear Abercrombie and

(22:41):
Fitch and those leather bracelets and those button ups with
a little moose pocket, and very much had this sort
of dual energy of both a grown up because you know,
we had to call him Mr North. He was is
our teacher, but he also had these very strong, like

(23:04):
boy kind of vibes coming off of him. It just
sort of radiated off of him who he was, this
complicated figure, and so the idea that I was getting
his attention for, you know, an hour after school every
day was just, Oh, my god, I'm the luckiest girl
in the world. Mr North is twenty six, a teacher

(23:25):
charged with protecting and educating his students. This could be
a great thing for Allison, right, a real game changer,
a popular and admired teacher taking an interest in her writing,
except that it becomes really clear, really quickly that Mr
North has other interests. The first time that I really

(23:49):
understood that my relationship with Mr North was not any
other relationship with the teacher I had experienced before was
right before Thanksgiving. So we had been meeting after school
for about two maybe close to three months, and in
the shop class where he was watching study hall, I

(24:13):
was supposed to be in some class I don't remember
what class. He would constantly write me hall passes to
get me into, to get me to meet him in
his study room, to be in his classroom when he's teaching,
And looking back, I don't know how that went on
as it did, because it's just perplexing how sort of
other teachers would just be like, oh, she has a

(24:34):
pass from Mr North. It's fine. Looking back, that's very
perplexing to me. But we were in a shop classroom
and he wrote me this note, like we had been
doing for the past few months. He began writing me
notes in classes, but we were passing notes like we
were two students, but he was a teacher. And he
asked me what my brass eyes was and I sort

(24:56):
of demurred and played coy and in he told me
that he would trade my BRA's eyes for how big
his penis was. And that really was the first moment
where I was like, oh, this really is something else,

(25:18):
which looking back, I mean, that is shockingly obvious, But
there had been a lot of more subtle signs. I mean,
looking back, there not even subtle. But at the time,
I really, I mean I was seventeen, I thought I
was in love, as in love as any seventeen year
old could be. I had the biggest crush on him,

(25:39):
and I thought that it was maybe just this like
light flirtation, or that I was maybe like making it
up a little bit in my head. What were some
of the subtle quote unquote subtle signs, Because I think
that that whole idea of making it up in your
head is something that is so resonant and familiar, and

(25:59):
I'm mean I relate to it myself, and I know
so many young women who have that feeling of maybe
this isn't really happening. Yeah, I mean the relationship started
with and I don't think this could have happened with
the match teacher. I think this is the kind of
thing that can only happen with with an English teacher
or a creative writing teacher. He began reading my journals,

(26:21):
he began having me he assigning me writing exercises, prompts,
and then he began reading me his own writing. And
then he began having me write things directly to him,
to Mr North. So things escalated, this sort of intimacy
that happens when you're sharing writing, when you're sharing sort

(26:43):
of your innermost thoughts and ideas and things like that,
and being vulnerable, not just emotionally, but also on the page.
There's this intimacy that happens really quickly. And he would
comment on me being pretty and sort of on you know,
my hour glass shape and um, he would make comments about,

(27:05):
you know, oh, you're really sexy. But I still I
kept sort of brushing it off in some ways. I
still sort of thought like, oh, he's just you know,
he's just sort of flirting with me. And we began
meeting outside of the classroom. We began meeting at coffee shops,
who began meeting late at night at diners across town
in the next town over. And these are all things

(27:28):
that as a thirty seven year old woman looking back
on like alarm bells, you know, get out of there.
But at the time I did not take it all
as seriously as I should have. I thought that I
was still kind of in control, like, well, I'm flirting back,
or I'm the one who's starting the flirtation today. You know,

(27:48):
I had this idea that, well, I can handle this
when you were meeting him late nights and across town
and you know, sort of at all hours you were
living at home, you were senior in high school. Did
this raise any questions or eyebrows with either of your parents. No,

(28:12):
And I've asked my parents about this, and they, for
the most part, say that they don't really remember what
their thought process was what I was saying. I mean,
I'm sure that I was saying things like, oh, I'm
just hanging out with a friend, I'm just working on

(28:35):
my homework. I don't know what I was saying, but
I think within the context of how serious my depression
had been for so long, you know, I mean, I
had gone sometimes I went weeks without wanting to leave
my room, without seeing anybody, without being awake during the daytime.
I switched my nights and days at times for long

(28:57):
periods of time, which was very difficult. So I think
and that sort of as the perspective, I think that
they thought, well, she's getting to school, she's not suicidal,
she's doing okay. Let's just let her be, probably with
some relief that you were, you know, living a quote
unquote normal you know, sort of senior year of high

(29:19):
school kind of experience, or so it seemed to them.
I'm sure that, I mean, looking back, I'm sure that
from the outside that's what they thought, Oh she's breaking curfew.
Sometimes you know that that's that's a normal teenager thing.
And this was before cell phones, you know, this was
the nearly two thousands. I mean, cellphones existed, but you know,
I was a kid in Suberbia. I didn't have a cellphone.

(29:40):
So something looking back that is very scary to me
is how this secret put me in so much danger
and I did not understand or comprehend or acknowledge at
all at the time. But the fact that nobody knew
where I was for so much time is frankly very scary.
Out It occurs to me from time to time when

(30:04):
I hear certain kinds of stories that these stories would
not have unfolded the way they did if they had
taken place now, when everyone's connected by technology. The kinds
of lies and secrets that happened even twenty years ago
would never have happened in the same way today. Alison's
parents didn't have the ability to track her on Find

(30:25):
my Friends, or a call to check in with her,
even if it had occurred to them. The other question
that occurred to me before we move forward, is um,
it's kind of a It's a tricky question in a way, um,
but did you know that you were very pretty? I
don't mean looking back now in that way of you know,
sort of looking at pictures and realizing, oh my god,

(30:46):
I was really pretty, But did you did you know
it as a as a sixteen year old, seventeen year old, No,
I was wildly insecure. I thought that with enough efforts
and with sort of that kind of sexy, sedectorus flirtatious
attitude that we saw all over media, all over TV shows.

(31:09):
You know, this was back in the era of Britney Spears,
of Dawson's Creek, of sort of all that pop culture
that's so much about sexualizing young women and teenagers. I mean,
I think that air of the pop star is just
something so specific and disturbing, um in a way that
you know, I mean, of course, like the sexualization of

(31:31):
young women is always disturbing, but I think that was
really an apex of this sort of specific kind of
perspective that society had on young women. And I thought that, well,
I'm not pretty, but if I put on enough makeup
and I wear low cut shirts and you know, low

(31:52):
rise pants, which was of course all that was being
sold at Abercombian Fitch and like all those mall stores.
And if I could do that, then I could look
pretty enough. And I saw that as a way to
be powerful, because, of course, there are so many signals
in media, in our society and in our language that

(32:13):
young women, in particulars power is through sex, is through
their body. I think part of what made me so
attracted to him was how overt he was about his
attraction to me, and that sort of experience of being

(32:34):
seen as sexy, not just as sexy. He thought I
was smart, He thought I was a good writer. He
thought that I was a good person. He thought that
I had just had a rough couple of years and
that's normal. And he would sometimes say things like I
don't know why you were so sad, because you're so smart,
and you're so beautiful, and you are only potential, and

(32:55):
those are things that no one had ever said to
me at that point. I just ate that up. I mean,
I think anyone would have but me at that point
in my life. He was just under ten years older
than me. He was the cute teacher in my school.
All the girls thought he was like the hot one,
so just that sort of attention from him was just overwhelming.

(33:18):
So the fact that the asking me for my braw
s eyes in return for the size of his penis
was happening before Thanksgiving, I think so, not even three
months later. I think that says something about how quickly
there was the relationship escalated too deeply inappropriate, and it

(33:39):
mostly continued on like that for the rest of the year.
At one point he felt like people were suspecting things,
so he he had me start dating somebody and was
getting these sort of these very specific instructions. At the
same time, got very jealous of the fact that I
was spending time with this other guy, this teenager, the

(34:00):
guy who was only who was nineteen, who was you know,
my age. Basically he was a friend of a friend.
And Mr North got very jealous about that and very angry.
And I was full of guilt because there's other teenage
boy really liked me, and he said he was in
love with me, and I was like, I'm just doing
this because Mr and North he was telling you too well,

(34:20):
the point should be made to write that you were seventeen.
So aside from the fact the that he was your
teacher and that and that he could lose his job,
and you know that that would be you know, a
huge deal if if this all was discovered you were
legally underage. Yes, I was legally under age. And he

(34:41):
began to bring that up a lot in our time together,
especially at the diner. I mean once he wrote, at
the dinner, we would pass pieces of the paper place
mats or napkins or these pieces of paper from school
back and forth, you know, writing the sort of very sexy,

(35:01):
intense things back and forth to each other. And I
remember once he wrote something about how playmates are only
eighteen and we are we being society are told to
look and yet I'm supposed to cast my eyes away
from you. He's sort of very romantic, but now I

(35:23):
see it is also very deeply manipulative and kind of
icky ideas um. But at the time it seems like, Wow,
she's just so smart and deep and right. We'll be
back in a moment with more family secrets. Mr North

(35:56):
introduces Allison to his favorite novel, Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov.
He tells her it's the greatest love story ever told.
Alison later way later learns to her horror and shame
that Mr North has been mispronouncing the surname of the
Russian novelist. It's not Nabakov, It's Nabakov. Even in this

(36:20):
he was a posure, a fake, a charlatan. She couldn't
see through. He gave me Lolita pretty early on. He
gave it to me that fall one night at the
diner in the parking lot, and he had read to
me the opening already, and he gave me his copy
and had inscribed it to me. This book is Love, Lust,

(36:42):
and Lightning, and I just thought it was the most
romantic thing ever ever. I could not even my mind
practically exploded at the romance he was offering me. He
told me that it was this beautiful story about love,
and that this was a story about us, and it
was the star crossed loves, and it was this seduction
by this young woman, and nobody could understand their love,

(37:05):
so it would had to be a secret, and I
I lapped it up. I didn't know any better. I
literally did not even know what an unreliable narrator was
at that point in my life. So I thought that
this book was what I was supposed to be aspiring
to be. I thought that Lolita Dolores Hayes was sort

(37:29):
of my model, and that by being like her, I
was being powerful. I was being this sexy Jezebel. And
I was given the impression because he told me that
that was the height of sex and love and lust. Well,

(37:51):
and it was the perfect vehicle for his grooming of
you because of this combination of what the novel entails,
and also it's literary, you know, greatness. So he's presenting
it to as an English teacher and as a fellow writer.

(38:13):
I imagine when he first presented it too, it must
have been like sort of the perfect key, you know,
like the perfect you know key for the lock. However,
the you know, the open lock. Really that was you
at that time, very much, I mean even now, I
mean people still talk about Nabakov being one of the

(38:34):
greatest writers. There are graduate school classes just devoted to Nabakov.
And so he put Nabakov on this incredibly high pedestal
for me and very much introduced it as this is
the greatest love story of our century. And looking back,
it was it was the perfect tool for grooming. But

(38:55):
I never thought of it like that. I thought I
was so special for him sharing this with me, And
I also knew it was sort of like a scandalous book.
I knew that too, because he told me, you know,
don't let people know that I gave it to you,
don't you know. It's it's a secret. It's a secret
between us, like everything was. And so I thought that

(39:16):
made me special, and that that made it's special, like
he was risking something to give this to me, and
that of course made me just want it more like
any teenager. Looking back, it makes me very sad that
a piece of literature was used in that way. But
I also have very complicated feelings about a Bokov and

(39:38):
Lolita now in that I think it is a beautiful book.
I think it is a beautifully written book that opening
light of my life are of my loins, my sin,
my soul. I mean, my god, it's a There are
just some beautiful, beautiful parts in that book, staggeringly beautiful
that I teach in class because they're just such powerful

(39:59):
examples of the tools of literature, the tools of language,
and there's all that wonderful stuff. But it is also
problematic as fun, and it can be both. It can
be beautiful, and it is also a story about rape
and kidnapping, and grooming, and we have to be able

(40:22):
to acknowledge both and pedophilia. Yeah, and pedophilia, yes, yeah,
that little thing. Just that. The direction of Allison's life
is now firmly being controlled by Mr North's. He starts
talking to her about their future, the two of them.
He pushes her toward Ithaca College because he has plans

(40:45):
to attend graduate school nearby at Cornell. This too, is
about as genuine as his pronunciation of the author of Lolita. Anyway,
Ithaca College isn't Allison's first choice, but that's where she goes.
Mr is the master of her destiny and her parents.
Her parents still have no idea what's going on. And

(41:06):
the night after she graduates from high school, literally the
next night, she and Mr North what to say, consummate
their relationship, begin their affair. None of the words are
quite right. Let's just call it what it is. They
have sex. Mr North, or Nick as I began calling him,

(41:26):
made it really clear that spring that we were going
to be together, that he was in love with me,
that by going to Ithaca College, he was going to
go back to Cornell and get his PhD in another year,
and then we could just be together. As like two
co eds in town, and we don't have to be
a secret anymore. So when I graduated, I knew, okay,

(41:52):
this is this is this line that we are going
to cross up. Until then, it had never been physical,
with the exception of this one time he kissed my ankle,
and that was the line. And he told me that
it was because he could get fired, and I did
not want him to get fired. And I was adamant

(42:14):
that I would never tell that, I would never let
that happen to him. But then the night of my graduation,
at my graduation party, our graduation ceremony afterwards, he gave
me whenever he told me to call him, and I
went to his apartment the following night and I got
very drunk. He got me very drunk. You know, I

(42:36):
was eighteen at this point. Um, I'd really only had
like bears at some sort of party on someone's back porch.
You know, I had had very very little um interactings
with alcohol. I had never done drugs. And he got
me drunk on Cosmopolitans because sex in the city was

(42:57):
cool then, so I was like, yeah, I'll have a
cost smell. I didn't know what I wanted to drink
because I didn't know what I liked to drink. But
I got really drunk and we had sex for the
first time. And I don't remember all of it, but
I do remember it was very uncomfortable and it was

(43:20):
not at all romantic or anything like the fantasy that
I had sort of put upon what our relationship was
going to be like. And what are you know, quote
unquote love was. And I remember thinking that it was me,
that I had done something wrong, and that I wasn't

(43:40):
good enough, that I didn't know how to have fact,
you know, that I was doing things wrong. Um, And
I very very much blamed myself, and the relationship very
quickly became even more controlling and very emotionally and verbally abusive.
And over the next six nine months when we were together, um,

(44:05):
as you said, having the affair. You know, I really
hate the word affair. But the problem is there's no
word for what was happening. It's not a relationship because
that sort of suggested in a equality, and there was
no equality in our relationship. Um. He was far more
the person in power than I ever was, even for

(44:27):
a moment, and we weren't dating because that sort of
seems too casual and sort of like, you know, you're
dating in high school. But he wasn't in high school.
He was almost ten years older than me. He wasn't
my boyfriend because he was a secret. Nobody knew. And
something that I think is really interesting and frustrating is
that we don't have a word for this, which I

(44:48):
think tells us a lot about what our language and
what our culture thinks about these relationships, or it doesn't.
So the relationship continued, and it continued to be a secret,
and I began to get really frustrated by that. Um
so it was exhausting to keep this secret because by
then I had made friends, I had sort of found

(45:11):
my place as a teenager in my high school. I
had sort of made more social connections, and I was
constantly lying, why did it have to continue to be
a secret at that point when you were eighteen and
had graduated. He said he would get fired if anybody
found out, So we had to get a new being

(45:33):
a secret, and I did not understand that. I was like,
I'm eighteen, it's fine, what's the big deal? But he
insisted that it continue being a secret, and who was
I to argue? So it seems like he continued to
become more and more sort of emotionally and verbally abusive,
something that he hadn't really overtly been when he was

(45:57):
grooming you, when he was like a actively courting you
by grooming you. When I went off to college, that
was really when things took a turn to the even worse.
The relationship was nothing like I had imagined. The relationship
was absolutely not the fantasy and this wonderful, romantic, beautiful

(46:19):
love story that he had promised me. It was really
ugly at times. It was full of him humiliating me
at times. Once he made me key in front of
him because he said that this was what real relationships
are about, which just horrified me and I, you know,

(46:40):
and he forced me to. He put me in the
bathroom and he would not let me leave. There would
just be these very humiliating and these deeply imbalanced power
moves that he would make, and those just began to increase.
And when I went off to college, he would come

(47:02):
up and visit me sometimes, but it got really ugly
really fast. Probably the worst one of the worst facts
that we had was when was that semester I was
taking a literature course, and we were talking about short
stories and PO and my professor had, you know, talked

(47:22):
about how PO was the father of the short story.
So I was with him and I and he was
like house classes and I was like, oh my god,
we're talking, you know, we're learning about these things and
I'm so excited and Poe and I was saying all
of that, and he laughed at me and said, you know,
your your professor is wrong. You're not learning anything there.

(47:43):
And I got, you know, upset, and he began arguing
with me that another writer I think, I think he
said Nathaniel Hawthorne was the father of the short story.
And we got into a screaming match about it, and
we were both drunk, because it did take me much
to get drunk, and he threw a glass across the
room and it shattered on the wall and I broke

(48:06):
down crying. And I mean, these sort of fights happened
more and more. The more that I began to sort
of get my own opinions about things and began to
not see him as this all knowing, all controlling figure,
the more tension we had, and eventually it became very

(48:28):
sexually abusive. And there are definitely times in that relationship
when looking back twenty years later, I would call that
rape what happened. I would never say that at the time.
At the time, again, I just thought he'd gotten mad
at me. I was doing something wrong. It was my fault,

(48:52):
and I never ever would have used that word. But
now he definitely raped me at least twice. Yeah, there
were definite moments when our sex was non consensual. On
my heart, what do you think allowed you to ultimately
get out? Because not everyone gets out. I think that's

(49:16):
very very luckily. I saw that because of keeping him
Nick the teacher, a secret. And while I was in college,
I was putting myself back into that same isolated, not
connecting with people place that I had been in high

(49:38):
school in my senior year when I first returned, because
I wasn't able to go out with my friends, I
wasn't really making friends because it's weird when you know
you can't go out with them that night. You have
to stay home in your dorm room waiting for the
teacher to call you, and you can't tell anybody that
that's why you're waiting in your dorm room. There was

(49:58):
just this constant lying and I just somehow I was
able to see dot that he made me feel shitty,
that I was crying way too much, that it became
clear that he probably was not going to be getting
into any PhD program, much less Cornell's, so we were

(50:19):
not going to be able to be just two codes
like he had promised. And I somehow found the strength
to walk away and to want to have my own life.
And frankly, I don't know how I did that. I
don't know, but I thankfully was able to. Allison graduates

(50:41):
from Ithaca College and works at a nonprofit was at
risk teenagers, perhaps a way of repairing some of her
own wounds. She eventually enrolls in a Master of Fine
Arts program and becomes a professor of writing, herself a
wonderfully false circle moment. When she become as a teacher,
it truly drives the point home to her. Even though

(51:04):
her parents should have been able to read some of
the signs that she was in trouble, it was really
her teachers, the ones who witnessed what was happening, who
had to see the way this teacher student relationship had
gone off the rails, and who said and did nothing
The first time I walked into a classroom as a professor.

(51:28):
It was a slap in the face. I mean, there's
no other way to describe it. I had been working
with teenagers for quite a while at that point, which,
of course, looking back, it all makes sense. It's like, ah,
this is part of my processing um working with girls
doing empowerment stuff during workaround consent and dating violence and

(51:52):
you know, reading programs and all and all the specific
work with girls. And at the time I did not
see any of those things. I just liked that work.
But looking back, it's fall clearly part of my dealing
with what it happened to me. But then becoming a
teacher myself was this whole new experience. And it is

(52:17):
just striking how when you are a professor, when you
are a teacher and you have a workshop, you have
a classroom full of students. It is just as someone
who is thirty seven now so literally twenty years later,
they're just so young, even even though they're eighteen nineteen,
maybe they're even twenty, They're so young. I mean, there's

(52:41):
just no other way to put it. And this is
not to of course disavow their agency, their maturity, their strength,
their intelligence, but they are still children too. You know,
many of them have never lived on their own, they've
never paid a bill, some of them don't know how
to do their own laundry or how to cook for themselves.

(53:01):
I mean, in a lot of practical ways, there's still children,
but also just emotionally, you can tell in their bodies
that they're still children in their faces. And then it's
also so obvious when a girl is in trouble in particular,

(53:22):
there's always at least one student, one girl. It's always
a girl who is having a hard time and needs
some support and needs extra attention and care, and this
need just radiates. It's so her vulnerability is just so obvious.
And I remember that first day in the classroom, before

(53:46):
we were just introducing each other, you know, not even
not even working on writing or doing anything like that,
sort of starting to get to get to know each
other in the classroom, and there she was right in
front of me, and it was me. I saw myself
in this girl, and it just made me realize how

(54:06):
vulnerable I was, what an easy target I was, and
it made me so viscerally mad and angry about what
happened to me in this whole new way. At this point,
I had already been angry and I have been frustrated
about what what had happened. You're like, this is really shitty,

(54:28):
This wasn't my fault, you know, all of those things.
But then becoming a teacher myself, and you know, my
stuents are even a little bit older than I was.
But to go into a classroom and see your students
as anything but people that you need to protect and
do take care of and provide for. To look at

(54:48):
your students and think, wow, I want to try to
fuck that one. There is nothing more wrong to me.
And I just got viscerally angry about what happened to
me in this whole way. I mean, I think teaching
a secret, I really do so to understand in this
new perspective what was done to me. It was illuminating

(55:13):
because I then better understood myself and what had been done,
and it also sort of sharpened by anger and also, frankly,
my resolve to not let this happen in my classroom
or in any classroom that I had any part of.
I'm just having an insight listening to you, which is

(55:34):
that I don't think that shame and anger can occupy
the same space. When shame takes over, it's not possible
to feel the kind of white hot clarity, because shame
means the wrongness is us, and anger is taking that

(55:56):
wrongness and turning it around a d eighty degrees and saying, no,
I was a victim here, and you were the person
who was in power and was in was in charge,
and who did this. I didn't do this, You did this,
And you can't get there when there's still are these
vestiges of shame. And I think it can take a

(56:16):
really long time to have all of that really peel away.
It took me a good fifteen years. I have spent
probably the first fifteen years after this had happened, thinking
it was my fault, you know, thinking I had seduced him,
that I was just as much of a participant in

(56:38):
this relationship as he was, and being in a classroom
made it so clear that nope, that is not what
was happening. And I think you're right, this sort of
white hot clarity of anger of you know, sort of
putting that blame outward for the first time really in
some ways. And I like the word victim. I know

(57:01):
some people don't, and Obviously this is a very personal thing,
but I actually like the word victim because to me,
it's sort of the nately suggests a victim of something,
a victim of someone, as opposed to, you know, a
word like survivor, which to me is kind of flattening.
And I mean, you know, all all words can be flattening,

(57:22):
but I think it eliminates the part of acknowledging the harm.
And I think that moment in the classroom, and every
time I stepped foot into a classroom is part of
me acknowledging the harm that was done to me that
I did not bring upon myself. I was seventeen. I

(57:42):
was a kid. This man was an adult. He was
almost ten years older than me. He was a grown up.
There was there's no way to excuse his behavior. Maybe
I thought he was cute, and maybe I was flirting
with him, but the thing is that was completely developmentally appropriate.
First devon girl to have a crush on our teacher,
to try to flirt with adults like that's fine, but

(58:03):
he should have known better, and he did, and he
did it anyway. Family Secrets is a production of I
Heart Media, Dylan Fagin and Bethan Mcalouso are the executive producers.

(58:27):
Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a
secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and
your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our
number is one secret zero, that's secret and then the
number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at

(58:49):
Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod,
and Twitter at fami Secret Spot. And if you want
to know about my family's secret that in fired this podcast,
check out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. For

(59:31):
more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.