My Lolita

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? 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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