You Can Always Count on a Rapist for a Redundant Prose Style
The Scandal at Miss Hall's School, My Dark Vanessa, and the Eeriness of Shared Trauma
Lately, I’ve been reading Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie. A TL;DR on the “eerie” half of this short book of theory: eeriness focuses on the dissonant feeling that arises when something is missing that should be present, or when something exists that fundamentally does not belong, creating a sense of invisible forces shaping events. These invisible forces are actually quite palpable—my favorite of Fisher’s examples is “the invisible hand of the stock market.” Of course, there is no real hand—there isn’t even a body, or a sentient presence behind the stock market—yet we know how it works and we certainly know it impacts us. It determines the price at the gas pump, how much property is worth. It has been known to send bankers off the sides of buildings. The eerie is not merely about what is unseen but about what is palpably felt, an unnerving awareness of systems operating in the shadows. It’s not real, but it impacts us as though it is.
I could not shake a feeling of eeriness as I read Evgenia Peretz’s recent Vanity Fair exposé on Miss Hall’s School, “Girls, Interrupted.” At the center of Peretz’s piece is Matt Rutledge, a beloved history teacher at Miss Hall’s School in Massachusetts. For over three decades, he groomed and abused vulnerable students under the guise of mentorship. Survivors Melissa Fares and Hilary Simon recount eerily similar experiences: Rutledge isolated them, gained their families’ trust, and transferred his shame onto them, leaving them to carry his secret. When confronted with their stories, the school maintained its silence, prioritizing its reputation over the safety of its students.
As I read the article, I kept thinking: I’ve heard this story before. Not just the broad strokes of it but the details, right down to the type of clothing Rutledge requested the students he abused wear the first time he raped them. Specifically, I’d heard it before in Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, which I read the week it came out, back in 2020. I wasn’t just interested in the content of the book (psychological realism about a young women who has what she considers to be an affair with her teacher until she realizes she did not actually consent), I was also interested because the author attended the same doctoral program as I and I’d heard her read from different drafts of the novel as she worked on it. I only spoke with Kate a handful of times, but I knew she was a powerful writer and a sharp intellect and I was very curious to see how the novel had come together.
So, it turned out, were a lot of other people. My Dark Vanessa was one of those debut novels that got a seven-figure deal. Stephen King did the cover blurb. Oprah was in talks to include it in her book club. And then—there was an accusation of plagiarism by Wendy C. Ortiz, who accused Russell of appropriating themes and structure from her memoir Excavation. Oprah dropped My Dark Vanessa from consideration, shy of being burnt again after the James Frey debacle of earlier years.*
In a now deleted Twitter post, Ortiz herself uses the word “eerie” to describe the similarities between her memoir and Russell’s novel. The eerie sensation I had reading “Girls, Interrupted” isn’t the same as what I imagine Ortiz felt the first time she heard of My Dark Vanessa, but I think it might have been similar—a sense that some unnatural and unseen force was at work. Russell has been open about the fact that My Dark Vanessa is based on her lived experience, so because her novel and the expose were so similar, I actually had to Google to assure myself that Russell didn’t attend Miss Hall’s School, that Matt Rutledge was not the actual teacher portrayed in My Dark Vanessa. She didn’t and he wasn’t, but I couldn’t quit thinking about the repetition across Peretz, Russell, and Ortiz’s stories. I kept telling people about it, hitting up my book friends to see if they’d read both the novel and the article, but nobody had yet.
I was explaining all this to my partner when I realized where the eerie sensation came from. It wasn’t that all these women had the same story, it was that all these men—disconnected, in different states at different times in history—had sexually assaulted woman in exactly the same way. Like the devil, whose greatest trick is convincing you he doesn’t exist, they’d convinced each woman that their own experience was so unique—I believe these men called it “special”—that it couldn’t possibly have happened to anyone else.
Ultimately, my eerie sense of repetition—the same story, slightly refracted—reveals something deeper about the nature of abuse. Predators seem to follow a script, a playbook of manipulation and coercion that’s so consistent it’s almost formulaic. Like the stock market, rape culture is also often ruled by an invisible hand.
Institutional complicity is central to Fisher’s idea of the eerie. Miss Hall’s, like many elite institutions, maintained a polished exterior that concealed its darker reality. This same dynamic animates My Dark Vanessa, where Vanessa’s school turns a blind eye to her teacher’s behavior, allowing him to continue his abuse.
From this perspective, it is unbearably sad and extremely obvious why Ortiz accused Russell of borrowing themes from Excavation. Ortiz’s accusation highlights how these stories, though deeply personal, often feel interchangeable because the dynamics of abuse are so consistent. Predators exploit the same vulnerabilities, use the same tactics, and rely on the same institutional protections. The result is a cycle that feels disturbingly familiar, whether in real life or fiction.
Predators also depend on the silence of their victims. In My Dark Vanessa and Ortiz’s VF piece, the young woman who have been abused come to find out that they aren’t the only victims. They also find out that the narrative of victimization has occurred in almost the same way every single time. Specific phrases are repeated during seduction, the same mix tape is made again, the same pet name is used, etc. The twist is: they have never, ever told anyone exactly what their abuser keeps repeating to everyone.
I wish that Russell and Ortiz had talked. I wish instead of going for the plagiarism accusation (which was quickly determined to be unfounded), I wish Ortiz had contacted Russell’s publicist to do an interview together about their shared experiences. I wish they’d cross-promoted their books and amplified both of their messages through the power of numbers, but I entirely understand why it didn’t go down that way. As I mentioned earlier, I barely knew Kate Russell despite the fact that we were office neighbors and she’d let me use her university computer because it had access to the departmental drive with dissertation filing paperwork and mine, somehow, did not. She attended a couple of days of a class I took with trauma theorist Cathy Caruth and was unbelievably composed and articulate while the rest of us cowered at Caruth’s lit theory fame.
I never went out of my way to speak to Kate, though, and she never went out of her way to speak to me. I was extremely anxious and withdrawn at that point. I was very invested in making sure everyone knew I had it together and deserved the fellowship I’d received to attend my doctoral program. I isolated myself, in part, because in the years leading up to my PhD program, I’d disentangled myself from a long and coercive relationship with a much older person that began when I was eighteen. Shortly after that, there was an incident with a stalker. I haven’t directly connected my self-isolation with those incidents until recently, but what I remember about arriving in the town where my new program was housed is that I was really scared. I had a hard time sleeping alone. I kept pepper spray everywhere. I felt I couldn’t go to parties at night because I didn’t want to come home in the dark alone. I saw the man who’d stalked me driving by my house sometimes. I’d call my oldest friend, who was in Germany at the time, and he’d assure me: That’s not him. He has no idea where you are anymore. And of course my friend was right, but the paranoia was right, too.
Back on my MFA program, I’d had plenty of friends to walk home with me at night, but now I had none because how could I? No one could know me. That is, of course, exactly what an abuser wants. To be the invisible hand, forever.
When I finished My Dark Vanessa, I went to Kate’s website to send her a message. Her socials had been deleted when the scandal happened and her university email was expired, as was mine—we’d both finished coursework and gotten out as quick as we could. But there was no way to contact anyone but Kate’s publicist, which I totally get. I also went dark in the DM’s for a while after my own novel, MONARCH, came out, which is something I frequently feel bad about. There was a moment in time when I couldn’t respond to the messages from women who saw their own experiences in the book. I still can’t quite explain it. It was always my intention to write a book that would give others language for what they’d experienced, to give women something that would help them feel less alone. But when they actually wanted to be less alone with me, I couldn’t do it.
And I suppose that’s part of how all this works, too. It takes a long time to feel capable of being enough for somebody else when you were not enough for yourself for a very long time.
I was again impressed by Kate as I clicked through her website back in 2019. She had the following note explaining what she’d hoped to accomplish with My Dark Vanessa
I would like to share with my readers that My Dark Vanessa, which I’ve been working on for nearly 20 years, was inspired by my own experiences as a teenager. I have previously discussed the relationships I’ve had with older men and how those relationships informed the writing of My Dark Vanessa. But I do not believe that we should compel victims to share the details of their personal trauma with the public. The decision whether or not to come forward should always be a personal choice. I have been afraid that opening up further about my past would invite inquiry that could be retraumatizing, and my publisher tried to protect my boundaries by including a reminder to readers that the novel is fiction.
Sexual abuse is a complicated subject that has a history of being silenced, misunderstood, and oversimplified. I believe novels can help create space for readers to unpack and talk about sensitive or difficult topics. My greatest wish is that My Dark Vanessa will spark conversation about the complexity of coercion, trauma, and victimhood, because while these stories can feel all too familiar, victims are not a monolith and there is no universal experience of sexual violence.
Plus, a reading list of academic and literary titles that influenced her while writing the novel. Her enduring seriousness with her subject matter, despite how deeply personal it was, made me proud to have known her, if from a distance.
I try hard to think of this every time I meet a withdrawn or bitchy or anxious person. Having certainly been someone else’s withdrawn or bitchy or anxious person, the best and, in fact, only thing to do is connect.
I assure you, we have an eerie amount in common.
*I would be remiss not to mention this The Vox article, which highlights how the controversy surrounding My Dark Vanessa and Excavation underscores racial and systemic inequities in the publishing industry. Wendy C. Ortiz, a Latina author, self-published Excavation and later released it through a small press, receiving limited recognition despite its critical acclaim. In contrast, Kate Elizabeth Russell, a white author, received a lucrative book deal and significant marketing support for My Dark Vanessa, which covers similar themes.
This disparity reflects how the publishing industry often privileges white authors, granting them broader access to resources, opportunities, and visibility. Critics argue this reinforces systemic bias, marginalizing authors of color and limiting the diversity of voices that receive mainstream attention. The article contextualizes this within a broader discussion about how race, privilege, and power dynamics shape whose stories are heard and celebrated.
Quick note before the rec…I’m on Bluesky now at candicewuehle.bsky.social.
The title My Dark Vanessa is a reference to Nabokov’s Lolita, as is the title of this substack today. (Congratulations to you if you got the riff on Nabokov’s line, “You can always count on a murdered for a fancy prose style.”!! You are truly a literary nerd!!!) I suggested Lolita for my Camp Rec last time I wrote about this topic, though, so I won’t double rec.
It occurs to me that stories of predation when the genders are reversed always take on a Campy tone, for reasons complicated enough to warrant another post entirely. In that vein, though, I recommend the fabulous Nicole Kidman-Joaquin Phoenix film from 1995, To Die For. Kidman stars as Suzanne Stone, an ambitious and sociopathic small-town woman determined to become a famous TV personality. To eliminate her “obstacles,” including her husband, Suzanne manipulates a teenage boy (Phoenix) into committing murder, spiraling the story into a campy mix of satire, obsession, and media critique. Kidman’s seductive dance scene is an absolute must see, especially for the babygirls out there.
Love “To Die For”