"I wrote this book for all the other 17-year-olds out there"

Alisson Wood on teaching, book bans, and Being Lolita

Alisson Wood. Photo by Christie Spillane.

When you’re locked into news about book bans and educational culture wars—in daily conversations where “groomer” is tossed off like a normal greeting—it can be hard to remember that for much of the last decade there was a meaningful and urgent conversation about actual sexual grooming, the process by which a powerful person singles out, builds a relationship with, and ultimately abuses someone younger and less powerful. That conversation predated but then built upon the peak of the #MeToo movement and, like the #MeToo movement, it was an explicitly feminist phenomenon, springing from the courage of individual women speaking out against their (mostly) male abusers. And as with the #MeToo movement, it felt like a reckoning, like society was finally addressing a problem everyone had known about forever.

The signposts were everywhere: Wendy C. Ortiz’s astonishing memoir Excavation (2014), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (2019), Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentemente (2020, tr. 2021). The revelations that undid literary biographer Blake Bailey’s career. Stories of predatory teachers at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Marlborough School, and the Thacher School.

Then something happened. By the summer of 2021, instead of real predators, the term “groomer” was being thrown at librarians and school board members, at trans people and drag queens. Or at teachers who signaled acceptance of LGBTQ students or who happened to be LGBTQ themselves. And the term was stripped of its feminist content, instead shouted at board meetings by Christian Nationalists vowing to “protect childhood innocence” from threats like sex education and inclusive libraries. Even worse, the term was weaponized against the very voices speaking out against abuse, and used to attack books that provide solace, information, and empowerment to victims. According to PEN America’s most recent study on book bans in America, 48% of all books challenged in school libraries last year include instances of violence or physical abuse, and another 42% cover topics of health and well-being.

The people behind the book banning movement of the past two years have a lot to answer for, but this is their most unforgivable act: cheapening and twisting the term “grooming,” taking the microphone from victims, and removing the focus from real predators in order to vilify perceived political enemies.

For this month’s book study, I wanted to try to undo some of that damage, to restore some seriousness to the discourse around groomers and grooming. I can’t think of a better way to do that than introducing one of the most stunning pieces of writing on sexual abuse I’ve ever read—Alisson Wood’s 2020 memoir Being Lolita.

In Being Lolita, Wood, a professor of creative writing at NYU and the founder of NYC-based literary magazine Pigeon Pages, describes a brutal sexual relationship she endured with an older man, an English teacher at her high school, starting when she was seventeen. The book is of particular interest to readers of Anger & Clarity because Wood’s “seduction” revolved around discussions of literature and books—Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in particular. Wood’s abuser (she refers to him in the book as “Mr. North,” and in interviews she often calls him “the teacher”) gave her a copy of Lolita in the parking lot of a diner where the two were secretly meeting after school. Wood writes:

He told me it would blow my mind, reading Nabokov, that I would never be the same after. He read me the opening, cars on the highway behind us. I rested my hip on my car door, stars and streetlights in the side mirror. The mirror was spotted and hazy. In my arms she was always Lolita. He touched my arm with the back of his finger. Just for a second, everything came alive inside of me and I was sure. I knew what I wanted.

The teacher used books—not just Lolita, but a series of narratives that glamorize older men’s attraction to young girls (“Annabel Lee,” Alice in Wonderland)—to justify and romanticize his actions as he crossed boundaries and started a relationship that Wood soon realized was grotesque.

As I said to Wood in our conversation this summer, I usually roll my eyes at the idea that books have anything to do with grooming. But her memoir reminds us that the stories a culture tells can lead people, especially vulnerable ones, towards destruction. At the same time, Being Lolita also shows the positive power of narrative and literature. A line from a poem by Margaret Atwood, one of 2023’s most frequently banned authors, helped the adult Alisson Wood make sense of her experience.¹ After college, Wood taught sex ed. Now, as a professor, she assigns her freshman students authors that would shock America’s censors: Carmen Maria Machado, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson. And Nabokov. Not because she doesn’t understand her students’ vulnerabilities, but because she does.

In addition to being a critical book for this moment, Being Lolita is also a beautiful read, if often a hard book to face. It’s also a crucial book for teachers. Wood told me she never intended to blame anyone besides the teacher who abused her for his actions, but reading Being Lolita it’s also apparent that many people could have stopped what happened to her—including other teachers in her school. Beyond that, Wood is a teacher herself now, and her experience has shaped her work and her concept of the teaching profession.

I spoke to Wood over Zoom this summer. She was in her apartment in New York; I was in my house in Austin, about to leave for a trip to Seattle. She tried to convince me to take my daughter to the Taylor Swift concert at T-Mobile Park. Apart from the cost of the concert, we talked about teaching, book bans, and what it means to be 17 or 18 years old. I’ve condensed our conversation and edited it for clarity.

Anger & Clarity: I want to start with the dedication for Being Lolita. You dedicated the book to “my grandmother, who would be so scandalized and so proud, and my mother, who says she will never read this, and to 17-year-old Alisson, who needs this book most of all.”

Alisson Wood: I’m always surprised at how many people bring up the dedication to me, either in interviews or DMs or emails I get from readers. Because I thought it was kind of corny. But it’s absolutely true, and probably one of the most sincere parts of the book. It’s not complicated, and so many of the emotions and ideas and moments that I tried to capture and recreate in the book are inherently complicated.

I mean, my grandmother died this past year at 94, after dealing with dementia. But it was really my grandmother who encouraged me to read and write. It was my grandmother who was so, so thrilled that I was teaching at NYU, leading creative writing classes. She was a kindergarten teacher, so education was important for her and, you know, she was just so proud of me and so excited for me. And it’s funny because I wasn’t sure how she was going to react to the book, because it’s a little personal and at times very graphic and explicit. I made a real point not to pull punches in the book. I felt like it was important for my readers to truly understand what it was like to have my experience. I wanted to make things really clear.

By the time the book came out, my grandmother was not really able to read. And in some ways, that was lucky because I know that I would have heard about it from my grandmother. Like Did you have to say those things? Which is just sort of funny.

And my mother has still not read the book and has made it clear that she doesn’t intend to, which again, is complex because my mother is so proud of me. She talks about me and the book to everyone. She has like this cute little short bookshelf that has my book and the international editions—the UK edition, the Russian edition, the Japanese edition. She has a pair of the heart-shaped glasses. It’s almost like a little shrine to my book. But she’s never going to read it.

And then 17-year-old Alisson who needed this book most of all. I have received thousands of DMs, emails, tweets from readers, who are almost entirely women. And it’s a whole range of women. I’m 39, and there are women who are 20 or 30 years older than me writing about how my book made them see something differently, or changed how they understood a part of their life, or made them feel seen in way that maybe they had never experienced before.

And I hear from women my age who are beginning the processing period of things. I think Millennials are the first generation who have grown up with the words, with the tools, to talk about these things, these acts of violence, these acts of being preyed upon.

And then I also get DMs from 16- and 17-year-old girls, 15-year-old girls, who are dating their coach or in love with their English teacher—it’s usually an English teacher—and don’t know what to do. So I know that it is evocative and important for readers, which I’m so honored by. It’s both the hardest and the best part of publishing this book: hearing from readers and knowing how important my book has been for them.

One thing I deal with constantly is people saying, “Books are being used to groom children.” And generally, I’m saying, No, that’s not the case. That’s not happening. But your story is a reminder that grooming is a real phenomenon, and that the stories we tell can be dangerous. Could you talk a bit about how powerful narratives are, and how, as a teacher, you respond to that power?

I am not in favor of banning books, period. I do not believe that the answer for challenging, disturbing, complicated stories is to not allow access to them. I think the more access the better. The more discussions around them, asking critical questions, things like that.

I teach part of Lolita in some of my classes. Only part of it because it’s too fucking long. People say this is blasphemous, but I think it could be a third less long—

It’s actually one of my favorite parts of your book, when you say that …

It could be a third shorter. It just drags along!

But that is not the first thing I teach. Whatever course I’m teaching, it’s always an explicitly and specifically feminist perspective, or feminist critique—including the perspectives of queer authors, non-binary authors, trans authors.

So I teach Lolita, but it is not the first thing we do in class. It is not the second thing in class. We talk about Lolita the last week of class, so by the time they are looking at this text, they have the tools to understand what is happening on the page. They understand the opening, the alliteration, you know: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul … They can take it apart and understand the text in way they couldn’t in the first class. And I think it’s revelatory for so many of my students. And also me: I enjoy it so much. I have so much fun in that class.

And we read it alongside “Annabel Lee.” We also read Meg Elison’s McSweeney’s piece “If Women Wrote Men the Way Men Write Women,” which inverts the sexualization. There’s one section that’s riffing on a professor teaching [a gender-switched version of] Lolita. It’s this woman professor looking at this young, nubile guy, and she’s like, Oh, I can’t wait to teach him things. And they find it hilarious because at this point in the course they are in on the joke, and they’re able to take apart a text like Lolita. I also make sure they read “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” by Claire Dederer. They read “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” by Rebecca Solnit. So they’re going into reading Lolita with these wonderful tools and they can ask questions and they know what questions to ask.

In other words, when you approach a complicated or challenging text in your classes, it’s a process of addition, not subtraction? You’re not taking the text away from your students. You’re providing them with other tools to understand it.

Other tools, other texts, other art. Supplementary materials.

I’d like to talk about the books that you were taught as a high school student. I reread Being Lolita and looked for the references not only to the books that were introduced to you by the teacher, but also the books you mentioned from your classes, which were Shakespeare, The Odyssey, The Great Gatsby. It sounds like you weren’t taught the way you teach. It was the same for me—what you describe is not the way I was taught. I was not offered, you know, feminist approaches to all of these texts.

Well, I was in high school in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. It was a dark time for young women. Culturally, it was a shitshow, frankly. I mean, when I was in high school, there was only one out gay kid. Lance Bass wasn’t out yet. The only celebrity I was aware of that was explicitly out was Ellen. It was also a really hard time to be a teenage girl because girl’s bodies were being so dissembled and dissected. That was when Cosmopolitan and teen magazines would have headlines like, Here’s How to Lose 5 Pounds in 2 Weeks! Make Your Breasts Look Perkier. Like on the covers! That was what our reality was like: Kate Winslet was called a whale when she was in Titanic. I mean, the discussions around women’s bodies were incredibly depressing and harmful.

I worry that there’s an effort now to drag us back to that time, to where you don’t have voices like yours, or voices of female authors or authors of color, or queer authors. I’ve been trying to shout from the rooftops that what’s being banned from schools right now is not sex in books, it’s not even sexual violence in books—because I can point you to a million books that are not being challenged, going back to Greek mythology, that incorporate sexual violence. But what’s being removed is violence from the perspective of the victim. Those are the books that are getting banned, because those are often the ones that describe it in the most detail. So I wonder what the consequence is, if we take those voices and return to something like the education we both had.

I think we are definitely being dragged back in time. Let me rephrase that. I think that many parts of academia and politics are being dragged back through time right now, in the sense that books are being banned—books that were just easy to find, easy to read, being supported when I was a teenager. In the fact that we’ve lost abortion rights. The fact that, while our cultural awareness of trans people has grown, now we are trying to “other” them, to say that they are something dangerous, to push against “them.” To say that trans folks are grooming our children, are harmful, are predators. And I think all of that is just a reaction by the far right to how much we as a culture have moved forward in the past 10 years.

And I think that, frankly, talking about trans people as groomers is offensive to actual victims of grooming. The statistics talk for themselves. According to Child Protective Services, 88% of all perpetrators of sexual harm, period, are adult men. And 93% are known to the victim. So again, that’s going back to this idea of who are these groomers, who has access to these young girls and young boys? It’s teachers, it’s coaches, it’s clergy. It’s not a random drag queen who is doing a children’s storybook hour on the weekend at your local bookstore. It’s not them! It’s the people who actually have access to young girls and young boys. Those are the people you need to worry about. And I think that’s very difficult for people to accept, because it’s fucking disturbing.

Something else that’s obviously really complicated is that predators are not harmful, cruel, or violent to all young women. Thinking about my teacher: He was not preying upon every single girl in school, right? They find a victim. I was very easy pickings. I was clearly in a really tough place. I was very lonely. Depressed.

I talked about this a little bit in the book, but being a professor now, being the teacher in the room, it is just so obvious which students are struggling. They radiate it. You can tell immediately. And that someone would take that knowledge and that power and use it to manipulate and eventually rape a student is just horrific. You know, I really do believe teaching is sacred.

I’m glad you brought that up, because I love the way you write about teaching. You talk about teaching as sacred, for example. Part of why I’m excited to talk about your book is that I think that it’s a really valuable book specifically for teachers. And what I see in your writing is that you radiate concern and care for your students, but also a knowledge of who they are. You’re able to really see them as the young, vulnerable people they are—without patronizing them, without taking away their agency. How do you as a teacher—and I teach high school seniors, so a little bit younger than your students, but basically the same age…

Freshmen in college are eighteen! They are kids. They are children!

Right! So recognizing that vulnerability that you describe so well, how do you build student relationships while also being aware of the different roles you and your students have?

I think the vulnerability that can come along with being young presents an opportunity for someone to prey upon that and take advantage of it. But there’s also an opportunity for some really powerful learning, because “vulnerable” can mean an opportunity for pain, but it can also be an opportunity for openness, to be able to think about things in a new way, to be open to reading something new or reading it differently. To be open to these ideas and concepts. So I think the vulnerability of youth is a really beautiful, special moment in our lives.

You know, being a teenager is so fucking hard. But I think there’s also so many beautiful things about it, too, which is true about most things in our life—very little is “good” or “bad,” it’s all sort of somewhere in between.

But I work hard to create strong boundaries, which not only is good for me, but it’s also good for my students. I want my students to see me as someone they can trust, someone who will be supporting them, but also making it clear: You know, I’m not your friend. I’m not your future girlfriend. I’m also not your mother.

It’s harmful for them to have these boundaries blurred. There’s also something very complicated about gender and misogyny in this, because I know a lot of male professors who have students call them by their first name, who are very casual, who will come in wearing whatever, like a t-shirt and jeans—but they still get all the respect. For me—this is also because I look young—I make a point in those first couple of weeks to wear a blazer, I have my hair tied up, and I am no nonsense. I want to create this expectation that I am the teacher, you are the student, and this is what you can expect. That’s good for everybody. They call me “Professor.” Even in emails. They can’t just call me “Alisson.” They can’t say “Hey, miss.” The have to call me Professor Wood.

I do not encourage or engage with anything that even begins to feel inappropriately personal or intimate. I don’t do any of that. I don’t comment on students’ bodies. I don’t comment on their love lives, even if they’re talking about that in classroom writing.

In other words, you have both an ethic of exploration—you want students to be able to explore these challenging, meaningful topics—and an ethic of protection. And the boundaries you’re setting are not there to distance you from your students, but because you care about your students and you’re aware of their particular vulnerabilities. Is that more or less what you’re saying?

Absolutely. I would even argue that strong boundaries make me a better teacher and better support for them. Because they never need to worry, for example, Oh, my teacher wants to meet with me after class—is it because she’s hitting on me?  No one’s ever going to think that about me. I think having boundaries is really a way of showing care.

Okay, one more question about Being Lolita. You’ve written a powerful book that speaks to the idea that narratives can be dangerous, and in fact can be used to cause harm. At the same time, you’ve written a book that will likely be banned from school libraries in Texas if HB 900 goes into effect, precisely because you were so forthright about your experience. How does that make you feel? What do you think about the fact that your book probably will not be allowed in school libraries starting this year?

Disappointing. That’s disappointing.

I think it’s a disservice to students to have a book like mine not easily accessible. I wrote Being Lolita not just for 17-year-old me, but for all the other 17-year-olds out there. So that’s really upsetting and disappointing.

You know, here’s something I think about a lot: People ask me about being a “survivor.” And I don’t like the word survivor, because I think that talking about “survivors” of rape or sexual violence is a flattening experience. I did not survive a hurricane. I did not survive a tornado. I survived someone choosing to manipulate, to groom, abuse, and rape me, and this was allowed and enabled to happen by an entire community. I was a victim of this man. And I think victim is a much harder word for people to think about. Whereas I think people like to think about survivors, because it’s easier. Oh, they survived this. They’re okay. They got past it. They’re healed. It’s all good.

But no, what happened was not and never will be okay. This was harmful. This was dangerous. This was terrible. And the word “victim” lives in that space and makes people uncomfortable. But I think it’s really important to stay in that space. And I think that’s a similar idea to banning book’s like mine. It’s easier. It’s simpler. It’s an easy way out.

Thank you so much again for your time. This has been great. I did want to quickly ask if there’s anything you want to say about Pigeon Pages, the literary magazine you founded.

Pigeon Pages is a space for women and non-binary folks, for trans writers, for queer writers, for writers of color. I work very intentionally to make sure this collective is inclusive and welcoming. We love emerging writers, and we love being the first publication for a writer. We adore that. We have an essay contest opening October 15, and we are always open for submissions. We’re on Submittable, and you can find us at pigeonpagesnyc.com. And we love new young writers! Please encourage your students to submit.

1. From “Siren Song”: This is the one song everyone / would like to learn: the song / that is irresistible