praying i can finally find my people in the comment section who reject lolita. i do not and will not ever understand the ongoing adoration of that book
I've never managed to get all the way through it. I understand that it's meant to be a detailed portrait of a person but I find Humbert deeply tedious in addition to being icky.
Jamie Loftus did a podcast miniseries on Lolita a few years ago, starting with a deep dive on the book, Nabokov himself (it seems like he was a good dude who was working through his own trauma as a CSA survivor by writing this) and how an explicit tale of evil was marketed as a tale of aspiration. Highly recommend, Jamie is brilliant and as feminist as they come, she will very much explain it. Justice for Dolores!!!!
If Nabokov was a CSA survivor working through his own trauma, if that was his motivation, he could have easily clarified to the public that the book was not about sex, that it was not about sexual manipulation by girls to get what they want or get attention, that it was about abuse. He could have said all of that without disclosing anything about his own past - but he would have lost the desired veneer of the enigmatic, intellectual novelist who was above the fray of advocacy for anything so societally unimportant as a 12 yo girl. That is my understanding of Nabokov's actions from the book The Real Lolita. I have to admit that I haven't listened to much of the podcast bc it is too triggering a topic for me, but it seems that one way or another Nabokov, in writing a book so explicit entirely from the pov of the perpetrator, had a moral responsibility to help the reading public understand, to correct the understanding of the book as pornography present even in mainstream reviews, which he generally did not do. He threw gasoline on the ever-present fire of exploitation of girls and watched it burn a lot of us. Just a thought.
Agreed, Nabakov even explicitly said he was unconcerned with the morals involved in the book. As much as people have ascribed feminist intentions to his book, it seems pretty clear that’s not where he was coming from.
I haven't been able to bring myself to read it but people keep referring to it as one of the greatest novels of all time, so I feel like I should try. I found an audiobook version narrated by Jeremy Irons so I'm hoping that'll help. But... said audiobook has been sitting in my library for like 2 years. Welp
Honestly, I think one of the more insidious things about The Canon is the implicit cultural insistence that in order to be Well-Read you MUST read the 500 Important Books By White Guys before being able to move on to reading everyone else, and before being allowed to have what is considered an informed opinion about art and literature. Hero worship within the intellectual sphere has some pretty incredible political effects, and if I may be so bold, I think it’s wasting our collective precious time.
agree. I finally read Anna Karenina recently and while there were parts of it I really loved, there's a whole entire character that's just a Mary Sue for Tolstoy; those were the most boring parts of the book. If I were his editor I would've cut them all completely. And now it's not a 1,000 page book anymore! LOL.
If only you had been there to fix it! The world would have one fewer flat and unrealistic models of femininity, and I would have that many hours of my life back, haha
Like, The Greats are obligatory reads if you hope to join the ranks of the intellectuals, and everyone else is optional.
Sometimes I think: how much richer would my understanding of the world be if I spent the two decades of my teens and twenties reading from women, trans people, indigenous and diasporic people, and people from the global south, rather than acting on the obligation to pore over Dickens and Hemingway and Nabokov (etc ad nauseam) with a fine toothed comb?
There’s nothing like hearing a known child abuser in my family praise “Lolita” as high literature for me to stop searching for feminist value in this book. I’ve never looked back.
I would say Three Women by Lisa Taddeo explores this and I thought it was a really interesting book, also her book Animal, which I loved. I have also heard My Dark Vanessa does this well but I haven't read it yet.
Listen. That Washington Post article about the celebrity veneers ruined my life! I'm mentioning it here because I think about it every day, and I cannot stop pointing out celebrity veneers to anyone who will listen (so I guess it ruined their lives too) and then you linked to it in this piece and I read it AGAIN! You should've seen me watching the Oscars last night; pointing out all the weird teeth (and also the normal ones, because they are such a relief when you see them.). I blame YOU, Jessica DeFino! 😆
I really appreciate this essay as I do all of your writing! However I think characterizing Noname’s book club as similar to the others listed isn’t accurate
Noname does not to my knowledge invest/directly profit off beauty culture through her career in the same way as some others listed, and her book club is pretty distinct. As a Black woman and rapper she’s also faced misogynoir in relation to beauty standards.
Her book club has a books to prison program that has run for years. They highlight Black owned bookstores throughout the US, have a Radical Hood Library at their headquarters in Los Angeles and host different radical programs connecting people outside with people inside prisons. All to say I think her use of a book club as a social tool is pretty different and it’s an inaccurate analysis to group them together.
Yes, 100% — I was in no way saying that any of these book clubs lack merit or substance, or that they all contribute to the beauty culture things I go on to attribute to Dakota's comments, Kendall's book stylist, etc. ! I really appreciate Noname and including her in that list was simply for context — to point out that she is one of many celebrities who has a successful book club right now (she was left out of of the The Cut piece on the topic last week which people were rightfully saying was a huge oversight). I thought it was clear that the "aestheticizing books" comment was directed toward the linked book stylist/book concierge examples in the following sentence, but I can see how that wasn't clear enough. I also hope it comes through that the point of this piece was not to say "celebrities shouldn't be doing book clubs" or "all celebrity book clubs celebrate beauty culture" but to say that books do not specifically *save* us from beauty culture, so the framing "intellectual pursuit" vs. "face serum" that Dakota Johnson used is not helpful (if the goal is deprioritizing face serum).
I strongly recommend the book The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman. It's about the kidnapping of a young girl in the 1940s upon which Nabokov loosely based the book. I ended up with a worse opinion of him and his motives as a writer, and yes, what happened to Lolita in pop culture took the sickness so much further. So: people have willfully misread it (or not read it at all), AND the original was already gross!
Yes! The Weinman book was so interesting - parts of what I learned from it that stuck with me: the only publisher Nabokov could find was a French publisher of pornographic books (and Nabokov was fine with it); N's wife was intent on making the world understand that the book was not child-porn but the author himself preferred not to clarify; it was understood as porn and a confirmation of childhood sexuality by many reviewers (not just the public); N hid the fact that he had based his book on a true story. The movie version was based on the public's understanding of the book, which was based on male fantasy, and N intentionally did little to nothing to stop that - in fact he made his career on the fame of the book. I am doubtful about making any 'great man/great literature' concession for Nabokov - he played on, exploited and benefited from the titillation too many men took/take from it.
Weinman's book was fascinating. I, too, am someone who's never been able to make it through Lolita and will never get the unending adoration for the story. I've definitely heard fans say they love Nabokov's prose and that's why they like/defend the book. But...just...celebrate another one of his books! Not this one, FFS!
Nabokov is very specific that to Humbert a "nymphet" is not at all conventionally beautiful, but decidedly in the awkward phase just before full-on adolescence.
I read once that Stanley Kubrick was cornered by the studio into casting a girl who 'looked older' than 12. That he was unhappy with this choice creatively, and had pictured someone like Catherine Demongeot as Lolita - childlike and tomboyish. It's possible I'm remembering the interview wrong. But I have occasionally wondered what that movie would have been like...
When I was abused by my math teacher at 12 years old in the 1980's, the school principal told my parents that "girls get crushes on their teachers," invoking the Lolita stereotype to shame them and blame me. It worked. I understood even then that I was being accused of being a Lolita, an over-sexualized vixen, even though I had not read the book. I didn't need to - Lolita (as a fact, a type of girl) was firmly embedded in our collective cultural psyche, with that poster as its dog-whistle. The effects of the book on girls, the practical reality that it normalized abuse and denigrated victims in the eyes of popular culture, cannot be justified by any claims of "literature." It's unclear to me how anyone can make it through that book, or why they would try. Nabokov greatly exploited the supposed "misunderstanding" of the book, and he did an amount of harm that neither he, nor the people who have lionized it, care to comprehend. Thank you so much for writing this.
Thank you for sharing your story for anyone who needs evidence that there is real-life danger in this (and many other) female archetype(s). I'm sorry that happened to you. <3
"literature is not the antidote to anti-aging serums"
I would say it is. Or at least can be. Just not how girlbosses use it to capitalize on, which I guess is exactly what you're saying.
I'm currently rereading Alan Moore's run of Swamp Thing, and my wonder at the idea of my consciousness becoming one with moss and transforming into an earth elemental makes me totally ok with my face rotting away completely.
So Dakota Johnson, a woman who was completely fine with starring in a tragic girlboss!/Fleabag adaptation of a Jane Austen masterpiece that missed the point entirely.... thinks 'People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things'. Maybe she should have read Persuasion before she helped make it shallower.
I’ve been thinking about this essay today and am wondering if and when celebrities decide they actually DO have enough money. Like you’ve pointed out, there are so many products on shelves that should have never been made!
I wrote a piece last October subtitled Nymphet Resistance, about a piece of art that is, for me, an antidote to Lolita as a book and a degrading archetype. I've been fighting the dehumanization inherent the Lolita myth for the past 40 years: https://calloffthedogs.substack.com/p/fighting-for-peace. TY
Jessica and fam - do yall have any advice as I still freelance at Sephora’s and these children are horrible even tho I think they’re innocent in a way to the bamboozle plus lax parenting. I would love any advice on how to turn these girls away from Junk elephant and trash skincare brands but they just seem to throw attitudes at me - granted I can be passionate to a punitive degree but I can control myself lol - just need perspective from parents and you! ♥️
If these parents only knew what letting their kids use this sh$t long term on young skin but…maybe I need to let it all go and sell them what they want.
praying i can finally find my people in the comment section who reject lolita. i do not and will not ever understand the ongoing adoration of that book
I've never managed to get all the way through it. I understand that it's meant to be a detailed portrait of a person but I find Humbert deeply tedious in addition to being icky.
lol--I gave up part way in because spending time in this man's head made me feel ill
Jamie Loftus did a podcast miniseries on Lolita a few years ago, starting with a deep dive on the book, Nabokov himself (it seems like he was a good dude who was working through his own trauma as a CSA survivor by writing this) and how an explicit tale of evil was marketed as a tale of aspiration. Highly recommend, Jamie is brilliant and as feminist as they come, she will very much explain it. Justice for Dolores!!!!
If Nabokov was a CSA survivor working through his own trauma, if that was his motivation, he could have easily clarified to the public that the book was not about sex, that it was not about sexual manipulation by girls to get what they want or get attention, that it was about abuse. He could have said all of that without disclosing anything about his own past - but he would have lost the desired veneer of the enigmatic, intellectual novelist who was above the fray of advocacy for anything so societally unimportant as a 12 yo girl. That is my understanding of Nabokov's actions from the book The Real Lolita. I have to admit that I haven't listened to much of the podcast bc it is too triggering a topic for me, but it seems that one way or another Nabokov, in writing a book so explicit entirely from the pov of the perpetrator, had a moral responsibility to help the reading public understand, to correct the understanding of the book as pornography present even in mainstream reviews, which he generally did not do. He threw gasoline on the ever-present fire of exploitation of girls and watched it burn a lot of us. Just a thought.
Agreed, Nabakov even explicitly said he was unconcerned with the morals involved in the book. As much as people have ascribed feminist intentions to his book, it seems pretty clear that’s not where he was coming from.
I will check it out! Thank you
I haven't been able to bring myself to read it but people keep referring to it as one of the greatest novels of all time, so I feel like I should try. I found an audiobook version narrated by Jeremy Irons so I'm hoping that'll help. But... said audiobook has been sitting in my library for like 2 years. Welp
Honestly, I think one of the more insidious things about The Canon is the implicit cultural insistence that in order to be Well-Read you MUST read the 500 Important Books By White Guys before being able to move on to reading everyone else, and before being allowed to have what is considered an informed opinion about art and literature. Hero worship within the intellectual sphere has some pretty incredible political effects, and if I may be so bold, I think it’s wasting our collective precious time.
agree. I finally read Anna Karenina recently and while there were parts of it I really loved, there's a whole entire character that's just a Mary Sue for Tolstoy; those were the most boring parts of the book. If I were his editor I would've cut them all completely. And now it's not a 1,000 page book anymore! LOL.
If only you had been there to fix it! The world would have one fewer flat and unrealistic models of femininity, and I would have that many hours of my life back, haha
Like, The Greats are obligatory reads if you hope to join the ranks of the intellectuals, and everyone else is optional.
Sometimes I think: how much richer would my understanding of the world be if I spent the two decades of my teens and twenties reading from women, trans people, indigenous and diasporic people, and people from the global south, rather than acting on the obligation to pore over Dickens and Hemingway and Nabokov (etc ad nauseam) with a fine toothed comb?
omg. THAT. You should talk to my high school English department
There’s nothing like hearing a known child abuser in my family praise “Lolita” as high literature for me to stop searching for feminist value in this book. I’ve never looked back.
I would just prefer to spend my time reading like anything else? Books written by the adult real-world “Lolitas” out there?
I would say Three Women by Lisa Taddeo explores this and I thought it was a really interesting book, also her book Animal, which I loved. I have also heard My Dark Vanessa does this well but I haven't read it yet.
Thank you, I’ll put them on hold now!
Listen. That Washington Post article about the celebrity veneers ruined my life! I'm mentioning it here because I think about it every day, and I cannot stop pointing out celebrity veneers to anyone who will listen (so I guess it ruined their lives too) and then you linked to it in this piece and I read it AGAIN! You should've seen me watching the Oscars last night; pointing out all the weird teeth (and also the normal ones, because they are such a relief when you see them.). I blame YOU, Jessica DeFino! 😆
kirsten dunst and (very very thin very suddenly) husband had human teeth at the oscars! i noticed too 😭😭😭🫡
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks about that article all the time!
Ha, I totally went on and on about the teeth while watching the Grammys with a group of friends.
I really appreciate this essay as I do all of your writing! However I think characterizing Noname’s book club as similar to the others listed isn’t accurate
Noname does not to my knowledge invest/directly profit off beauty culture through her career in the same way as some others listed, and her book club is pretty distinct. As a Black woman and rapper she’s also faced misogynoir in relation to beauty standards.
Her book club has a books to prison program that has run for years. They highlight Black owned bookstores throughout the US, have a Radical Hood Library at their headquarters in Los Angeles and host different radical programs connecting people outside with people inside prisons. All to say I think her use of a book club as a social tool is pretty different and it’s an inaccurate analysis to group them together.
Yes, 100% — I was in no way saying that any of these book clubs lack merit or substance, or that they all contribute to the beauty culture things I go on to attribute to Dakota's comments, Kendall's book stylist, etc. ! I really appreciate Noname and including her in that list was simply for context — to point out that she is one of many celebrities who has a successful book club right now (she was left out of of the The Cut piece on the topic last week which people were rightfully saying was a huge oversight). I thought it was clear that the "aestheticizing books" comment was directed toward the linked book stylist/book concierge examples in the following sentence, but I can see how that wasn't clear enough. I also hope it comes through that the point of this piece was not to say "celebrities shouldn't be doing book clubs" or "all celebrity book clubs celebrate beauty culture" but to say that books do not specifically *save* us from beauty culture, so the framing "intellectual pursuit" vs. "face serum" that Dakota Johnson used is not helpful (if the goal is deprioritizing face serum).
I strongly recommend the book The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman. It's about the kidnapping of a young girl in the 1940s upon which Nabokov loosely based the book. I ended up with a worse opinion of him and his motives as a writer, and yes, what happened to Lolita in pop culture took the sickness so much further. So: people have willfully misread it (or not read it at all), AND the original was already gross!
Yes! The Weinman book was so interesting - parts of what I learned from it that stuck with me: the only publisher Nabokov could find was a French publisher of pornographic books (and Nabokov was fine with it); N's wife was intent on making the world understand that the book was not child-porn but the author himself preferred not to clarify; it was understood as porn and a confirmation of childhood sexuality by many reviewers (not just the public); N hid the fact that he had based his book on a true story. The movie version was based on the public's understanding of the book, which was based on male fantasy, and N intentionally did little to nothing to stop that - in fact he made his career on the fame of the book. I am doubtful about making any 'great man/great literature' concession for Nabokov - he played on, exploited and benefited from the titillation too many men took/take from it.
Weinman's book was fascinating. I, too, am someone who's never been able to make it through Lolita and will never get the unending adoration for the story. I've definitely heard fans say they love Nabokov's prose and that's why they like/defend the book. But...just...celebrate another one of his books! Not this one, FFS!
I expanded on this in an above comment, but Jamie Loftus’ Lolita podcast goes into all of this as well and is absolutely brilliant
Nabokov is very specific that to Humbert a "nymphet" is not at all conventionally beautiful, but decidedly in the awkward phase just before full-on adolescence.
Loved this one! The classic binary: Beauty versus brains. Reductive as ever.
thanks allie!
I read once that Stanley Kubrick was cornered by the studio into casting a girl who 'looked older' than 12. That he was unhappy with this choice creatively, and had pictured someone like Catherine Demongeot as Lolita - childlike and tomboyish. It's possible I'm remembering the interview wrong. But I have occasionally wondered what that movie would have been like...
Yup! There's a great podcast about the legacy of Lolita that goes into this too
Which podcast? I'm so interested in this topic. Great essay by the way!
it's called lolita podcast! lol
Jamie Loftus’ Lolita podcast! So good!!!
When I was abused by my math teacher at 12 years old in the 1980's, the school principal told my parents that "girls get crushes on their teachers," invoking the Lolita stereotype to shame them and blame me. It worked. I understood even then that I was being accused of being a Lolita, an over-sexualized vixen, even though I had not read the book. I didn't need to - Lolita (as a fact, a type of girl) was firmly embedded in our collective cultural psyche, with that poster as its dog-whistle. The effects of the book on girls, the practical reality that it normalized abuse and denigrated victims in the eyes of popular culture, cannot be justified by any claims of "literature." It's unclear to me how anyone can make it through that book, or why they would try. Nabokov greatly exploited the supposed "misunderstanding" of the book, and he did an amount of harm that neither he, nor the people who have lionized it, care to comprehend. Thank you so much for writing this.
Thank you for sharing your story for anyone who needs evidence that there is real-life danger in this (and many other) female archetype(s). I'm sorry that happened to you. <3
That review of Lolita from Oprah's book club feels so weirdly off base like the person who wrote it didn't read the book at all.
looooooved this!
"literature is not the antidote to anti-aging serums"
I would say it is. Or at least can be. Just not how girlbosses use it to capitalize on, which I guess is exactly what you're saying.
I'm currently rereading Alan Moore's run of Swamp Thing, and my wonder at the idea of my consciousness becoming one with moss and transforming into an earth elemental makes me totally ok with my face rotting away completely.
So Dakota Johnson, a woman who was completely fine with starring in a tragic girlboss!/Fleabag adaptation of a Jane Austen masterpiece that missed the point entirely.... thinks 'People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things'. Maybe she should have read Persuasion before she helped make it shallower.
I’ve been thinking about this essay today and am wondering if and when celebrities decide they actually DO have enough money. Like you’ve pointed out, there are so many products on shelves that should have never been made!
I just finished reading Rouge by Mona Awad and now I want an Unpublishable book club to talk about it immediately.
I wrote a piece last October subtitled Nymphet Resistance, about a piece of art that is, for me, an antidote to Lolita as a book and a degrading archetype. I've been fighting the dehumanization inherent the Lolita myth for the past 40 years: https://calloffthedogs.substack.com/p/fighting-for-peace. TY
Jessica and fam - do yall have any advice as I still freelance at Sephora’s and these children are horrible even tho I think they’re innocent in a way to the bamboozle plus lax parenting. I would love any advice on how to turn these girls away from Junk elephant and trash skincare brands but they just seem to throw attitudes at me - granted I can be passionate to a punitive degree but I can control myself lol - just need perspective from parents and you! ♥️
If these parents only knew what letting their kids use this sh$t long term on young skin but…maybe I need to let it all go and sell them what they want.