The author lets us in to her world and into the inner workings of sexual predation. The book references cultural touchpoints illustrating young girl-grown man romances. The most often referenced is Nabokov’s Lolita, but there are also references to Britney Spears, Fiona Apple and other late 90s-early aughts girl-women.

The first 40 percent of the book was slow, but after that I could not put it down. It is a primer not only of how older men can sexually groom those under their power but also how abusive relationships in general operate.

For some readers, the play by play of conversations, notes, and other interactions will be tiresome. I found it slowed down the first 40 percent of the book. But I can see why the author chose to present it this way because it illustrates the grooming process.

This is a must read book for men and women, especially those who work with teenagers or have/will have teenage girls. Alisson Wood is honest in her depiction of a "relationship" with her high school teacher and how he groomed her when she was young -- and the aftermath of their abusive relationship. The book also is a critical deconstruction of the novel Lolita -- which the teacher thought was the "inspiration" of the relationship. It was like a memoir and a feminist deconstruction of Lolita at the same time. I loved this book and have raved about it on my Bookstagram @jennydlovesthebooks.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for an early e-arc. All opinions are my own.

Thank you NetGalley and Flatiron Books for my ARC. This is a heartbreaking memoir about Alisson Wood’s experience of being groomed by her high school English teacher. It is very reminiscent of My Dark Vanessa which also tells the story of abuse and manipulation of a minor at the hands of an adult. My heart ached for Alisson as she relayed her recollection of her relationship with “The Teacher.” At times difficult to read, yet always compelling and inspiring. This is a survivor’s story that needs to be told.

3.5 rounded up to 4 Stars

I was intrigued when I first saw this because I had admired the book "My Dark Vanessa" about the same topic in recent months. There were so many similarities it was uncanny, but this is an actual memoir. Ironically enough, I enjoyed the fictionalized "My Dark Vanessa" a tad more.

Alisson Woods is a teenager who has suffered with depression, manifesting in cutting and a suicide attempt. After successful psychological treatment she returns to high school, only to get lured into a romantic relationship with her English teacher, Mr. North. He is obsessed with the famous book "Lolita", reading it to her on surreptitious night outings to a diner, and gifting her with his notated copy. They write notes to each other which must be destroyed in water or ripped into tiny pieces. He writes a number on the chalkboard and quickly erases it during class- a crafty mode of communication for the time Allie should meet up with him at the diner.

As mutually agreed, nothing physical occurs until Allie graduates, but the idealized version of their illicit union falls far short of her dreams. In fact, some of it reads like a nightmare. I found the character of Nick, aka Mr. North disturbing, and their relationship is obviously damaging on several levels. Once Allie goes to college she's exposed to people more her age, but spends far too much time in her dorm room waiting for her phone to ring. It's a refreshing and hopeful development when Allie tries dating a couple of fellow students at college and hanging out with girlfriends. Still, the spector of Mr. North has left an indelible mark. It takes time for Allie to come to terms with the reality of their relationship, whether it was truly love or an act of abuse. At college, under the tutelage of a gifted female teacher, Allie has an epiphany about her sordid secret. When her writing class analyzes and discusses the "Lolita" book, it is a revelation to her. She later uses the book as an annual final course read when she becomes a creative writing teacher. Her senses are also heightened for the well-being and safety of her students, looking back on how she was victimized. When she was 17 she thought she was so strong and sexy, but now realizes how vulnerable she really was.

This was a good read, but it harped just a little too much on the book "Lolita". I've never read it, so these passages did not speak to me, and became a bit monotonous. So, I've read two eerily similar books in a short amount of time, and apparently there is a sickening formula to this kind of inappropriate seduction of a minor student.

This was such an incredible memoir. Honestly, I'm still in shock at the amount of honesty and heart Alisson Wood put into this book, it couldn't of been easy but I'm so appreciative that she was willing to be this open as it'll undoubtedly help someone.

This story read eerily similar to My Dark Vanessa, but as this is a memoir it hits in a new way. Alisson Wood was 17-years-old when she begun to have a relationship with her professor. He created a rose-tinted bubble for her to see their relationship through - her the Lolita to his Humbert.

If you've read Lolita or are at all familiar with the story, you'll know how unhealthy their relationship is. Being Lolita never hid from that fact. There were so many times during the story that I ached to hug Alisson, her professor really screwed with her perception of what a true relationship is and as someone who has also thought love to be something that it wasn't in my youth, it bruised my soul.

If this book has even been vaguely on your radar, I urge you to pick it up.

Thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This book was so honest and raw--I am so thankful to have been able to read it. It's about an inappropriate relationship between a 17 year old student and her 28 year old high school teacher. It goes into detail on how he picked her out because of her difficult past (mental health problems, anti-social, etc) and began to groom her into his version of Lolita. After high school they continued to "date" but soon his controlling, manipulative ways transformed into physical and emotional abuse.

Good news though, she does make it out alive at the end and takes her past as guides to help others who have/are in similar situations. I liked how she was honest and went over how as an adult looking back on old photos and journal entries she wrote from that time--she now sees that it wasn't "her fault" for being preyed upon by a predator or that she wasn't "asking for it." It wasn't her fault that a grown adult couldn't control himself.

I highly recommend this to people who romanticize relationships like this--it's a good perspective of a young woman who's lured into a relationship when she's too young/immature to realize what was exactly happening.

TW: rape, abuse, violence

5/5

Many thanks to Flatiron books for giving me this copy to read. First thought upon reading this was “this was like DARK VANESSA” I have been reading that book first because it was the library’s book of the month. In this book, we can also see the thoughts of the author and how her life is in comparison with Dolores a.k.a Lolita. I like how the author touches how sexist our society can be, patriarchy and how we have to change our last name just because of our marital status which is, I think, we, as women, can now choose to go against (Lucy Stoner, anyone?) and how double standard some chauvinistic people are. I know quite a few couples with that age gap of ten years or more and I could not say that I am not for it, because age is just a number. What was just wrong in this case is that the relationship between Allison and Nick is an abusive kind of relationship. If you like dark romances and student-teacher romantic relationships I’d say pick up this book and read more.

It is about the dark relationship between a high school student and her teacher. Since it is a memoir, there is a lot of detail which is a very heavy subject in itself. It definitely makes you feel more but it is a dark concept and is painful. So go for this one when ready to handle some heavy content. It can be uncomfortable at some places and is definitely heart-wrenching but being a memoir, it will make the readers keep reading to find more.

Trigger warning : Sexual abuse in detail

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

A dark romance evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher, in this incredible memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson, finds solace only in her writing— and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North.

Being Lolita comes out today: be sure to get your copy!

Thank you to @flatiron_books @macmillanusa & @alissonwood for my copy and the fun glasses 😍🥰

Below is my review of Being Lolita from last week:
Being Lolita
304 pages
Genre: Memoir, nonfiction
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
REVIEW: This is an excellent book that really explores difficult truths with incredibly powerful and poetic writing. This is an absolutely stunning coming of age memoir that explores incredibly disturbing sides of a relationship. Power, manipulation, obsession, and vulnerability fill the pages of this raw memoir. I finished this in a couple hours, completely engrossed in the poetic writing, and it was definitely a page turner. The chapters are short, which really made this a smooth read. The author really lets everything out in this one, telling her own true story. Thank you for sharing this with the world, and I can’t wait to see what you write next.

This is a memoir of a young woman who lived out a similar story to the one in Nabokov's divisive classic, Lolita. The author was a depressed and lonely teenager when an English teacher at her high school began paying her special attention. They began to develop an extremely inappropriate relationship that continued (and became even more toxic) after she graduated.


There have been several books with this kind of story that have been released over the past few years, and I think it's really important not only that victims have a space to tell their stories, but also to educate others on what abusive relationships, including this case of an extreme exploitation of a power dynamic, look like.


I ended up having mixed feelings about this book. I love and support the message, but the execution was flawed. Her narrative from her teenage years is sometimes, but without any purposeful rhythm, interrupted by her adult thoughts. Sometimes this involves breaking the fourth wall and outright addressing the reader for no good reason. It breaks the ability for the reader - who is likely very aware that the relationship isn't healthy - to feel there with the author in her teenage years, all wrapped up in the lines this teacher was feeding her. The book also mixes literary allusions to the point of becoming muddled. There's Lolita, of course, but also Alice in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, Poe...oh, and references to Disney. There wasn't a central thread connecting all of these, so their inclusion ended up becoming confusing.

This memoir details the dark romance between a high school student and her English teacher who seduces her into being his Lolita.

This story is so powerful and difficult to read as Wood describes her relationship and explores vulnerability, power, and consent. With Lolita as a backdrop to their relationship, she rewrites her story and shares how her perception of Lolita shifts from romance to disturbing fiction. It’s a beautifully written and courageous story and I highly recommend.

Alisson has written and shared with us her affair with her English teacher and how it was revolved around the book Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
At the age of 17 Alisson was just returning to high school after being treated for depression; during this time she starts an affair with her teacher. He reads Lolita to her while they are in bed, that was just beyond creepy for me.
If you have not read Lolita, it is about twelve year old Dolores Haze who becomes sexual involved with her stepfather..
Mr. North the English teacher makes false promises to Ali, telling her when she graduates and turns eighteen they will be in a serious relationship.. lies
The fact that this man used the book Lolita to encompass what he was doing, is just sick.. I am sorry
This poor girl, that is all I thought while reading this book, she was fully not herself suffering from depression and this man completely took advantage of her and it took her so long to finally realize that it had to stop..
This is an actual true story, a story that took Alisson a lot of courage to write and share with the world; if you enjoyed My Dark Vanessa which is fiction, grab a copy of this book that is based on a real life story..

The author's honest and emotional story of her affair with her teacher is one that every parent needs to read. This shows how easily an older predator can take advantage of a student. The manipulation that the teacher used to get the author to stay in a destructive relationship. Maybe reading this will help a parent that has a daughter in this situation see what is going on and intervene to help their daughter.

At seventeen, Alisson is hoping to find someone who can help lift her out of the dark depths of her endless depression. Day after day, she’s late for the bell and left to wander the halls of Hunt High School searching for a sanctuary. And she finds it not with another student but with her English teacher.

Mr. North seems to understand exactly what she’s going through. He takes her under his wing and nurtures her talents and aspirations. In his classroom, she finally feels seen. And then one day, he reads to her from a copy of “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov and nothing is ever the same again.

The relationship that follows defines Alisson’s life in ways that she could never imagine. Until she finally begins to understand that what she thought was love as lonely young girl is actually something far more sinister.

“There is a long history of loneliness in literature. Of loneliness as a prerequisite to love. Almost like you can’t really love someone unless you’ve been alone and loveless for a long time. At least, if you’re a woman. Almost as if this protracted alone time is a purification, prepares a girl to be worthy of a man’s love. Think of the Greek myths, the Odyssey—Calypso dancing sorcery alone on her island, Penelope waiting twenty years for her wandering husband to return. Think of our fairy tales, the stories we tell our daughters before we put them into bed: of Cinderella toiling in the dust before she can be fitted for those slippers, of Rapunzel living in a tower with only her long hair as silent company. And then her prince comes to rescue her.
Nabokov said that all good stories are fairy tales. At seventeen, I was primed to be someone’s princess.”

Being Lolita is nothing like a fairy tale. I think that I read the entire book while holding my breath because I was just like Alisson in High School. A girl too mentally exhausted to even bother making friends or fit in anymore. My interests were books and music – not the prom and boys. I was vulnerable and lost. It could have happened to me.

Alisson details her journey from victim to warrior in a smart lyrical style. She lays bare her soul to tell a terrible truth. All the while, she masterfully draws parallels to the work of Lolita itself. And it makes the experience of this book so raw that it demands you pay attention.

I’m not much one for trigger warnings, but if you need one for this book, it’s right there in the title. The author writes a heartbreaking, beautiful and reflective story about being preyed on by her high school English teacher, and believing it was love. Her story is not uncommon and most women will be able to see some small bit of their own experience in it. Though she later learns her experience itself was sadly not “special,” she has made it into an incredibly special book.

The book describes 17-year-old Alisson’s seduction by her 26-year-old teacher within the framework of Nabakov’s “Lolita.” As we all know, and as this book explores, the very word “Lolita” has become synonymous with a child seductress who holds all the cards, rendering men powerless by her (young, illegal) sexuality. This is how her predator painted her throughout. It was only later in life when she realized her experience of the story was her own and did not follow his unreliable narration.

Here, in the course of reflecting on what happened to her, Wood also does a great textual analysis of the original Lolita as written by Nabakov. After reading this book I felt like I had experienced moments of enlightenment both about my own childhood, and about the book Lolita. I have to really hand it to Wood for laying her most painful moments so bare in this memoir. It’s the kind of book that is going to help other people. But it brings its deeper message and analysis through what is also a beautiful and completely addictive, page-turning reading experience.

At times crushingly hard to read and at other times beautiful (not unlike the original text), this is an exceptional memoir. The ending, and particularly the part about butterflies (you’ll know it when you get there), was perfect.

Thanks to NetGalley, Flatiron Books and Alisson Wood for the advance copy of this excellent memoir. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A beautiful and yet heartbreaking story of watching a young woman fall in love with her teacher. You see what happens through her rose colored love eyes. And then the truth as she looks back. Very hard to read at some points but empowering as well in others. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

𝘽𝙚𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙇𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙖 - Happy Pub Day to this amazing memoir by Alisson Wood @alissonwood
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Have you read Lolita, because I hadn’t until I began reading Alisson’s story about her own Lolita experience. Written in prose that sounds so close to poetry, you can almost feel the feelings she’s having as a high school teenager being seduced by an English teacher several years her senior. Alisson not only tells her story of this destructive relationship, but also how she has turned her experience into a powerful force for educating others. If you’ve read Lolita, or even if you haven’t, you may want to read this memoir for the hope it offers for anyone who has had their own Lolita experience.
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Thank @flatironbooks and @netgalley for my gifted copy!
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@my.love.affair.with.reading on Instagram

This book was so poetic, so thoughtful, and so haunting. I literally couldn’t believe this was a memoir. It feels weird reviewing a book based on someone’s real life, especially given the nature of the relationship between Allison and the teacher. Wood does an excellent job of taking us into the mindset of a lonely teenage girl, one who might confuse an older man’s attention for affection rather than what it really is: a predator preying on the vulnerable and impressionable (also can we talk about how twisted it is that the teacher literally and consciously modeled their relationship after Lolita in so many ways??). For someone who has never been in an abusive relationship it can sometimes be hard to see why people ignore or can’t see the warning signs, and I think this book opened my eyes about this. Without spoiling the ending of Alisson’s story I’ll just say this: this is an amazing tale of the complexity of human emotions, and the resilience we might not even know we had.

Wow. I’m not sure what to say. This was very intense. It was beautiful but painful to read. I thought the way the author wove the story of Lolita by Nabokov throughout her own story was perfect. A very real look at who Lolita really was and what kind of person Humbert was. The harsh reality of a pedophile and his victim. The guilt and the manipulation involved. Very well done!

Note: I was given an advance review copy by NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. #netgalley

Generally a well-written, well-observed, and NECESSARY analysis of this troubling dynamic in relationships that happens all too often. I was also the Bright, Troubled Girl in my youth and could relate to a lot here.

But there's a subtle "off" quality that isn't even dispelled completely in the final chapters, where as an adult she reconsiders the way she perceived the relationship while it was happening, and comes to a lot of insightful conclusions.

My first inkling of this disconnect happened on the first page, when she writes, "He was twenty-six. The first time he saw me, I was seventeen." 26 and 17? That's barely a May-December relationship. It's a May-August relationship, maybe. Could a 26-year-old really be a Humbert? Especially to a girl who's just 4 months away from 18? Of course, the age difference was amplified by their roles--he was a teacher, she was a student--but the bottom line was, he was abusive. And he wielded his age and position of authority as weapons of abuse, yes. And he used the novel Lolita, in a ridiculously hamhanded misreading of it, to lend romance and literary pretension to the situation, but contrary to the title (Being Lolita), she was not Lolita. He was not Humbert.

Alisson graduated from high school in 2002; Nick had graduated in '93, then graduated from undergrad in '97 and presumably took at least another year to do his master's at Columbia. So he was only 3 years (at most) out of school when he met her, at the beginning of her senior year. And of course when you're 17, 26 seems impossibly old. She mentions his need to shave daily as an example of how grown-up he is, if that gives you any idea what her standards of "adult" are at 17. But the pop-cultural myth of Lolita is of a man old enough to be the girl's dad, which Nick isn't. And when Nick comes to visit her at college, he looks young enough that her college friends assume he's a peer.

He's tall and good-looking; the high school girls all have crushes on him. He shops at Abercrombie, just like the students. His favorite musician is John Mayer. By the time you learn, later in the story, that he was the star football quarterback in high school, and later still, that he was in a frat at Cornell, you are thoroughly unsurprised. Nick is a FRAT BRO and he's completely steeped in the toxic masculinity of frat-bro culture, and THAT is at the beating heart of the type of abuse he heaps upon Alisson. His couching it in "Lolita" just further shrouds that fact. Sure, he went to some fancy schools and studied literature and theater, but that doesn't mean he's intellectually sophisticated. He may be a teacher (at his high school alma mater, no less!) but that doesn't mean he has any meaningful knowledge to impart. Even though, by dint of entitle-itis, he thinks he does.

When he first starts hitting on her sexually, his innuendos (if you can even call them that) are not the innuendoes of a dissolute, bohemian dirty-old-man type to his would-be muse. They are straight from the mind of a Maxim Magazine reader. Early on, he recommends she apply to Ithaca College, because "all the prettiest girls in Ithaca were there...and the Cornell guys dated the Ithaca College girls." The author picks up on the total inappropriateness of this recommendation coming from a teacher, but doesn't quite pick up (even at the end, as an adult) the fact that his point of view comes straight from rapey frat-bro culture, which he fully inhabits without a hint of self-awareness.

He asks her for her bra size and says he'll give her his penis size in exchange. Ugh, penis size? No self-respecting Humbert would EVER. And he tells her that "girls who are only 18 are in Playboy" and shows her an ad in Rolling Stone depicting a man embracing a nude woman to show her what he imagines their sexual relationship would be like. He's into her because she's "hot" in the porn sense, not because the two of them are Twin Souls who are misanthropic in the same way and Understand Each Other and all of that more familiar Lolita-style older-man grooming mythology. Further obsession with penis size is revealed later when he asks her to rank the penis sizes of him and all her previous boyfriends.

He tells her that, in the novel Lolita, "the beauty is in the twinning of the porn and the love story" (OMG! Beyond wrong!) and the adult Alisson realizes how beyond wrong he was, but doesn't seem to go as far as to declare that his misconception has to do with his AGE. In the opposite way from "older man." It's because he's too young, immature, sheltered to know better.

Can you be sheltered and also be an abuser of people younger and even more sheltered than yourself? Yes, very much. Especially if the kind of sheltered you are comes with being treated like you're king of the world, as a football player frat boy who ALSO attends Ivy League schools undoubtedly always has been. He's so naive, he's been led to believe he's smart.

So she's stunned when she finally graduates and goes to his house to have sex with him and it isn't a swoonworthy literary romance, but a frat-house-esque plying of her with liquor, to the point where their first kiss is just a blur, and then having his way with her in the apelike, pounding, ramming way frat bros learn, as teens and young adults, is how to have sex with women. She bleeds, not because she's a virgin (she's slept with three boys her own age) but because he's way too rough. And then, when they start having a full-blown relationship, the nature of its abusiveness isn't really defined by their age gap. It's the Dating Violence that high-school and college-age girls experience all the time with guys their age or slightly older, the Dating Violence that she later gets a job teaching teenage girls about. As the author acknowledges, it's rooted in a need for control, and (I'm not quite sure she acknowledges this) a sense of ENTITLEMENT to that control. And it has less to do with the boyfriend's AGE than his SIZE. Nick is big and tall; Alisson is petite; it is truly frightening when he gets angry and violent. He expresses his anger the way a guy does who's learned that it's okay for him to take his anger out on other people, women in particular, when things don't go his way. That lesson is taught in the football locker room, in the frat house, on the Ivy League campus, in porn and lad mags, which were at the height of popularity in the early '00s. It's alarmingly typical of college relationships, even if the age gap is just freshman-to-senior.

Not that the real Nick will ever learn the error of his ways, however old he gets; a lot of men never outgrow it, as we now know in #MeToo, grab-em-by-the-pussy 2020. But he's still a baby in 2002. When he lashes out at her violently for staining his white sheets, he informs her that his PARENTS are going to kill him because those were THEIR SHEETS and they're LUXURY SHEETS. Luxury sheets? I can almost smell the Axe Body Spray. That is so the kind of remark you'd hear from some douchey first-year I-banker who picks you up at a bar on the Upper East Side and takes you back to his black lacquer-and-leather "bachelor pad." Just as turning 18 doesn't make you an adult, neither does graduating from college.

And when he makes cocktails for the two of them, he self-consciously makes himself the same drink as Humbert drank in the book. This is not the action of a real-life Humbert, much as he'd like to think it is. It's the action of a wannabe, so dazzled by the idea of that role that he ineptly pretends it to someone who will buy it. It's the act of a man-child, starry-eyed by a racy vision of adulthood, who feels sexy when he regards himself as an Older Man. He wants to have his cake and eat it too: All the benefits of being a baseball-capped Abercrombie football dude who all the girls pursue, AND of being a brooding, misunderstood, tragic Bukowski type who loves literature and the theater.

The underlying problem with Nick is that young men are taught toxic masculinity. Yes, YOUNG men. And, while the adult Alisson realizes that toxic masculinity is the problem, and that Nick's interpretation of the book Lolita was totally wrongheaded, and even that Nick alluded to "Lolita" to aggrandize and romanticize himself in much the same way Nabokov himself used allusions to Poe, I'm not sure she realizes how truly un-Lolita-ish her abusive relationship with Nick was, despite the fact that, as Humbert did to Lolita, he hurt and traumatized and gaslighted and abused her. And he was (a few years) older.

I love how she fights back against the toxicity in the (brilliantly conceived) Powerful Women writing course she teaches at NYU, with readings by Rebecca Solnit and Carmen Maria Machado, And of course a critical examination of Lolita.

But her own story owes far less to "Lolita" than other books that come to mind, such as "Boys and Sex" by Peggy Orenstein, "American Hookup" by Lisa Wade, "Blurred Lines" by Vanessa Grigoriadis, "Pledged" by Alexandra Robbins, and "I Am Charlotte Simmons" by Tom Wolfe. I would love to hear Alisson Wood give commentary on those books.