Texas Book Festival 2018: The Real Story of Lolita

For being about a forgotten moment in the past, Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita feels positively prescient. If My Favorite Murder and its ilk have put us in a true crime renaissance and #MeToo has us grappling with our culture's cycles of abuse and predation, there seems no better time to remember kidnap victim Sally Horner.

Sarah Weinman (l) and Suzy Spencer (Photo by Rosalind Faires)

In the bowels of the Capitol Building, in front of a warm and fairly grey-haired audience, moderator and Austin-based true crime writer Suzy Spencer inquired about what led Weinman to write her latest nonfiction book. Weinman described a precocious youth – reading her parents’ baseball encyclopedia for fun presaged her interest in archival research – and being drawn to stories of accidents and death early on. “Crime was a window to the world,” a lens through which to view and understand culture. That perspective might be why Vladimir Nabokov’s lifelong resistance to acknowledging that he sometimes drew from real-life events while writing was both fascinating and frustrating to her. “I wanted to chip away at this great artist mythos that Nabokov has,” Weinman explained. Lolita hadn’t sprung fully-formed because its author was a genius – “You have to work really hard to achieve that,” and Nabokov labored to erase the evidence of that work, including by destroying his handwritten first draft.

Weinman doesn’t present Sally Horner’s erasure as pure conspiracy – Nabokov and his wife, Vera, obscured all kinds of details about their personal life and work when faced with the press – but she believes that forgetting the very real trauma Horner endured in her 1948 cross-country kidnapping by a pedophile would be an injustice. Since Horner died two years after escaping her captor, she left no direct descendants and Weinman described “a race against time and against memory” to find people who remembered Horner so her place in history could be preserved. Why do all this? “Sally Horner matters,” Weinman explained, “and if she matters, so does every one of us who has suffered trauma.” Since Horner’s kidnapper had none of Humbert Humbert’s charisma or eloquence in Nabokov's novel, there’s no danger of readers seeing him as anything other than what he was: a profoundly dangerous and unrepentant rapist. By recognizing and honoring Horner’s experience as a victim of child abuse, Weinman hopes to bring us to the same view of Dolores Haze. “If this book can help obliterate the idea that 'Lolita' means seductress,” Weinman concluded, “I’d be very happy.”