It's easy to pinpoint when it all started, that moment of walking into his sun-soaked classroom and feeling his eyes drink me in for the first time, but it's harder to know when it ended, if it really ended at all.
-- Vanessa (chapter 2017)

Importance: At the heart of the novel is the question of how to measure trauma, how the impact of an emotional and psychological violation like Vanessa’s sexual relationship with her teacher registers. The open-endedness suggested by this admission by Vanessa early on in what she hopes will be her narrative of recovery indicates that Vanessa, fifteen years after her first sexual encounter with Strane, cannot affirm that the impact will ever be entirely understood, entirely defined, entirely survived. The word that reveals that psychological dilemma is the word “if.” That word, freighted with uncertainty and doubt, casts the narrative that Vanessa is about to share into terrifying relief. Whatever...