Sarah Weinman: Why We’ve Always Misunderstood Lolita

This week on The Maris Review, Sarah Weinman joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her book, The Real Lolita, now available in paperback from Ecco.

On our misunderstanding of Lolita:

Sarah: One of the things about writing this book is that it wasn’t just writing about the story of Sally Horner or the publication process of Lolita. It was also figuring out this very bizarre cultural afterlife of Lolita and how that novel has been so deeply misunderstood, really since the beginning.

The fact that adaptations of Lolita have done it such a disservice, starting with Stanley Kubrick’s film. Yes, there is good acting and good set pieces, but for understandable reasons they could not film the novel as it was written. It wouldn’t have passed the censors. It’s also that Kubrick and his producing partner, Jimmy Harris, came in with a misunderstanding. Harris was quoted as saying that he viewed this as a bizarre love story.

It’s this idea, and this is the thing that I’ve been trying to do ever since my book was published and I feel that I have been somewhat successful, that can we stop equating the nickname Lolita with the idea of a seductress because Lolita was Dolores Haze. She was a twelve-year-old girl. She didn’t live all that long. After getting away from Humbert Humbert, she ends up with Clare Quilty, and he himself has perverse and profane desires. She gets away from that, and she ends up with her husband on the way to something that resembles a normal life of her choosing.

This is the thing that I think that is really important to stress—and what gets lost because it’s Humbert Humbert’s narration and his perspective—is that this book was always about Dolores Haze. It was always about the choice she couldn’t make and the choices she could make and the tragedy that she couldn’t live long enough to make even more choices.

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On adding a chapter to the paperback version:

Maris: I know how extensive your research was and how difficult it is because we’re at a time when the people who knew Sally are older. When I asked you last year what you thought about ending the book, as you did, you said the book is only as done as you set it out to be, and you wouldn’t mind if more people came forward after the hardcover publication because then it wouldn’t be closer to the truth. Your paperback has a whole new section in it!

Sarah: Yes it does, and that’s because a week or so after we went to Atlantic City—so three weeks before the publication date—I got an email from one of those weird Freedom of Information accounts that the FBI has. I had submitted a request for Frank La Salle’s FBI file eighteen months before. Now, the book is ready to go—there are already finished copies—and I get this email and click on the PDF, and there is this sixty-page file … but it was enough for me to figure out two key things.

First, directly related to the FBI report, that they were involved early and that one agent closed the file in October and said, Oh well, we don’t have enough information to pursue it even though it was an interstate kidnapping, and they knew.There was a handwritten note in the file acknowledging that this was bad. It was in there that they fucked up.

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On excesses:

Maris Kreizman: I do think that it’s ridiculous and disgusting, and sort of funny, that after [our initial interview] we walked on the boardwalk and we found ourselves at lunch at this place called the Sugar Factory.

Sarah Weinman: [laughs] Which I stupidly did not realize was a chain, and I’ve seen subsequent Sugar Factories around, and I go, Oh, it’s a concept. It has obscenely large sundaes and concoctions and stuff I’ll never eat because I’m not a diabetic—which I know you are—but I know being around it would put me in some kind of diabetic shock. How was it for you?

Maris: It was the kind of excess that is so lovely to look at: milkshakes with pieces of cake hanging out of it.

Sarah: It was kind of unreal.

Maris: Absolutely unreal.

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Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita. She’s the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin). She has written for the New York Times, the New Republic, the Guardian, and Buzzfeed, among other outlets.

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