Every Woman I Know Had a Teacher Like Blake Bailey
There is rage, yes, but also endless disappointment
Before I even got out of bed this morning, I read this long piece in Slate about Blake Bailey, the author of the recent Philip Roth biography whose publication has been frozen amid allegations of rape and sexual assault, as well as grooming young students. I can’t stop reading about it. There are more stories, memories, allegations surfacing from his former students, and it’s bringing up feelings. I was fortunate to talk to a couple friends who are also women writers about this over Zoom the other night. One of them, Alisson Wood, author of the recent memoir Being Lolita, published a piece about it in Vanity Fair today.
Wood’s piece is about the sameness of this kind of predation, the tricks these men predictably use to flatter and ensnare young girls. But it begins with infatuation. Like so many of us, Wood was excited to receive special attention from her teacher. She was enamored. She writes:
In high school, a teacher gave me his copy of Lolita. But only after he read me the opening lines — “light of my life, fire of my loins” — over french fries in a diner, late at night when I should have been home. When he spoke those words to me, my hands cupped around a mug, my palms warming from the stale coffee, I was as in love with him as any teenager could be.
Reading about Bailey in the last couple weeks has made me reflect on these experiences in my own life. It made me recall (and google) the English teacher I was in love with — Bailey even looks like him — who fortunately never crossed a line. But others did. During junior year, I found one high school teacher’s pornography (two low-budget, hardcore magazines with titles that are imprinted forever on my mind), which he’d brought to school in his briefcase. There was the one who told our history class that Jewish girls have soft breasts. The coach who encouraged us to flash passing trucks (actually, to press our breasts to the windows and show the drivers “fried eggs”) while en route to soccer games on the school bus. Another one left me a dazzling but unquestionably flirtatious inscription in a book of poetry he bought me. And at 17, I had a full-blown, months-long relationship, sex and all, with another teacher, though I wasn’t…
