My furious, fed-up thirteen-year-old reading of Lolita had actually been correct. Not the part of conflating Nabokov and Humbert. But the part where I had an almost visceral reaction to Lolita’s lack of real presence in the novel. I was reading the world’s most adept depiction of the erasure of a girl. Maybe it scared me because I, like so many girls, was living this story, in a smaller, quieter way.
