In the summer before eighth grade, I made a leap forward in my reading. I’d always liked big old, fat old books—Little Women, Gone with the Wind, Dickens when I was at my most self-consciously precocious. That summer I picked up The Great Gatsby and began reading analytically for the first time. I was reading irony. Which is not to say I was reading with irony, or that I understood The Great Gatsby. But I was losing the childhood need to identify with the narrator. The book was becoming a journey and an object, no longer an extension of myself.

My older brother was reading Lolita. Flush with my success at adult reading, I thought I might give it a whirl. I knew it was an important book, but it was about a girl just my age. This seemed felicitous.

I stole it from my brother’s room and took it to my reading hammock, hung between two trees over a high cliff above the Sound. As I began the book, I was overcome with a kind of revulsion. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” Why did Lolita have so many names? And why did Humbert have only the one, repeated like a mumbling stutter? The whole thing seemed uncomfortable and un-storylike. I read until dusk without stopping.

Lolita was a nymphet, a demon, an irresistible lure. Was I these things too? I found it terrifying that I also might be an irresistible lure. I knew I was just a girl, nothing special. Lolita seemed just a plain girl herself. Yet Humbert saw her as a profoundly sexual creature, as his angel and devil of sex.

Nabokov’s exercise allows us into the mind of the tragic, despicable Humbert, but I was Lolita for those horrible hours till I could read no more. I went back to the house and returned the book to my brother’s room. I didn’t pick it up again for a dozen years.