Tampa by Alissa Nutting

Tampa by Alissa Nutting
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First of all, Nutting is an amazing writer, the writing will cast a dark spell on you keep you turning the pages and plant you so deep inside the brain of her main character Celeste that you will feel your head spin. That said, the plot of the book is pedophilia, so it's super gross. I conceptualized reading this book as reading a horror book. It’s about a beautiful female pedophile and it’s somewhat based on the true story of Debra Lafave. It’s really graphic sexually so that makes it harder to read. Nutting doesn’t do Nabokov’s Lolita's suggestion of sex, she spells it out completely so that we can’t look away from the ugly monster inside the beautiful young woman.

But here are a few things I think make this topic make sense. This actually happens not that infrequently in real life, beautiful young women teachers get arrested for sleeping with 14-16-year-old students. There’s a pretty substantial list of them (google it) and those are just the ones that got caught; probably they don’t all get caught.

Secondly, in a lot of ways, the topic of the book is more about the inside of a sociopath’s brain. It reminded me a lot of the Ted Bundy documentary if it had been from the honest perspective of Ted Bundy. Sociopaths are scary and dangerous because they don’t have the same guardrails of human sympathy, empathy, nor do they possess a built-in moral framework. Can you be incapable of love and be truly human? As the character of Celeste is developed, we see that her only problem is not her perverse sexual desires, she fundamentally doesn't care about right and wrong or human life or anything aside from obtaining her personal desires.

[Light spoilers ahead.] Finally, there’s a lot of truth about how society lets beautiful people get away with so much more than unattractive people. The book also highlights how the legal system frequently blames the victim. Specifically, because the perpetrator is a woman, it kind of flips the script, but some things remain the same. This book, while gruesome to read, definitely made me think about a lot of problems in society.

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