Best Podcast Reviews

I Want You to Listen to Lolita Podcast

February 3, 2021 9:50 am

Jamie Loftus’s Lolita Podcast is the platonic ideal of a deep-dive nonfiction podcast, and it hit me like a fucking brick, and I’m so grateful for it. I want you to listen to Lolita Podcast.

But before I explain, a quick note: this review, given its subject matter, will touch on abuse, including the grooming and sexual assault and abuse of minors. Lolita Podcast is often hard to listen to. For me, listening to it was often harder than reading Lolita itself–though this will certainly vary from person to person. Additionally, you do not need to read Lolita to listen to Lolita Podcast, but it does help. Discussions all include plenty of context and citations that make it easy for a listener to follow along, no matter when or if they’ve read the novel. This podcast also, unfortunately, does not currently have transcripts.

With all that said: if doing so would be emotionally safe for you, whether or not you’ve read the novel, I want you to listen to Lolita Podcast.

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What a deep dive podcast should be

Lolita Podcast launched on November 22, 2020. Across ten episodes (or eleven, if you count the two-part eighth episode as two separate episodes), host and creator Jamie Loftus seeks to figure out how Nabokov’s Lolita became so much more than just a novel. Loftus interviews academics who have studied Nabokov and Lolita, as well as people who worked on various adaptations of the novel–namely, most of the women who have played “Lolita.”

But Loftus starts and ends the podcast knowing that scholars are not the only people who have an important connection to Lolita. The entire premise of the podcast focuses on the novel’s reach and use in culture as a whole–and its use, as Lolita Podcast addresses more than once, is often nefarious.

So Loftus also interviews victims of child sexual abuse (CSA). She centers them. She doesn’t just make and hold space for them; she genuinely honors their stories, or at least that feeling comes across in every episode. She speaks with people who have been groomed by older men who used Lolita as a grooming tool.

Loftus talks about “Lolita Syndrome” throughout the podcast. She talks about Sally Horner, the “original Lolita,” who Humbert Humbert directly references in Lolita. She talks about films in which a teenager seduces an adult man and leaves him in ruin. She talks about the online Lolita aesthetic, something almost divorced from the book itself, and how thinking heart sunglasses are cute can signal something very different to so many adults.

Until recently, “Lolita Syndrome” referenced a specific type of girl seen as the mastermind behind her own abuse. She is too mature, and she knows it, and she loves it. She is a Venus flytrap for caring, emotional, very hot older men. Who could blame her for wanting to lure them in? Who could blame them for being lured? She is the puppeteer, and them, the heartbroken puppets.

In second grade, I come down with a rare illness that lands me in the hospital and almost kills me. In recovery, I’m put on intense steroids and hormones to make sure I don’t almost die again. Within the year, I’ve started puberty. I’m a C cup by fifth grade, H by the time I go to college.

And men won’t stop staring at me, and I don’t understand it. I’m walking around a mall with my mom, and she suddenly squeezes my hand hard, stares knives at a man nearby, and hisses at him, “She’s twelve, you creep.”

I didn’t even notice this one was staring, and that makes everything scarier.

I read Lolita too early, but somehow I understand it. The first time I hear someone call it a love story, I never speak to them again.

She speaks with victims and survivors who love the novel and who hate the novel. And she consistently brings up the people disproportionately affected by CSA, but ignored by both the concept of “Lolita” and, unfortunately, most news media: Black girls, Indigenous girls, and other girls of color. She talks about CSA victims who are disabled, queer, poor, fat, boys. She talks about everyone nobody else is talking about.

When people think of deep dive podcasts, there’s often an association with true crime or inconsequential quests. There’s also an idea that podcasts don’t need to be held to the same journalistic integrity as print media. Lolita Podcast subverts these ideas–or, at least, is very aware of them. Lolita Podcast is not a true crime podcast, even though it discusses many crimes that have truly happened. It’s a deeply consequential quest, but it has the same feeling of passion as something like Dead Eyes. It’s a podcast, but it also vets its interview guests and takes much of its information from verifiable primary sources.

There’s also an idea that journalism should be objective and unemotional, that close proximity to a subject should make you somehow incapable of accurately reporting on that subject. Lolita Podcast is a deeply emotional listen, and Loftus talks about her relevant personal experiences. Loftus’s own history with sexual abuse (though not as a child) and Lolita is not the focus of the podcast, but it’s important. This is a story that needs to be told by someone who understands why it’s important. This is a story that should be told by someone who shows emotion when discussing how Lolita is culturally used and “understood.”

And thank god, from the first episode, the audience knows that Lolita Podcast was made by someone who actually gets it and has done their research.

Lolita, Lolita Podcast, and narrator reliability

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

The iconic first words of Nabokov’s Lolita, the greatest love story ever told. The audience is immediately introduced to protagonist Humbert Humbert through his love for the titular Lolita. Nabokov wrote Lolita to show the pain and beauty of star-crossed tragic lovers, separated by something as trivial as age.

When I bring up my Sophomore year math teacher in my high school reunion Facebook group, everyone talks about what a funny, chill guy he was. For being somewhere in his 60s, he was pretty into internet culture and let us kick back sometimes and look at memes on the projector.

And everyone remembers how he and I used to laugh together, how I could easily postpone a quiz by derailing the conversation with a joke.

But that isn’t true. That isn’t what really happened, if you’re paying attention.

The cover art for Lolita Podcast. On a bubblegum pink background, there is an illustration of red heart-shaped sunglasses. In the reflection of one of the lenses is a figure holding a camera, as if to suggest the person is capturing the glasses for a film. The podcast's title is written in red and white cursive handwriting font.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita doesn’t begin with Humbert Humbert’s narration. It begins, instead, with a foreword by the fictional John Ray Jr., Ph.D., who tells the reader that not only are Humbert’s actions horrific, Humbert’s often beloved purple prose is exactly what makes abusive manipulators like him avoid consequences for their actions.

Lolita Podcast is about this schism. Focusing on the factual text of the novel to contrast with the cultural phenomenon of the novel, Lolita Podcast doesn’t just explain how a book is misread and mistaught. That would be interesting enough, but unfortunately, Lolita is not just a novel. It’s a cultural phenomenon, an aesthetic, a syndrome. It both informs and is informed by the way we think of and discuss young cis white women. Lolita Podcast isn’t just about Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s about what Nabokov’s Lolita means to society, and why.

“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male, such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. ‘Humbert Humbert,’ their author, has died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start.”

When you look up Lolita‘s opening lines, these are not the words you’ll find–but they are, in fact, the opening lines to the novel.

It’s always more convenient, more palatable, more romantic to think of the white widowed male than his crimes or subsequent incarceration.

I’m drunk at 2am halfway through the 2020 leg of quarantine, and I hate that teacher and my classmates and all the other teachers and my whole awful high school and myself. I log on to cause chaos. It’s all I know to do.

I post a status update about the teacher, about how he once said in front of the whole class that I’d “look hot as a goth” (an aesthetic I’ve embraced because he’s right, and it makes me feel like myself, and I hate him for it) and nobody said a goddamn word about it. I talk about how he wrote in my yearbook that age is just a number and I’m “very mature.”

Nobody wants to hear it.

Lolita Podcast wants you to pay attention, and so do I.

In the final episode of the podcast, Loftus narrates, “My own experiences happened nearly 70 years after Dolores’s, and there was still not a fucking chance of getting any justice. Shit sucked that bad in 2014, and in most regards, shit sucks that bad right now.”

You might be asking yourself, “Who’s Dolores?” My answer is, “I want you to listen to Lolita Podcast.“

Weaving tones

Here’s the thing about trauma survivors: we’re like, really funny. There’s a whole other podcast about this that you should listen to, but it’s also a prominent part of what makes Lolita Podcast so good.

The content of Lolita isn’t funny. What happens to CSA victims isn’t funny. But sometimes, tragedy gets so absolutely buckwild, so nonsensical, so horrific, what can we do but laugh?

And thank god we laugh; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the darkest parts of Lolita Podcast as easily as I did. Expecting only the most somber tone for over ten hours of some of the most traumatizing content from a creator would be genuinely sadistic. The subject matter is all treated with respect, but more than once, Lolita Podcast had me laughing out loud. Usually in horror, but I’ll gladly take it.

If you’re not familiar with Loftus’s previous work in podcasting, she comes from a history on comedy. The conversational film podcast she co-hosts, The Bechdel Cast, takes a sardonic, hilarious look at how people of marginalized genders are portrayed in film. In her limited series, My Year in Mensa, she talks about, yes, the year she spent in Mensa, and it’s one of the funniest podcasts I’ve ever listened to.

Lolita Podcast moves through different tones with grace and ease. The moments of absurdity, or Loftus being (rightfully) incredulous in narration, never steps on the care given to survivors. It comes across as effortless, but I can’t imagine something more stressful to execute. It’s a godsend for people who care about the novel, who care about how it is interpreted, but do not want to traumatize or retraumatize themselves for an ounce of validation.

Lolita Podcast tells you from the start that it’s going to deal with some truly horrifying stories–but it tells you that the road there doesn’t have to be as horrific as it may seem. There’s room for levity. There’s a need for it.

So what do we do?

We listen.

We listen to works like Lolita Podcast that seek to figure out why we misread texts the way we do. We listen to works like Lolita Podcast that try to show how victims of CSA are made to carry the burden of fixing the systems that have failed them. We listen to the survivors who talk about their experiences, and we listen closely to the perpetrators who try to slither out of consequences with purple prose.

And we talk.

When we can, we talk about our experiences, if we have them. We talk about the dark, misunderstood realities of CSA. We talk about works like Lolita Podcast that focus on what really happens, what has historically happened, instead of repeating the half-truths of less scrupulous analyses. And we talk to people who think Lolita is a love story.

We tell them, “I want you to listen to Lolita Podcast.”