Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita (w, Laura Lippman)

Sarah Weinman discusses her book, The Real Lolita, at Politics and Prose on 9, 12, 18. Nabokovs Lolita, the story of a middleaged man obsessed with a twelveyearold girl, has fascinated and troubled readers since its publication in 1955. As Weinman shows in her revelatory history of a 1948 kidnapping case, the novel owed as much to actual events as it did to Nabokovs imagination. The reallife Lolita was Sally Horner, elevenyearsold when she was caught stealing by a fiftyyearold man who told her he was an FBI agent. He abducted her and drove her from New Jersey across the country. After twentyone months, Sally escaped; her kidnapper was arrested in 1950. Acting as both a truecrime reporter and literary sleuth, Weinman tells Horners story in detail and shows what Nabokov knew of the case when he wrote his novel and how he disguised that knowledge. Weinman is in conversation with Laura Lippman, author most recently of Sunburn.