“Every year I choose one student to have sex with,” said Principal White. “This year, I pick you.”
Released last June, Jessica Berger Gross’s debut novel tells the story of a Brooklynite family dropped into the Maine college town of Riverburg, where they make waves after eighteen-year-old Hazel is propositioned by her principal. Berger Gross uses Hazel’s reckoning with the harassment to explore small-town misogyny, antisemitism, and the insider-outsider tensions that Hazel’s family create in sleepy, smalltown Riverburg.
The cover of Hazel Says No depicts a charming white colonial house with vibrant green shutters, its windows curiously empty and a sharp yellow door cracked intriguingly ajar. From a clothesline swing a series of blue and neutral-colored clothes, dangling stiffly above a picturesque green backdrop interrupted by the small blue of a pond and the even smaller gray of distant, indistinct roofs, all enclosed by a neat white picket fence. It is the embodiment of rural charm. Not too rural—other houses are visible—but a calmly domestic scene, a fantasy of the American nuclear family. The too-blue sky shouts in bold letters, Hazel Says No, marching unapologetically in a blocky white sans-serif. And there, tucked to the side, is a small, italicized phrase: a novel. As in, a work of fiction. But is it?
Let’s set the scene. “Riverburg itself was hardscrabble, a former mill town. An old T-shirt factory sat on the river’s edge, its broken windows boarded up. Toward the highway was the stretch of strip malls with supermarkets and fast-food places and the Surplus & Salvage store, with discount emporiums and motels….” Basically, a charming gray plot of late-stage capitalist America.
But “[i]n other ways, Riverburg was almost idyllic…Main Street had a library and the Opera House…a footbridge across the river…On Thursday afternoons, a bustling farmers market came to life with an ice cream truck selling chocolate salted carmel…a Mennonite baker with the best German pretzel…and an extravagant display of locally grown and delicious produce. The town rabbi…[held] a fermentation workshop.” Look, it has redeeming qualities! So cute. But a tad patronizing, isn’t it?
As a town, there were “So. Many. White people” (9). Even still, “Riverburg…was diverse in its own way. Take the pool. For every family affiliated with the College, there were families who seemed, for a lack of a better word, country….” Ah yes. Let’s eloquently dive into the race and class dynamics of this former-mill-turned-elite-college town.
Riverburg could be anywhere in America. Some of the same dynamics at play are found here in New Haven, another elite liberal arts college town with town-gown tensions of its own.
I’m from Riverburg. Except the town’s really called Waterville (see what she did there?). Waterville is a small former mill town with an old *dress-shirt* factory on the river’s edge, its broken windows boarded up, but now home to upscale apartments and art studios. Toward the highway there is indeed a stretch of strip malls with supermarkets and fast-food places and Marden’s, the iconic Maine surplus-and-salvage store with its earworm jingle. Berger Gross left out the not insignificant number of weed stores.
As for Waterville’s more idyllic qualities, she (mostly) nailed those too. There is a quiet Main Street (two way traffic as of 2022!) with a public library (one of our claims to fame—a 2017 National Medal winner) and an Opera House. There is a footbridge across the river, and every Thursday afternoon, from 2pm to 5pm, a farmer’s market does take over the parking lot near the bridge. There is an ice cream truck selling chocolate salted caramel. A Mennonite baker does offer the best German pretzel. And we do indeed have a town rabbi who in 2018 hosted a pickle making workshop as part of the fourth annual Maine Conference for Jewish life. Berger Gross has imported Waterville piece by piece into her novel.
And although it might not be how I’d put it, Berger Gross wasn’t wrong about Waterville’s demographic information either. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Waterville sits at 87.9% white with a median income of $53,580. So is this even a novel? Perhaps a niche roman à clef to which only the venn diagram overlap of Waterville residents and readers of Hazel Says No have the key.
* * *
In early September 2015, then-principal of Waterville Senior High School Donald J. Reiter was placed on paid leave as a result of an ongoing police investigation. A high school student had brought forth allegations claiming that on the first day of school, Reiter propositioned her for sex, saying “Every year I choose one student to have sex with, and this year I’ve picked you.” Sound familiar?
Two months later, the school board fired Reiter, but not without intense pushback from the community. He received a standing ovation at a school board meeting and for several weeks there were gatherings of supporters who held signs calling to “#FreeReiter.” Harsh criticism of the student circulated online, including the release of her name.
Shortly after his suspension, Reiter’s wife filed for divorce. Reiter faced charges of misdemeanor official oppression for the misuse of his office; but because the student was older than eighteen, he was unable to be charged with attempted gross sexual assault.
Soon further allegations surfaced from Reiter’s past, including one hundred and forty-seven pages of letters between Reiter and his then seventeen-year-old student from his time teaching in New Hampshire. The letters detailed a romantic and sexual relationship between the two.
As part of an October 2016 plea deal, Reiter permanently surrendered his teaching credentials in exchange for his charges being dropped. Of the student in question, Kennebec County District Attorney Maeghan Maloney said “I obviously don’t have a case without her cooperation, this has been extraordinarily difficult on her. She has been ridiculed. She has been called a liar. And I can’t even imagine how hard it has been for her going through this process. But through it all, she has gained even more strength in herself, and a belief in doing what’s right and in pursuing justice.”
* * *
At the end of the first chapter of Hazel Says No, Berger Gross leaves us with a cliffhanger—Hazel has been called into the principal’s office, where the situation gradually escalates in creepiness until Mr. White finally says his fateful line—which is verbatim (albeit with the addition of one period) the quote from reporting on the allegations issued against Waterville principal Don Reiter in 2015. Even the names sound similar. Reiter and White.
When asked about her inspiration for the novel, Berger Gross frequently cites her own experience moving with her family from Brooklyn to small town Maine. The town she moved to? Waterville. Berger Gross and her family live around the block from my family. Her husband teaches at the same college as my mother, and her son and I attended various summer camp together. Everything about Hazel Says No hits incredibly close to home. Literally.
In a podcast interview on Read the Damn Book with host Michelle Glogovac, Berger Gross offered that she was interested in the idea of exploring sexual harassment in small town Maine partly because of “something that had happened, something sort of similar in my community…particularly the idea of a student saying no.” To take this statement in a favorable light, we might consider Berger Gross’s nonspecificity as respectful of the privacy of those involved in the events that occurred at Waterville Senior High School in 2015. Her vague handwaving might be seen as a way of protecting the student, her friends and family, the friends and family of Don Reiter, and the community at large.
But I also read this indefinite attribution of inspiration as dismissive and dishonest. It is one thing to take inspiration from a student’s brave actions in standing up to an abusive principal and to spin that action into a novel under different circumstances. It is another to center a novel around what is an essentially verbatim quoting of the student’s allegations as taken from reporting about the school board hearings. It is even another to set the harassment in the exact town in which it really happened, under only a lightly fictionalized name and twisted circumstances.
In her 2023 novel Yellowface, R.F. Kuang satirically critiques racial diversity in the publishing industry via her white writer protagonist, June, who steals an unfinished manuscript from recently deceased Athena, her friend and a Chinese American author. June finishes the manuscript and publishes it as her own work, achieving immediate success that eventually spirals out of control before crashing and burning. But of interest to us here is the discussion of narrative ownership. Kuang’s main character assuages her own guilt by reassuring herself that the story June stole was itself stolen—stolen from people’s real lives by Athena. During the two characters’ time as undergrads at Yale, Athena had taken a story June told her about her own sexual assault and published it as a fictionalized story, “identifying personal details changed with either astounding laziness or indifference.” June describes Athena as a “vampire” who “s[aw] through the grime and sludge of facts and details to the part of the story that bled. She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off, and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced readers.”
In an interview with journalist Kelley Vick, Berger Gross comments again about her inspiration and the process of finding the idea for her novel, saying “I just needed something big to happen to this family, something really meaty.” She knew she wanted to write a novel about a Brooklyn family dropped into small town Maine. As for plot, she ended up looking no farther than half a mile from her new house, to the walls of Waterville Senior High School. I cannot help but think that it is “either astounding laziness or indifference” that led Berger Gross to take the true story of what happened to a senior at Waterville and turn it into a mere “meaty” and “inciting incident” for her novel.
Because for all of Hazel’s self-awareness and acknowledgement of herself as a “perfect victim,” her story leads to a happy ending. We don’t know what happened to the young woman who was brave enough to bring forth the disgusting actions of Don Reiter, but we might assume that it involved nothing so shiny as Hazel’s story.
Spoiler alert: Hazel turns her experience into her college essay, which goes viral after she makes the decision to go public, leading to a New York Times interview, national attention, and ultimately landing her a six-figure book deal with talks of a television adaptation (so relatable). But in the end, Hazel forgoes fame and her book deal, choosing instead to embrace the fulfilling life of a typical teenager. She turns down the glamorous life she could have had and settles for being a normal college student at her dream school, Vassar (the author’s own alma mater).
Berger Gross maintains the reality of the story so closely in certain aspects, but then divorces it from fundamental realities of class and privilege. That the principal would call the daughter of a newly tenured professor at the local elite liberal arts college into his office and proposition her on her first day at the school is unlikely. Realistically, when the student spoke up she would not get her voice heard in a viral New York Times essay. Realistically, she would be ridiculed and called a liar and it would not propel her to Los Angeles for a meeting with television producers. Berger Gross put the story of a local Waterville student into the mouth and experience of a character whose privilege drastically changes how we look at and think about what happened; a Waterville student’s pain and fight for justice in 2015 has been morphed into a feel-good novel.
For Berger Gross to write a novel appropriating a Waterville story and setting, describing our town as “economically depressed” but somehow still “almost idyllic” means something when you consider her perspective as “from away”—as someone not from Maine. What might seem like just a description to establish the small-town Maine setting becomes a simultaneous romanticization and derision, the superiority of a New Yorker who has come to small town America and found it quaintly “hardscrabble.”
Berger Gross relies so closely on Waterville’s reality to describe her fictional town of Riverburg that I recognized nearly every character as someone I know personally—they are the people I’ve grown up around. Riverburg is the town I grew up in. Berger Gross describes the Riverburg public school, inspired by the Waterville public schools, as having a “basic prison library” with “classrooms in various states of disrepair” while her own son attended Kents Hill School, a private boarding high school in the area that costs $39,500 per year for Maine day students and $74,800 for out-of-state students. She writes in the voice of the public school principal speaking to Hazel that “[l]ots of students here go to the U of Maine, or community college. Some straight to work…I don’t want that to worry you…You’re a star.” To identify Hazel, daughter of highly educated parents “from away,” as a star among local students becomes more significant when you think about Berger Gross as a highly educated parent “from away” of a high school aged child in Waterville. Her words take on a disdain for the community she is mining for her novel.
I am also “from away.” I am also a daughter of highly educated parents who moved here for a job in academia. I am, as she describes, one of the “couple of students who get into the Ivy League” every year. I know that line is about me, because last year her son came to Yale for a college visit and I met with him so he could ask me questions. But unlike Berger Gross or her family, I went to Waterville Senior High School. Unlike Berger Gross, I try to remain acutely aware of the place I occupy within my Maine community, and the way that that position influences how I think and how I should talk and write about my hometown. She has acted with impunity, treating Waterville’s history and people as fodder for her fantasies.
The line between fiction and reality is never a clear one, but Hazel Says No presents us with an opportunity to think about what, exactly, it means to take someone’s, or some place’s, story for your own. It might prompt us to consider what stories lurk beneath our favorite fictions. People will read her novel and treat it solely as the fictive narrative it claims to be. But meanwhile, Waterville pervades every sentence. The people and places I know pervade every sentence. The young woman who faced Don Reiter in 2015 pervades every sentence. Jessica Berger Gross has exploited a story from our community and lazily manipulated my hometown to serve her twisted self-insert fanfiction.
