Jeannie Vanasco - Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

THINGS
WE DIDNT
TALK ABOUT
WHEN I WAS
A GIRL

[A MEMOIR]

JEANNIE VANASCO

TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon

For Hannah

JEANNIE VANASCO is the author of The Glass Eye: A Memoir (Tin House Books, 2017). Her work has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times Modern Love, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and is an assistant professor at Towson University. Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl is her second book.

But what is the word for what I experienced after?

From Nightingale: A Gloss

by PAISLEY REKDAL

Early evening. We were in your car, at the end of your block, at a stop sign. The streets were empty. My window was open because I hated closed windowsprobably because I thought my why drive if you cant feel the wind attitude made me profound. We were sixteen.

I just needed to leave my house, you said.

With a few classmates, wed been cramming for an exam about waves and optics and contemplating why our accomplished physics teacher taught at our poorly ranked public high school. Cost of living? Witness protection? He actually likes Sandusky? When we left, our classmates were writing formulas on their wrists with fine-point markers.

Lets drive until we hit civilization, I said.

You stared straight ahead at something, it seemed, that couldnt be seen.

Somewhere with a bookstore, I said, like a real bookstore. One with a poetry section thats more than one shelf.

You squeezed the steering wheel and suddenly your pale knuckles looked cartoonish, like a badly rendered, unshaded drawing of knuckles. I barely glanced at your face. I sensed you were resisting tears.

You told me I was important to you. I told you I knew that, and you said, No, really, youre the only one who understands me.

You turned, looked at me, then quickly looked away. I had never seen you cry before. I hadnt seen many teenage boys cry, but I didnt say that.

I know you understand this, you said. I just get so lonely.

This is probably my favorite memory of us.

I know youre sad now, I said, but I promise this will be a happy memory someday. Us at this perfectly straight stop sign.

You nodded, and I wonder if I explained my observation, or if my observation was insightful enough to imply its metaphoric meaning, as in: lets notice when things are right.

The memory stops there. If you were critiquing this, you might say, Come on, Jeannie, its a little too perfect, dont you think? The memory stopping at a stop sign.

I kept putting the book down to make sure I was still breathing, to interrogate what had happened to my heart. Vanasco is a brilliant craftspersonblurring the lines between memoir, investigation, and interview, she confronts her years-ago rapist and dives headlong into the complexity of forgiveness and redemption, what was taken and what can be rebuilt. Our cultural discussion of rape is so deeply marked by silence. Enough with the silence. Enough. Vanasco has given us a bridge.

MEGAN STIELSTRA, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

Carrying memories of rape sometimes feels like working, day in and day out, on untangling a hopelessly knotted chain. In this book, Jeannie Vanasco works through the gnarl until its terrifying expanse is stretched out before us. There is so much power in these pages: in the vulnerability she shows in seeking answers, in the deftness with which she builds a narrative where there was once only a mess of questions and silence.

ELISSA WASHUTA, My Body Is a Book of Rules

Vanasco performs a literary feminist miracle for all women who have been denied basic rights, been suspect, been labeled, been unbelievable after their rapes and assaults, and shines our collective shame outwardly, to ask a man why a choice to abuse is made. Vanasco is powerful in her vulnerability, gutting in her candor and breaks the fourth wall, artfully, to interrogate the truth of toxic masculinity. Every male who has taken part in abuses of power, from politicians to teenage boys, will see a mirror and wince, knowingly. A modern classic of nonfiction.

SOPHIA SHALMIYEV, Mother Winter

Jeannie Vanasco has written exactly the book we need right now: an investigative memoir that scrutinizes the nuances of sexual assault, the false binaries and myths too long used to determine who is and isnt capable of rape, and the insidious ways that we are socialized to protect our predators. A book that dissects the complexities of sexual assault need not also be a pleasure to read, but this book is. Vanascos honesty and willingness to interrogate both her rapist and herself enthralled me from the opening paragraphs. I wish everyone in this country would read it.

MELISSA FEBOS, Abandon Me

Jeannie Vanasco continues to shine a light into the unreconciled depths of the past. Fourteen years after being raped by her childhood best friend, the author sets out to track him down, to hear his voice, to salvage something of what was lost that fateful night. Part memoir, part interview, Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl interrogates the terms of betrayal, the limits of redemption, asking us how can we forgive when we never truly forget?

TIM TARANTO, Ars Botanica

In Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco has done something extraordinary. She explodes rape culture at the level of language, shows us how we are trapped and how we might make ourselves free. This is a brilliant book, an astonishingly fierce inquiry into the places language wont go. It charts a path through the things we dont have words for yet and the things we dont know how to say.

EMILY GEMINDER, Dead Girls

With matchless grit and a vibrant mind, Jeannie Vanasco performs an absorbing autopsy on a friendship that ended in rape. Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl cuts through the silence of deep betrayal, gives contour to the aching space between forgiveness and absolution, and offers a living testament to the endless wreckage of sexual assault.

AMY JO BURNS, Cinderland

Jeannie Vanascos narration of her experience is nuanced and complex. In sharp, purposeful prose, she explores what is demanded of victimsthat we live in a world where the consequences for victims and perpetrators are grotesquely reversed, where the identities and reputations of perpetrators are protected, sometimes by the very people theyve harmed. Unflinching in her honesty and approach, Vanasco interrogates boundaries further shaping and reshaping memoir as we know it. Wickedly clever and powerful, Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl is a necessary book.

KRYSTAL A. SITAL, Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad

Jeannie Vanascos rigorous and nuanced investigation of crime, trauma, secrets, and the telling of our stories applies an agile mind and penetrating insight to the enforced silences that surround rape and its aftermath. Vanasco incinerates shame and beckons us into the holy smoke. Searching, searing, and sacred, Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl is the cleansing flame we have been waiting for.

LISA LOCASCIO, Open Me

In this brave and urgent memoir, Jeannie Vanasco asks if its possible for a good person to commit a terrible act. In a moment where morality is so often rendered in flat, simplistic terms, Vanasco refuses to take the easy way out: she is generous yet exacting, fair yet relentless.