Things We Didn't Talk about When I Was a Girl

by Jeannie Vanasco

Overview

A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Best Book of the Year at TIME, Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, and Electric Literature

Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her. When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides—after fourteen years of silence—to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person.

Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own.

Unflinching and courageous, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships—a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions, push towards deeper understanding, and continue a necessary and long overdue conversation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793453
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	1,230,104
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

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 Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is her second book.

Editorial Reviews

Facing the person who betrayed you, who preyed upon you, who haunts you: It's the stuff of vengeful daydreams, born of nightmares. Jeannie Vanasco has had plenty of nightmares, but the story she tells in Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is not one of revenge. It's about violence and forgiveness, about friendship and the unwanted title of victim, about digging deeper and deeper to seek answers—from yourself and from your bogeyman. But in this memoir, questions beget more questions, and few are sufficiently answered. Trauma cannot be tied with a tidy bow.

The New York Times Book Review - Maya Salam

05/27/2019

Vanasco (The Glass Eye) was raped during her sophomore year of college, and in this powerful memoir, she confronts her assailant, a man she calls Mark. Vanasco and Mark became friends at 13, and in 2003, while on break from Northwestern University, Vanasco attended a party at the house where Mark lived. She became drunk and Mark took her to his room in the basement. Vanasco graphically describes what followed: Mark undressed her, penetrated her vaginally with his fingers, masturbated over her while she cried, and told her: “It’s just a dream.” Fourteen years later, Vanasco contacted Mark to discuss the assault and here delves into their uncomfortable email exchanges, phone calls, and meetings. Mark has become a remorseful loner, and reveals to her that he’s still a virgin. Vanasco worries about giving him a voice in her book: “But by interviewing him, I also can invert the power dynamic... he’ll probably come across as too defensive. And maybe I want that.” In unadorned prose, the author interweaves her exchanges with Mark with stories of other predatory men she’s known, including a high school teacher who punished her after she rejected him. This is a painful reminder of the ugly ways some men treat women, and Vanasco’s nuanced story will resonate with those who’ve endured sexual inappropriateness in any form. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Vanasco is a formidable talent.

Daniel Gumbiner

A rigorous and nuanced investigation.

Lisa Locascio

A literary feminist miracle.

Sophia Shalmiyev

Brilliant.

Megan Stielstra

Heartfelt, painful, and essential.

Shelf Awareness

Perhaps the most important book of the season.

Esquire

Utterly brilliant.

Book Riot

Cuts through the silence of deep betrayal.

Amy Jo Burns

Sets the canon of #MeToo-era creative nonfiction on fire. . . . Inimitable.

Starred Review Booklist

Wickedly clever and powerful.

Krystal A. Sital

A gripping read and true fodder for the necessary reckoning with toxic masculinity.

BuzzFeed

About how important it is to speak about these oft-silenced experiences that cause so many to feel ashamed, scared, and alone.

NPR

Gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking.

Carmen Maria Machado - Bustle

A remarkably nuanced account of the complicated and confusing emotions that surface when your rapist is someone you knew and trusted.

The Cut

Exactly the book we need right now. . . . I wish everyone in this country would read it.

Melissa Febos

Interrogates the terms of betrayal and the limits of redemption.

Tim Taranto

Thought-provoking, unmooring, and haunting.

NYLON

Explores the common experience of rape with uncommon nuance and intense tenderness.

YZ Chin

About violence and forgiveness, about friendship and the unwanted title of victim, about digging deeper and deeper to seek answers.

The New York Times Book Review

Vanasco immediately makes you wonder how we can take so much about sexual assault for granted.

The Times Literary Supplement

Striking. . . . Creates a language for something we don’t talk about.

The Paris Review

An essential, unforgettable work.

Erik Anderson

A cuttingly funny meta-meditation on her own pain in the context of #MeToo.

The Oprah Magazine O

Astonishingly fierce.

Emily Geminder

Intrepid. . . . A work that has the potential to change the way we think and talk about rape and the people who commit it.

Bitch

There is so much power in these pages.

Elissa Washuta

Stunning.

Angela Pelster

Bold, unsettling, and timely. . . . A reckoning with injustice.

Laurie Halse Anderson - TIME

Part memoir, part interview, Things We Didn't 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?

Timothy Taranto

It’s about violence and forgiveness, about friendship and the unwanted title of victim, about digging deeper and deeper to seek answers — from yourself and from your bogeyman.

Maya Salam - New York Times

Vanasco gets at so many of the gray areas in our conversations about rape and the rehabilitation of its perpetrators. If some traumas don't fit into neat little narratives, then the pleasure of reading Vanasco is in knowing that messiness is OK, that there's no right way to handle such betrayals.

Maris Kreizman - Pacific Standard

Vanasco immediately makes you wonder how we can take so much about sexual assault for granted, how we will accept lines about women asking for it and women’s insistence that it only happened this one time. But the book has – and achieves – a higher ambition than being an astute study in sexual consent.

Times Literary Supplement

Vanasco's second memoir sets the canon of #MeToo-era creative nonfiction on fire: she interviews her rapist. ... This is a slow-burning, reverberating meditation on the nuances of morality, masculinity, and punishment. ... Inimitable. (Starred Review)

Booklist

Vanasco's second memoir sets the canon of #MeToo-era creative nonfiction on fire: she interviews her rapist. ... This is a slow-burning, reverberating meditation on the nuances of morality, masculinity, and punishment. ... Inimitable. (Starred Review)

Booklist

A firecracker of a book.

Bustle

10/01/2019

As part of the process of healing from her 2003 rape, Vanasco (English, Towson Univ.; The Glass Eye) decides to talk to her rapist, her childhood best friend. This memoir contains the raw and open conversations with her friends and family as well as transcripts of exchanges with the man who raped her. At times the text is linear, at other times fragmented, as the author explores memories and feelings. This book is not only about the author's own experiences, but how sexual assault and rape has impacted other people in her life. It touches on the conversations people have about sexual assault and more important, the dialogs not had. VERDICT This fiercely written, sobering account of actions that alter lives forever is recommended for students of sociology, gender studies, and psychology, as well as general readers wishing to learn more about the effects of sexual assault and rape.—Meghan Dowell, Carroll Uni., Waukesha, WI

Library Journal

★ 2019-08-18
After 14 years, a survivor of rape chronicles her interviews with the man who assaulted her, a former friend.

Inside the swirling "zeitgeist" of the #MeToo movement, Vanasco (English/Towson Univ.; The Glass Eye, 2017) decided not only to write about the experience that still gives her nightmares, but also to include the perspective of the person who raped her. Over emails, phone calls, and in-person conversations, the author interviewed her former friend, Mark, and tried to make sense of his inexplicable betrayal as well as her own ambivalence toward him: "I doubt I'm the only woman sexually assaulted by a friend and confused about her feelings," she writes. At every step of this harrowing process, from deciding how to approach Mark after years without contact to transcribing and interpreting their conversations, the author scrutinizes her own motivations, her compulsive caretaking of Mark's discomfort during their discussions, and the lasting impact of the trauma that he caused her. Perspectives from Vanasco's friends, her partner, and her therapist also figure heavily into the narrative, emphasizing how crucial it is for survivors to have wide networks of support. With deep self-consciousness, courage, and nuance, the author reveals the inner universe of her survivorship and interrogates the notion that rapists are two-dimensionally evil. A friend of Vanasco's reflects, "how can someone who seems so harmless or acts so well or is so intelligent be capable of committing what is understandably kind of an evil act and how can it happen?" Though the author does not exactly answer these questions through her interviews with Mark, her engrossing, complex, incisive testament to the banality of violence is not a desolate narrative. Instead, Vanasco invites her readers to understand the complicated humanity involved in both causing and experiencing harm, leaving the limits and possibilities of accountability and healing as urgent, open questions.

An extraordinarily brave work of self- and cultural reflection.

Kirkus Reviews

Read More