A Conversation with Jeannie Vanasco
BY MARISA SIEGEL
Jeannie Vanasco is the author, most recently, of the memoir A Silent Treatment, forthcoming with Tin House Books in September. Her previous books include the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco investigates, with characteristic emotional depth and wit, her mother’s periodic employment of the silent treatment during the time she lived in the renovated apartment in Jeannie’s basement. The longest silence lasts six months, and it’s from within that silence that Vanasco begins writing.
Marisa Siegel: Jeannie, it’s a pleasure to talk with you about this remarkable new book, which I couldn’t put down.
You write in the text itself about the creation of the book, and we’ll talk more about your use of the meta later on, but first, can you tell me more about its path from the moment you first promised your mom you’d write a book for her to the finished memoir I’m holding in my hands?
Jeannie Vanasco: There’s a scene in my first book, The Glass Eye, where I tell my mom that my next book will be for her, and she replies, “You have to do things for yourself.” But writing The Glass Eye was just as much for me as it was for my dad. It offered me a way to spend time with him. After I finished writing it, I felt so depressed. I remember thinking, What am I supposed to do now? Sit at his grave and read it to the dirt? I knew then that I had to write a book for my mom while she could still read it.
A few months before The Glass Eye came out, she moved in with me, and almost immediately began using the silent treatment. Her silences would happen for reasons I didn’t always understand, and while they were happening, I felt angry and hurt. And I didn’t want to write from anger. I’d internalized this idea that I couldn’t be publicly angry at my mom or write about her flaws. But to write anyone with any complexity, you have to acknowledge their flaws. I wasn’t ready to do that. So, I put this book off for a long while.
MS: How do you think through the ethics of writing about real people?
JV: I consider the power dynamics. And I often ask for permission. I asked my mom for permission a lot. I’m sure I was annoying her; she was like, “yes, I said you could write about me. If I didn’t want you to write about the silent treatment, I shouldn’t have done it.” She still hasn’t read the manuscript. She’s waiting until after it’s published. She said if she interfered, telling me what I could or couldn’t write, the book would no longer be mine. A memoirist couldn’t ask for a better mom.
This isn’t to say I ask everyone. It all goes back to the power dynamics. For instance, in this book, and it’s there for some levity, I introduce readers to a colleague who’d make digs at me. One of the digs I include is how, in a room full of other faculty, he points out the lines on my forehead and laughs. When I decide whether to include something like that, a moment that reflects negatively on someone else, I think, well, what is it saying about my character or the larger story? In this case, I start obsessing over his remark. I wear clip-on bangs at home, debating whether I want actual bangs. I’m being neurotic—I forget where I read that bangs can be a sign of an approaching nervous breakdown—and I’m thinking about aging. So, someone saying something inappropriate or mean, it’s not really a reflection of that person as a whole, it’s about how that character contributes to the emotions of the book.
When it comes to students, I try to be extra sensitive because there’s a clear power imbalance. I usually remove so many details that the students may not recognize themselves. Or I wait until they’re no longer students, and then I ask for permission. For my second memoir, there was one student I couldn’t ask. She died before I started writing it. I shared pages with her parents, and they gave me their approval.
I’m still trying to sort through what’s fair. I have an ongoing fear of hurting someone’s feelings. I try to be cautious in memoir because it’s public—you can’t just take it back.
MS: So, your mom hasn’t read the finished memoir yet. It’s interesting because throughout the process, you were so hesitant, and she’s urging you to just write the book. Is she glad that it’s finished?
JV: Just last week, she asked if she could preorder copies, and I said, “Mom, the publisher is giving me copies. I’ll give you the book.” And she replied that she wanted to support me and send it to her friends.
She and I have talked about this memoir, about how it’s my representation of her, and so, it’s filtered through my point of view. I write about this a lot in A Silent Treatment. I want readers to understand how constructed a memoir is. I think this is linked to my use of meta writing.
MS: The impulse to be meta, it’s coming from a desire to help the reader understand how you’re using people in the work?
JV: I think a huge part of it is that. I sometimes ask myself why I’m not writing fiction, if I have so much anxiety about sharing details about other people’s lives. But both the first book and this book are born out of love, and when we love someone, we love them regardless of their flaws. We can make mistakes and the relationship still survives. I think that’s part of what goes into loving someone, loving them through the difficult times. Not that we should always forgive people who abuse us, or tolerate abusive behavior, but people make mistakes.
MS: You don’t call your mother’s use of the silent treatment “abuse,” but Chris, your partner, does. There’s a moment in the book where, drawing on some research, you differentiate between a silent treatment employed punitively, to cause hurt, and a silent treatment employed to protect, more of a withdrawal. But to the person experiencing the silent treatment, it doesn’t really change the experience.
JV: My mom and I have talked about this, actually. I said to her, “you know, some people would call it emotional abuse . . .” She seemed surprised. For her, it’s not meant to be abusive.
I’ve read about the silent treatment being symptomatic of certain mental health disorders—especially when it’s inflicted repeatedly—but I’m hesitant to pathologize or apply diagnoses to anyone, least of all my mom, and she has never received a diagnosis. I think most of us get emotionally overwhelmed at some point in our lives, and how we react can depend on larger circumstances. She felt trapped living with us. To some extent, she was trapped. The financial limitations were real. She was trying to remove herself, to prevent herself from saying something hurtful to me. Except then she’d leave cruel letters for me to find—she used to do that to my dad, too. I didn’t know that until I found letters tucked in the liner of his wrench kit, which I describe in the book.
I try to remember that I’m fortunate; I grew up in a generation where therapy is the norm. Shortly after she moved in, a doctor suggested to my mom that she might see a therapist. After all, she’d retired from a job she’d had for twenty-some years, sold a house she’d lived in for more than fifty years, moved states. It was a ton of transition. But she shut him down right away, saying, “I’m not crazy!”
MS: As a reader, I wondered if your mother had ever been in therapy. But then the way you include her letters to you in which she writes about her childhood shows us that this is an adult who hasn’t processed much of the trauma she experienced in her own life.
JV: The way my mom operates is to shut out anything upsetting. A lot of people might say that’s really unhealthy, because, of course, the emotions come out in other ways. But if you’re never going to find resolution about something, maybe it is healthy, sometimes, to put it away. I don’t know. I’ve chosen to write memoirs about some very painful moments in my life. By the time I’m done writing a memoir, I’ve reflected so deeply that I’m ready to move on. Writing a memoir without retraumatizing oneself, it’s hard to do.
MS: Do you have strategies for that? If a student comes to you and asks, “Jeannie, how do I write about this painful thing without retraumatizing myself,” what are the strategies you’re suggesting to them?
JV: I tell them about James Pennebaker’s study on therapeutic writing. Therapeutic writing results from writing about feelings and events, not strictly one or the other. I’m teaching at a creative writing camp for high schoolers this week, and one student was writing about her mother’s death, and she mentioned to me that she really wanted to expand her writing, but wasn’t sure if she could do it. We talked about linking feelings to events, and how if writing ever got to be too difficult, she could step away, move onto something else.
Given my situation, I couldn’t step away. I had a deadline. And I did feel an intense urge to complete the book, to demonstrate my love for my mom in the same way I did for my dad. My editor at Tin House, Masie Cochran, generously extended the deadline several times. But I couldn’t keep doing that. I actually believed this book would be easier to write than my other two. I figured: My mom’s right here, she’s living with me, I can interview her. But each of the books have been difficult in their own way. Writing this one gave me a greater degree of empathy for the work a lot of my undergraduates are doing; a lot of them are still living at home or have been until quite recently. Until writing this book, I didn’t fully understand how hard it is to write about someone you’re in a conflict with while you’re living with them.
MS: Tell me a little more about your editorial relationship with Masie.
JV: I hope she’ll always be my editor. It’s been wonderful, as a memoirist, to work with the same editor across my books. She’ll sometimes remember something from my life or an earlier piece of writing that I don’t remember. I’ll be working with her, and Tin House, again on the next book. I told myself I wouldn’t write another book on proposal. I told myself I wouldn’t write another memoir. But here I am.
MS: Can you share anything about the new book?
JV: I’ve been thinking about the shame I felt when I was in my late twenties and on Social Security Disability. I was in and out of psych wards, dealing with hallucinations and mania. I don’t think I could’ve gotten past that point had I not had disability payments and Medicaid; those were crucial to my receiving care. And now, watching so much of that funding be cut, is horrifying. Before I was on Social Security Disability, I remember navigating the public health system, how hard that was. I would go to these free public health clinics in New York. I’d arrive at 7 a.m. and maybe, by 5 p.m., maybe I’d get to see a doctor. I had a job in publishing that paid poorly—I realize that’s redundant—and for a while, had no health insurance attached to it. I’m a relatively smart person, and it was still hard for me. I kept my diagnosis a secret for a long time. So, that’s the subject matter. Shame is really generative for me. [Laughs]
MS: I can’t wait to read that book. But back to A Silent Treatment! So, you knew you wanted to write a book for your mother, but when did the silent treatments become its subject matter?
JV: I had just published the second book, and thought: Okay, I have to write a book for my mom next, but what about that feels impossible or shameful? During her silent treatments, there was frustration, and anger, but also love. And empathy. The silent treatment, it seemed to me, could hold all that complex emotion, and that’s what I’m most interested in depicting on the page.
It’s funny—I told my mom about it, when I first had the idea, before the book went under contract. And I thought maybe it would end the silent treatments. That’s not why I had proposed the book, but I thought, Oh, okay, she knows I’m writing about it now. Surely this will end. Nope. It was fascinating to me.
MS: She was engaging in the silent treatments knowing that you’d be recording the experiences and putting them into a book? It’s almost like she wanted you to have enough material!
JV: At one point, I wondered if she thought I was taking too long to get the thing done and was trying to help me out! [Laughs] It wasn’t that.
MS: Even though your mom’s withdrawing is largely born from a desire to avoid hurting you, each silent treatment is brought on by a moment where she feels slighted by you, even if she realizes later the perceived slights are unintentional. But you so successfully make her three-dimensional, and so I can hold empathy for you and also for her.
JV: I was seeing a lot of literature on people who cut their parents off, and I understand that in some contexts. But I sensed my mom was in pain. For her, the silent treatment was self-preservation. And writing the book became a form of self-preservation for me. I could remove myself from the situation—not always, but just enough—and gain some distance on what was happening. I realized, okay, it feels like my mom is doing this to me, but she’s kind of doing it for herself.
MS: It seems like you did a lot of research into silent treatments. I’m curious to know what that research looked like, and what didn’t make it onto the page.
JV: I’m a fan of diegetic sound in movies—when the characters are hearing a sound within the story that the audience hears. I wanted to communicate the research in a diegetic way. I didn’t want to drop it in as if I were an expert. So I talked to the Google Home Mini that Chris installed, which felt reflective of my interior state, of my anxiety. Asking it for advice became a way to transform research into scene. A lot of research about solitary confinement didn’t make its way in. I didn’t want to conflate my experience with experiences of such extreme punitive silence. You know, I really didn’t like the Google Home Mini when Chris first installed it. But it turned out to be a useful writing tool.
MS: In each of your books, it’s as though you find exactly the necessary container or device to deliver the story. What’s your secret? How much of that innovative structure exists in early drafts versus shaping that happens later on in revision?
JV: I often write by collage; I rarely write in order. And sometimes what I find helpful at the start of a new project is to think I’m working in one form, that I know what the structural map will be, but then to allow myself to break out of it as the real form reveals itself. That doesn’t mean I know the form will change; I often genuinely believe I’ve landed on the right idea the first time. But then, as I write, it feels false. It’s really about whatever container or form is going to be most reflective of my thinking.
For a period, I thought I’d include something playful in the manuscript. I wrote a lot in the margins of academic articles, and I thought drawing on my marginalia could be formally interesting. It seemed reflective of a certain facet of my experience—how I’d pushed myself to the side during the silent treatments, to explore my mom’s experience. But ultimately, it felt like a gimmick.
For me, writing is often about how to get as close as possible to the voice in my head, and what form or forms will help or allow me to do that. There was another form—at one point, I’d shifted the manuscript entirely to be a direct address to my mom. But then that didn’t work. There was so much backstory the reader needed to know, and it wouldn’t be a story I’d explain to my mom. I couldn’t find a way to set up that backstory without it feeling staged.
It’s only after struggling with very different forms that I start to see a shape for something.
MS: In the book, a writer-friend notes how hard it is to sustain a manuscript written in the present tense. Was there ever a version of this memoir that saw you abandon the present tense? I find its use in your work so effective, by the way—it feels important that the reader be in the moment alongside you.
JV: There was a version in which I wasn’t using the present tense. But the silent treatment felt so suffocating that writing from within the experience, using the present tense, felt crucial. I wanted the reader to be in the experience with me.
What’s strange is that later, when I’m working on edits, I’m no longer living within the silent treatment, but I’m still trying to inhabit that headspace through revision. That was hard, and another reason it was important to get as much written as I could during the silences.
MS: Do you think you’re married to the memoir genre at this point?
JV: I feel the most anxiety about writing memoir, the most shame, and I find that internal conflict to be so generative. Maybe it’s also a delayed adolescent rebellion.
MS: But you’re excruciatingly fair to your subject matter in your work—you must have been the most mild-mannered teenager!
JV: I think I was a pretty easy-to-have kid. I once broke curfew because a study “party” ran late. [Laughs] Writing memoir, I feel like I’m rebelling against what’s expected of women: to be deferential, comforting, kind, quiet, and small.
I was so happy when Annie Ernaux won the Nobel. Here’s someone who has come at her life from so many different angles and who is writing “women’s stories” in a genre too often dismissed as navel-gazing.
MS: How, or how much, do you think about audience when you are writing new work?
JV: I’m writing to be read, but I’m not thinking so much, in the writing stage, about my “ideal reader.” I would not be able to write memoir if I was on social media, if I was hyperaware of who’s reading my books.
MS: Do you feel like you’ve answered any questions for yourself about what the silent treatments were? Is that part of your impulse to write the book?
JV: I wanted to understand why my mom kept doing it if she knew it was hurting me. Why does anyone keep doing something if they love you and they know it hurts you? The silent treatments were what my mom used to get through a difficult time in her life.
My other impulse: I couldn’t find a self-sustained nonfiction narrative about someone experiencing the silent treatment. I read Linda Boström Knausgård’s Welcome to America, a novel about a young protagonist who employs the silent treatment, but I couldn’t find a memoir about someone on the receiving end. That’s part of what motivates me to write—not that it has to be a brand-new idea, but whether there might be an unusual way of coming at a subject, whether I can offer something a little bit different from what exists already.
