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A Memoir
by Jeannie Vanasco
She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn't want to say something they'd regret.
What does she want to say now that she'd regret?
Jeannie Vanasco's mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie's home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother's childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and―in big and small ways―succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again.
From the acclaimed author of Things We Didn't Talk About When I was a Girl and The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco's A Silent Treatment is a searingly honest and lasting testament to the power of all things left unsaid.
"Vanasco's third memoir, focusing on her relationship with her mother, is her most potent yet…. Vanasco captures the hurtful confusion of the silent treatment so clearly…. A beautiful gift to all who have struggled to care for a loved one in the way they needed." ―Booklist (starred review)
"An elliptical, meditative portrayal of wounded women." —Kirkus Reviews
"While Vanasco's subject matter is familiar, her account is uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds. This is difficult to shake." —Publishers Weekly
"Spirited in form and pensive with its subject, A Silent Treatment confronts both the complexity of family and the quandary of capturing a family's shapeshifting and perplexing love, their truthful and devoted love, in the amber of memoir." ―Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"I look to Jeannie Vanasco to learn where memoir can go next, what psychic spaces it has yet to broach. In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco's response to her mom's silence unearths rage, loyalty, bottomless need, and probes the bounds of reality itself. It's impossible to read without questioning one's own primary relationships: How can we be enough to each other? How should we relate to those who love and harm us most deeply? What do we owe our parents and ourselves? Provocative, gripping, and dancing on the edge of madness, A Silent Treatment is a transformative thriller. I couldn't put it down, and it still hasn't let go of me." ―Jenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin
This information about A Silent Treatment was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of 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.
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