Jeannie Vanasco
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs A Silent Treatment (forthcoming 2025), Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (2019), and The Glass Eye (2017). Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl—a New York Times Editors' Choice, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a TIME magazine Must-Read Book of the Year, and the 2020 winner of the Ohioana Book Award in nonfiction—was published by Tin House in 2019. In its starred review, Kirkus called Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl "an extraordinarily brave work of self- and cultural reflection." The Glass Eye—honored as an Indie Next selection and an Indies Introduce selection by the American Booksellers Association as well as a Discover Great New Writers selection by Barnes and Noble—was published by Tin House in 2017. The New York Times Book Review praised The Glass Eye as "hypnotic . . . a haunting exploration of perception, memory, and the complexities of grief." Her third book, A Silent Treatment, will be published in September 2025 by Tin House. Vanasco's writing has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she now lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
3 Books Written
The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died.After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in esc
Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. She startles awake, saying his name. 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. "It's the least I can do," he
“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 She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn't want to say