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A Silent Treatment: A Memoir
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.
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.
Book Details
- Publisher: Tin House
- Publish Date: Sep 9th, 2025
- Pages: 304
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.80in - 5.30in - 1.10in - 0.90lb
- EAN: 9781963108453
- Categories: • Memoirs• Women
About the Author
Vanasco, Jeannie: - 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.
Praise for this book
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
With each new book Jeannie Vanasco completely reimagines what life writing can be. I am in awe of what she has done in A Silent Treatment, which is such a nuanced and open-hearted exploration of how we tell our mothers' stories, and what it's like to be a daughter of complicated women. This is a book charged with the authority of love, a tribute without romanticization, and an indelible portrait of what can emerge from the terrifying blank space of silence.--Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea
Jeannie Vanasco's A Silent Treatment deftly explores the targeted omission of speech with both insight and compassion. In bursts of poignant, staccato prose, Vanasco lyrically traces the particular and cumulative harm of withholding. A Silent Treatment is a ground-breaking, complex, and moving contribution to the genre, demonstrating her unique ability to write about and through the moral complexity of our deepest intimacies.--Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name
In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco writes from within her mother's punitive silence, an ever-present, pressurized force that radiates through the floorboards from her apartment below. Vanasco's precise language chisels into the quiet white space of each page, conveying her urgent need to communicate while avoiding harm. In this way, the two women are mirrors to each other, caught in that age-old question: how best to love those closest to us. This is a book I'll turn to again and again, and I'm grateful Vanasco has written it.--Sarah Perry, author of After the Eclipse
Articulating the pain of a removal, something that is not there, is massively challenging, and yet Jeannie Vanasco has done it--filled the scarcity of silence with an abundance of thrilling, exacting prose. A Silent Treatment is a gift for those of us who've been punished by the particular cruelty of silence and an opportunity for those who use this method of punishment to understand their frailty. A salve and a method of healing, this memoir will help countless people.--Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland
Vanasco is without question one of the most versatile and inventive memoirists working today, and her latest tells a powerful story of the gulfs that separate people and the love that bridges them.-- "WBEZ Chicago"
Enthralling.... uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds.-- "Publishers Weekly"
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"