by Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (retail) (epub)
HIM: No, it’s fine. The general thrust of this, it’s possibly sociopathic, the extent to which you are compartmentalizing things is not alien to me. [We laugh.]
ME: Entering writer mode, that’s given me some control and allowed me to not think about a lot of this.
HIM: I mean, it’s going to be easier for me than it is for you on this subject.
ME: I still haven’t told my mom what I’m working on.
HIM: That’s got to be tough too. To not know how to talk about it with her.
ME: Does some part of you actually want your parents to know what happened?
HIM: I mean, yeah, I don’t think you’re wrong there in that. There is a part of me that wishes I could have that conversation in a way that isn’t selfish and destructive. But I don’t see any good coming from it.
ME: That it would just hurt them.
HIM: Yeah.
ME: Well, if you ever decide to tell them, perhaps the book is an easier way to do that.
HIM: Yeah, I’ll just buy my mom a copy of the book for Christmas. [We laugh.] Look what Jeannie wrote. [We laugh.]
ME: I was thinking about how you mentioned that your dad was very conscientiously ethical and always cares about doing the right thing by people, and I was wondering if that was motivating you with this project.
HIM: Yeah, I mean there would be a degree of contempt involved that I’m not eager to pursue.
ME: What do you mean?
HIM: I think I would basically lose my dad’s respect.
ME: Oh, if you didn’t participate.
HIM: No, if I told him what, what had happened.
ME: Oh, okay. What I mean is, what you’re doing, talking with me, it’s the ethical thing to do.
HIM: I don’t think that would be the aspect of that conversation that would be most relevant to him.
ME: One more question. Do you think you’ll date? Or is that not of interest to you?
HIM: It’s not that it’s not of interest to me, but the longer it’s gone on where—how do you go out on a first date and say, I’m a thirty-four-year-old man and I’ve never—I’ve never done this or that or the other thing? So, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. And then, you know, I don’t know if you can say it’s depression-related or fatigue-related, but I get home from work and I don’t want to be around people.
ME: How have you been doing?
HIM: I’m not depressed or anything. I just legitimately had—I don’t know if it was a cold or allergies or some hellish combination of both, but I was sick. I wasn’t ducking your call last weekend. I know how it looks. I legitimately had a migraine and then a fever since yesterday.
ME: I didn’t think you were lying about being sick. But I guess I was concerned that you were maybe depressed. And there I go. I slip into this, How are you feeling? I don’t want to upset you. Actually, I’ve been really annoyed by myself in looking over the transcripts—because, within, I think within a page I said: I hope you know I don’t hate you, I hope you know I think you’re a really good person, I hope this is somewhat helpful to you. [We laugh.] It’s absurd. It’s embarrassing. I didn’t know I did it that much. There’s part of me that would love to remove all that. [We laugh.]
HIM: It’s endearing in a way. You could do a deep dive on why that is your default reaction.
ME: It’s absurd how much I do it.
HIM: Spending half of the conversation propping me up.
ME: Yeah! [We laugh.] I praise you a lot. You’re kind of good at everything: things like that. What’s weird, though, I was feeling when we last met, there was a way in which, because we were friends, I wondered, Do I hug him?
HIM: The whole thing is, I’m going to reuse the word, fraught.
ME: It’s been an interesting experience trying to do this. So thank you. It’s weird to thank you for this, but thank you.
HIM: You realize you’re doing it again, right?
ME: I know. [We laugh.]
HIM: The nice thing is, you get to decide what goes in the book.
ME: I do.
THIS IS WHERE WE ARE
Last night, I had another nightmare about Mark. So much for resolution.
Today is the first day of class. After I briefly review the syllabus with my students, one of them asks me, If someone writes about being raped but doesn’t want it reported, then she shouldn’t say that it happened on campus or that another student committed the rape. Is that right?
This is where we are.
I return to Hannah’s essay, to the sentence I suggested cutting: A grown woman, now—or growing still—who has survived so much and still has so much to survive.
I regret my suggestion. I want that line.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Immeasurable love and thanks to my mom (I’m still searching for a support group for parents of memoirists) and Chris.
Enormous thanks to Kate Neuman, Jung Yun, Molly Englund, Leigh-Anne Goins, Anita Anburajan, Rebekah Frumkin, Meaghan Winter, Tom Peter, Stephanie Palumbo, and Adam Germinsky for talking me through this project. Thanks to Lauren Reding and Thomas Bechtold for suggesting takeout and liquor when I didn’t want to talk about it. And love and thanks to Joan and Terry Shannon for their encouragement (and the mood ring).
I wanted to keep working with my editor, Masie Cochran, after I finished writing The Glass Eye, and this book gave me a reason. She’s brilliant—and if she suggests a more modest description, I will, for the first time, reject one of her edits.
Tremendous gratitude to the amazing Tin House team, especially Craig Popelars, Win McCormack, Nanci McCloskey, Molly Templeton, Elizabeth DeMeo, Diane Chonette, Yashwina Canter, Sabrina Wise, Morgan LaRocca, Tony Perez, Lance Cleland, Anne Horowitz, and Allison Dubinsky.
Thanks also to everyone at Duckworth Books, especially Matt Casbourne and Kate Leaver.
And thanks to my agent, Ethan Bassoff.
Thanks as well to the editors of one of my favorite literary magazines, the Arkansas International, where pieces of this memoir first appeared—before I knew it would become a book.
And thanks to the librarians and independent booksellers who supported this memoir early on. I especially want to thank Jamie Thomas, Sarah Malley, Madeleine Watts, Johanna Albrecht, Javier Ramirez, Kelsey O’Rourke, and Jason Kennedy.
Thanks to my creative writing colleagues at Towson University—Leslie Harrison, Geoff Becker, and Michael Downs—as well as the English department chair, Chris Cain, and the College of Liberal Arts dean, Terry Cooney. A TU faculty grant funded my research and travel related to this book.
TU has been a wonderful place to teach—in no small part because of its students. I wrote this memoir for a lot of reasons, but mostly I wrote it for them.
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.
“I kept putting the book down to make sure I was still breathing, to interrogate what had happened to my heart. Vanasco is a brilliant craftsperson—blurring the lines between memoir, investigation, and interview, she confronts her years-ago rapist and dives headlong into the complexity of forgiveness and redemption, what was taken and what can be rebuilt. Our cultural discussion of rape is so deeply marked by silence. Enough with the silence. Enough. Vanasco has given us a bridge.”
—MEGAN STIELSTRA, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
“Carrying memories of rape sometimes feels like working, day in and day out, on untangling a hopelessly knotted chain. In this book, Jeannie Vanasco works through the gnarl until its terrifying expanse is stretched out before us. There is so much power in these pages: in the vulnerability she shows in seeking answers, in the deftness with which she builds a narrative where there was once only a mess of questions and silence.”
—ELISSA WASHUTA, My Body Is a Book
of Rules
“Vanasco performs a literary feminist miracle for all women who have been denied basic rights, been suspect, been labeled, been unbelievable after their rapes and assaults, and shines our collective shame outwardly, to ask a man why a choice to abuse is made. Vanasco is powerful in her vulnerability, gutting in her candor and breaks the fourth wall, artfully, to interrogate the truth of toxic masculinity. Every male who has taken part in abuses of power, from politicians to teenage boys, will see a mirror and wince, knowingly. A modern classic of nonfiction.”
—SOPHIA SHALMIYEV, Mother Winter
“Jeannie Vanasco has written exactly the book we need right now: an investigative memoir that scrutinizes the nuances of sexual assault, the false binaries and myths too long used to determine who is and isn’t capable of rape, and the insidious ways that we are socialized to protect our predators. A book that dissects the complexities of sexual assault need not also be a pleasure to read, but this book is. Vanasco’s honesty and willingness to interrogate both her rapist and herself enthralled me from the opening paragraphs. I wish everyone in this country would read it.”
—MELISSA FEBOS, Abandon Me
“Jeannie Vanasco continues to shine a light into the unreconciled depths of the past. Fourteen years after being raped by her childhood best friend, the author sets out to track him down, to hear his voice, to salvage something of what was lost that fateful night. 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?”
—TIM TARANTO, Ars Botanica
“In Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco has done something extraordinary. She explodes rape culture at the level of language, shows us how we are trapped and how we might make ourselves free. This is a brilliant book, an astonishingly fierce inquiry into the places language won’t go. It charts a path through the things we don’t have words for yet and the things we don’t know how to say.”
—EMILY GEMINDER, Dead Girls
“With matchless grit and a vibrant mind, Jeannie Vanasco performs an absorbing autopsy on a friendship that ended in rape. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl cuts through the silence of deep betrayal, gives contour to the aching space between forgiveness and absolution, and offers a living testament to the endless wreckage of sexual assault.”
—AMY JO BURNS, Cinderland
“Jeannie Vanasco’s narration of her experience is nuanced and complex. In sharp, purposeful prose, she explores what is demanded of victims—that we live in a world where the consequences for victims and perpetrators are grotesquely reversed, where the identities and reputations of perpetrators are protected, sometimes by the very people they’ve harmed. Unflinching in her honesty and approach, Vanasco interrogates boundaries further shaping and reshaping memoir as we know it. Wickedly clever and powerful, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a necessary book.”
—KRYSTAL A. SITAL, Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad
“Jeannie Vanasco’s rigorous and nuanced investigation of crime, trauma, secrets, and the telling of our stories applies an agile mind and penetrating insight to the enforced silences that surround rape and its aftermath. Vanasco incinerates shame and beckons us into the holy smoke. Searching, searing, and sacred, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is the cleansing flame we have been waiting for.”
—LISA LOCASCIO, Open Me
“In this brave and urgent memoir, Jeannie Vanasco asks if it’s possible for a good person to commit a terrible act. In a moment where morality is so often rendered in flat, simplistic terms, Vanasco refuses to take the easy way out: she is generous yet exacting, fair yet relentless. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a searching, brilliant book and Jeannie Vanasco is a formidable talent. We are lucky to have her.”
—DANIEL GUMBINER, The Boatbuilder
“Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a work of astounding control, able to reach places I never expected a book to reach. It is both a conversation between Jeannie Vanasco and her former friend, Mark, and a conversation between Vanasco and herself—about paradox and betrayal, owing and being owed, and the complex terminology of sexual violence. Vanasco writes not just about whether it is possible to be ‘a good person who commits a terrible act,’ but about having to consider the weight of the word good. It has left me transfixed.”
—THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ, The Book of Resting Places
“By unflinchingly inhabiting complex emotions and uncomfortable positions, Jeannie Vanasco has given us the rare book that lays bare to readers just how much the writing of it is itself a journey. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl explores the common experience of rape with uncommon nuance and intense tenderness. In the process, the book also unexpectedly becomes a warm celebration of female friendship. Vanasco reveals the boundaries of your thoughts and feelings. Then she takes you beyond.”
—YZ CHIN, Though I Get Home
“Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is the embodiment of what a book-length essay should be—personal, vulnerable and honest, it follows a spiraling and ever deepening path of questions—questions about the way women and girls are supposed to respond to the trauma of rape, questions about the power of language to both explain and evolve what we believe about sexual assault, and questions about who rapists are and how they become those who enact sexual violence. Vanasco, miraculously, writes with both tenderness and horror of the memories she has of her closest friend turned rapist, and spares no dark corner within herself as she questions what that tenderness means about who she is, her assimilation into a culture that trains girls and women to blame themselves for both the assault and its aftermath, and what the cost of that assimilation is personally and throughout the wider society. Her wildly courageous decision to confront her rapist, question him, meet with him, and then invite her readers into her processing of that experience is, frankly, stunning. This is a book I’ll teach and reread well into the future, grateful that fewer and fewer girls will grow up without the opportunity to talk about these things.”
—ANGELA PELSTER, Limber
Copyright © 2019 Jeannie Vanasco
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 9781947793453 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781947793545 (ebook)
First US Edition 2019
Interior design by Diane Chonette
www.tinhouse.com
