Interview: Jeannie Vanasco
Memoirist Jeannie Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment, will be released by Tin House on September 9. Jeannie’s mother starts using the silent treatment shortly after she moves into a renovated apartment in Jeannie’s home. Over the five years she’s lived with Jeannie, the silences have totaled around eighteen months, the longest lasting about six.
The structure of A Silent Treatment begins by tracking days within a silent period, though Jeannie doesn’t yet know how long it will last. Eventually, the structure breaks under the emotional weight of what’s unfolding, but not before offering a sharp snapshot of her thoughts and experiences within that silence.
Through lists, Google queries, conversations with her partner, and research into the silent treatment, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation that come with silence as punishment.
Jeannie was gracious enough to speak with me in Baltimore, about the evolution of the book’s structure and the formal decisions she made throughout its development.
—Matti Ben-Lev
Matti Ben-Lev: One of the most striking aspects of your memoir is how the silence between you and your mother contrasts so sharply with the cognitive noise in your head. When did you realize that the structure—tracking days in a specific silence—and the form—using lists, Google searches, and so on—could help you convey that internal experience?
Jeannie Vanasco: Tracking days, that structure arrived early. I’d already been doing it for years. In my notebooks, I’d make a hash mark for each passing day of silence. If the silent treatment lasted weeks, I’d usually give up tallying. My craft decisions often emerge from life patterns. Take lists. I make lists every day. I love them. Lists can be misused, of course, growing so comprehensive as to be self-defeating. But in general, they help me focus and organize my life. And as a literary device, lists can reveal obsessive thinking and resist linear time. They can add lyricism without purpling the prose. They can feel both spontaneous and natural. It’s such a democratic form. Almost anybody can make a list. And I really like the idea of somebody reading my book and thinking, Huh. I could write a book like that. I want my writing to seem effortless, even as I acknowledge its artifice.
Now the Google searches—those came later. I remember I was sitting in my living room, stuck in another silence, already having lost track of days. I felt desperate—really desperate. I almost Venmo’d my advance to my editor without explanation. I couldn’t think straight. I felt too afraid to walk from my house to my car. The possibility that I might see my mom in our yard and she’d pretend not to see me, I couldn’t handle that again. So I asked my Google Home Mini how to tolerate the silent treatment. Until then, I’d treated the Mini strictly as a light dimmer. I didn’t expect much. But the Mini surprised me, citing some peer-reviewed research that I’d already done, and I realized: Oh, this is how I can blend in research and externalize my internal conflict in a way that feels natural. I also liked how the Mini regularly said, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” I appreciated the modesty.
MBL: Similarly, another element you use throughout the book is parentheticals that insert your mother’s statements—some loving, some painful—that cut through the narrative. For example: “She’s angry at me because I’ve spent more time writing about her than I’ve spent with her. (Mom: I was never too busy when you needed something.)” Can you talk about your decision to use parentheticals in this way, and how you thought about their emotional and structural impact on the reader?
JV: I remember asking myself, How can I make the prose feel more alive? It seemed so dull. It lacked texture. So I did what I usually do when I feel stuck: I stared into the fridge. I suddenly remembered how my mom would describe her childhood home, how filthy it was, with roaches crawling out of the fridge, and I thought, Oh. I’m hearing my mom right now. So why not just put that into the book? The parentheticals became a way of letting her talk to me, interrupt me, chastise me, praise me. I chose whatever dialogue came to mind. Once I had the idea to use parentheticals, I went to my partner, Chris, and said, “I got it! It’s parentheticals! It’s stuff my mom said and wrote. I’m just going to insert it right into the narrative.” He had no idea what I was talking about and said, “Sounds great.” Then I went off and started working them into my manuscript. I love unexpected juxtapositions—when a formal choice cuts in and gives the prose some friction and electricity.
MBL: It’s so interesting, because we think of silence as nothing; as absence, subtraction. But the mind fills silence with noise. I think the way you used form and structure, especially the parentheticals, gives the reader a sense of what those silences feel like, without having to explain them. You’ve also spoken about trying different structural approaches that didn’t quite work. You already mentioned the use of lists, which I found incredibly impactful as a reader. I’m thinking, for instance, of the list titled “Signs she’s avoiding or preparing to avoid me.” That leads me to my next question about structure: Was there a structure you tried that didn’t work, and how did you pivot from it?
JV: Here are some structures I remember trying: epistolary, diary, marginalia, prose poetry. The marginalia would’ve been a nightmare for anyone recording the audiobook, but I thought passages in the margins would look interesting. I also tried structuring the narrative around shifting points of view. And I’m just now remembering a draft containing large portions of white space. Some pages would include maybe a sentence or two. Others, a few paragraphs. But that all seemed gimmicky, a little too clever, for this book. So I tried to get out of my own way. I started paying more attention to my everyday life. Here’s some advice I tell students, which is advice I regularly need to tell myself: Whenever you want to say, “I can’t write,” reframe it as “I can’t notice.” Writing is hard. Noticing, though? Noticing is more manageable. And noticing the significance in smaller, everyday moments revealed new possibilities for organizing the book.
More generally, though, I do find it helpful to choose a form early on so I at least have something I’m working with or against. I remain open to the possibility it will change. Karen Green’s Bough Down was an early influence. But I wanted a looser style, one that felt almost artless and spontaneous. I greatly admire all of Sheila Heti’s books. How Should a Person Be is a touchstone. It has a studied carelessness in style, a deliberate nonchalance, that I admire—what the Italians call sprezzatura.
MBL: I’m glad you brought up your influences. While reading, I was really curious about any specific influences, literary or otherwise, that shaped your approach to the structure and form in A Silent Treatment.
JV: There are so many books I’ve read that informed this project; it’s hard to highlight only a few of them. Annie Ernaux for her list-making, definitely. Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra for how she casually introduces research with humble openings to her sentences, like, “The internet is full of stories about…” and, “for no particular reason, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand….” Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever for how she handles narrative pacing through fragmentation.
MBL: Around the middle of the memoir, the structure of using chapter titles like “The Second or Third Day” and “3:30 AM” starts to break apart, giving way to titled chapters, like “The Gray in Everything” and “I Don’t Need to See a Therapist.” It felt like a formal rupture that mirrored something emotional, as if the structure just couldn’t contain the experience anymore. Was this shift a conscious narrative choice in revision, or something that emerged organically as the emotional arc shifted?
JV: I forget exactly when the shift happened, but it was very much a conscious choice. I wanted that movement—bringing my mom’s language out of the parentheticals and making them chapter titles—because it’s a place in the story where she has so much power over me. That’s how it felt anyway, and I thought the dynamic around power was interesting. I wanted to give that power to her in the narrative, because that was what it felt like in real life.
MBL: When the structure broke, it felt highly effective for me, as a reader. The earlier sections gave me a strong sense of what silence feels like, how your mind works inside it. And then the shift was as if you’re saying, Okay, now we’re going to tell the full story. That’s how it landed for me.
JV: It’s so hard to maintain a linear narrative. Tracking the days—and then, and then, and then—gets tedious. I needed to break it open to find a new way of organizing my experience. And that meant using her language to structure how I understood my days passing. I’m glad it felt effective for you.
MBL: I love how, even though the subject matter could have been deeply solemn, you still bring in so much humor. I’m thinking of a few specific scenes, like where you’re reading poetry about hens on egg cartons, called “henkus.” Or arguing with your mom about whether Nicolas Cage is attractive. There were moments I laughed out loud, and I appreciated that levity in a narrative that’s so fraught. At what point in your writing process did you decide to bring in humor?
JV: I wanted some lightness because I can’t think of a more painful time in my life. I began to question whether she actually loved me. I cried almost every day. But I didn’t want the book to just be sad, sad, sad. Even though it was a painful time, I could still see the absurdity in our situation. Like my mom putting a bunch of her shoes in the trash the day after trash day. I knew she wanted me to see that she was throwing them out. Or her leaving a moving checklist for me to find. All it said: Call Movers and Pack. Paying attention to the absurdity helped me break out of the “this is so tragic, this is so unfair” mindset.
MBL: What did you discover that surprised you as you worked on this book?
JV: That I could reach a point so low that I would utter the words: I hate books. The writing was going so badly that Chris came into my office one day, and I was just lying on my back, crying. He asked, “What’s wrong?” And I said, “I hate books. I want to get rid of all the books in the house.”
I was surprised by how much harder this book was than I expected. I knew it would be difficult from my other books. It was different from writing about my dad. He was dead. But writing about my mom while living in the same house as her and while she was mad at me? And knowing that she would read it? That was something else entirely.
It gave me a new level of empathy for students who are writing about family members while they still live with them. I don’t think I had fully appreciated how hard it must be for my students when they are writing about family. I mean, I knew it was hard. But I hadn’t really considered what it meant to be in the same physical space as the person you’re writing about.
Writing memoir can be such a weird experience: I felt so much pain during most of the process, but now I can’t access that pain. I know I felt it. But I can’t feel it now. So here I am, believing my next book will be a breeze. I’m surprised I’m going to try this genre all over again.
MATTI BEN-LEV is a queer nonfiction writer and poet currently based in Northern Virginia. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, CRAFT, X-R-A-Y, Ekphrastic Review, Jake, Libre, and elsewhere. He is the assistant nonfiction editor for the intersectional feminist lit mag, So To Speak, and an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction from George Mason University. Find him on Twitter @MattiBL6.
JEANNIE VANASCO is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, will be published by Tin House in September 2025. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
