Release Dates: October 1, 2019 (US); October 3, 2019 (UK)
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 says.
Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own. She examines the language surrounding sexual assault and pushes against its confines, contributing to and deepening the #MeToo discussion.
Exacting and courageous, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships—a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions and interrogate our biases. Jeannie Vanasco examines and dismantles long-held myths of victimhood, discovering grace and power in this genre-bending investigation into the trauma of sexual violence.
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 says.
Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own. She examines the language surrounding sexual assault and pushes against its confines, contributing to and deepening the #MeToo discussion.
Exacting and courageous, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships—a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions and interrogate our biases. Jeannie Vanasco examines and dismantles long-held myths of victimhood, discovering grace and power in this genre-bending investigation into the trauma of sexual violence.
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER
US readers: from your local bookstore--or online at IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Amazon.
UK readers: from your local bookstore--or online at Foyles, Waterstones, Blackwell's, and Amazon.
You can get an advance copy by subscribing to The Rumpus Book Club.
UK readers: from your local bookstore--or online at Foyles, Waterstones, Blackwell's, and Amazon.
You can get an advance copy by subscribing to The Rumpus Book Club.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“I read Jeannie Vanasco’s forthcoming memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, immediately upon receiving it, and although I can’t stop thinking about it, I’ve struggled to find words for a work that demands pages in response. Vanasco pieces together an account of her sexual assault—rape, she often amends—by a close friend when she was nineteen. Recalling the incident fourteen years later, she decides to contact her rapist and interview him about the assault and the dissolution of their friendship. The transcripts are brave and compelling, but it’s Vanasco’s reflections throughout that I found most striking . . . Jeannie Vanasco muddles through the silt of her thoughts to create a language for something we don’t talk about.” – Nikki Shaner-Bradford, The Paris Review
“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
“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, Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“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
“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
“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 and Starvation Mode
“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 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
“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
“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 re-shaping 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
“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
“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
“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
“My copy of this book is underlined, with exclamation points in the margins. My dog-eared pages are dog-eared in both recognition and awe and what Jeannie Vanasco has created. In exposing the difficult parts of her past, she’s written a book that is an act of bravery while also being a reckoning. Her exploration of her own rape shows how omnipresent sexual assault is for women, but she is unflinching and honest in showing how women have been trained to forgive and blame ourselves, and how embarrassing it is to hear yourself make excuses for those who have caused us the most personal pain. This is a book of nuance, one that in clean, careful writing circles and loops in order to find the linear text. In giving her rapist his own voice, Vanasco makes Mark more human, but in many ways he becomes more monstrous because of how banal and almost unconsciously manipulative he’s revealed to be in trying to control the narrative. In his decency, he’s more of a villain. This book is important and timely, but it’s also deeply personal and affecting.” – Jamie Thomas, Women and Children First Bookstore
“Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is more than a memoir of sexual assault, more than an exploration of guilt or how good people can do bad things: it is a creative experiment to show exactly how women reckon with these experiences. We talk with our friends and coworkers, we analyze, we question, and propose. We regret. This author does not want this to be read as advice or as a universal story. But I identified with so many of her thoughts and feelings, even her approach. How can you protect yourself against this happening again if you don’t know why it happened?” – Johanna Albrecht, McIntyre’s Books
“Jeannie and Mark were childhood friends who helped each other through hardships of adolescence and family tragedy. As they set off for college it seemed as if that friendship would flourish into adulthood. But on a night like any other, at a party that would have been happening on any campus, Mark raped Jeannie. Fourteen years later she decides to reach out to Mark in order to talk about the rape, maybe understand why good people do bad things and in doing so both confront how it has affected their lives and relationships. What you hold in your hand are transcripts of conversations between the two of them, interspersed with discussions held with friends and colleagues of Jeannie, including her partner. This book is as brave and important as they come. It concerns the right here and now while simultaneously serving as a primer for future generations. Jeannie Vanasco has initiated a different and vitally important dialogue concerning gender politics and we as individuals need to step up and join in, if only to educate those that will follow in our footsteps.” – Javier Ramirez, The Book Table
“Jeannie Vanasco tells us the story of her confronting the person who sexual assaulted her back in her college days. It was person she trusted, a person she counted on as a friend. It wouldn’t be the last time. Yet, Jeannie does an amazing and courageous feat of contacting him and engaging him in a meaningful dialogue. She examines her own feeling around the assault and she sees with more clarity as time has given her space. She’s not giving him a voice but making him own up to what he did and finding out what his motives were. He destroyed more than trust and more than friendship. Jeannie’s writing grabbed me as few memoirs ever do, and that brings such strength to her story.” – Jason Kennedy, Boswell Book Company
“Things We Didn’t Talk When I Was a Girl is unlike any book that I’ve read, and I’d wager that it’s unlike any book that you’ve read either. This memoir is a project in motion, morphing and reconstructing itself as Vanasco works through the telling of her own narrative, the reader as witness. Vanasco’s project—to write a memoir about her rape that deliberately brings in the literal voice of her rapist—is something that no one could ever ask of a victim, but offers a perspective so brave and invaluable that I wish that I could personally thank Vanasco for this book. Vanasco’s approach to telling the story of her rape allows for an exploration of trauma and its aftermath in real-time. We are witness to Vanasco thinking through her own internalized misogyny, the ways both minute and large in which rape culture has persuaded and distorted the thinking of both rapist and victim, a conversation between two experiences of an event that adds such a deep level of nuance to this conversation that nearly every page of my copy is dog-eared.” – Kelsey O'Rourke, Literati Bookstore
“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
“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, Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“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
“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
“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 and Starvation Mode
“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 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
“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
“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 re-shaping 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
“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
“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
“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
“My copy of this book is underlined, with exclamation points in the margins. My dog-eared pages are dog-eared in both recognition and awe and what Jeannie Vanasco has created. In exposing the difficult parts of her past, she’s written a book that is an act of bravery while also being a reckoning. Her exploration of her own rape shows how omnipresent sexual assault is for women, but she is unflinching and honest in showing how women have been trained to forgive and blame ourselves, and how embarrassing it is to hear yourself make excuses for those who have caused us the most personal pain. This is a book of nuance, one that in clean, careful writing circles and loops in order to find the linear text. In giving her rapist his own voice, Vanasco makes Mark more human, but in many ways he becomes more monstrous because of how banal and almost unconsciously manipulative he’s revealed to be in trying to control the narrative. In his decency, he’s more of a villain. This book is important and timely, but it’s also deeply personal and affecting.” – Jamie Thomas, Women and Children First Bookstore
“Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is more than a memoir of sexual assault, more than an exploration of guilt or how good people can do bad things: it is a creative experiment to show exactly how women reckon with these experiences. We talk with our friends and coworkers, we analyze, we question, and propose. We regret. This author does not want this to be read as advice or as a universal story. But I identified with so many of her thoughts and feelings, even her approach. How can you protect yourself against this happening again if you don’t know why it happened?” – Johanna Albrecht, McIntyre’s Books
“Jeannie and Mark were childhood friends who helped each other through hardships of adolescence and family tragedy. As they set off for college it seemed as if that friendship would flourish into adulthood. But on a night like any other, at a party that would have been happening on any campus, Mark raped Jeannie. Fourteen years later she decides to reach out to Mark in order to talk about the rape, maybe understand why good people do bad things and in doing so both confront how it has affected their lives and relationships. What you hold in your hand are transcripts of conversations between the two of them, interspersed with discussions held with friends and colleagues of Jeannie, including her partner. This book is as brave and important as they come. It concerns the right here and now while simultaneously serving as a primer for future generations. Jeannie Vanasco has initiated a different and vitally important dialogue concerning gender politics and we as individuals need to step up and join in, if only to educate those that will follow in our footsteps.” – Javier Ramirez, The Book Table
“Jeannie Vanasco tells us the story of her confronting the person who sexual assaulted her back in her college days. It was person she trusted, a person she counted on as a friend. It wouldn’t be the last time. Yet, Jeannie does an amazing and courageous feat of contacting him and engaging him in a meaningful dialogue. She examines her own feeling around the assault and she sees with more clarity as time has given her space. She’s not giving him a voice but making him own up to what he did and finding out what his motives were. He destroyed more than trust and more than friendship. Jeannie’s writing grabbed me as few memoirs ever do, and that brings such strength to her story.” – Jason Kennedy, Boswell Book Company
“Things We Didn’t Talk When I Was a Girl is unlike any book that I’ve read, and I’d wager that it’s unlike any book that you’ve read either. This memoir is a project in motion, morphing and reconstructing itself as Vanasco works through the telling of her own narrative, the reader as witness. Vanasco’s project—to write a memoir about her rape that deliberately brings in the literal voice of her rapist—is something that no one could ever ask of a victim, but offers a perspective so brave and invaluable that I wish that I could personally thank Vanasco for this book. Vanasco’s approach to telling the story of her rape allows for an exploration of trauma and its aftermath in real-time. We are witness to Vanasco thinking through her own internalized misogyny, the ways both minute and large in which rape culture has persuaded and distorted the thinking of both rapist and victim, a conversation between two experiences of an event that adds such a deep level of nuance to this conversation that nearly every page of my copy is dog-eared.” – Kelsey O'Rourke, Literati Bookstore