Available in bookstores.
Excerpts available through TinHouse.com, Lenny, Lit Hub, and Longreads.
Interviews with Bustle, Fanzine, TinHouse.com, Bookselling This Week, Columbia Journal,
the Rumpus, The Writer, and Arkansas International.
Indie Next Pick
Indies Introduce Pick
Powell's "Picks of the Season 2017"
Ploughshares "Must Reads for Fall"
NYLON's "25 New Books to Read This Fall"
Publishers Weekly "Big Indie Books of Fall 2017"
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick
Literary Hub's "Best Reviewed Books of the Week"
Rumpus's "What to Read When It's Mental Health Month"
Entertainment Weekly's "15 Books to Read in October 2017"
Powell's Books "Staff Top Fives: Our Favorite Books of 2017"
Amazon's "Best Books of the Month: Biographies & Memoirs"
Poets & Writers's "Five Best Literary Nonfiction Debuts of 2017"
Bustle's "16 of the Best Nonfiction Books Coming in October 2017"
New York magazine's "What to Do in New York. . . Read The Glass Eye"
Newsweek's "Seven New Books That Will Make You Happy You Can Read"
Newsweek's "What to Read This Fall ... Recommended at Brooklyn Book Fest"
Bustle's "11 Memoirs About Grief to Remind You That You're Not Alone in Your Journey"
Bustle's "13 Memoirs By Millennials That Prove You're Never Too Young to Tell Your Story"
Excerpts available through TinHouse.com, Lenny, Lit Hub, and Longreads.
Interviews with Bustle, Fanzine, TinHouse.com, Bookselling This Week, Columbia Journal,
the Rumpus, The Writer, and Arkansas International.
Indie Next Pick
Indies Introduce Pick
Powell's "Picks of the Season 2017"
Ploughshares "Must Reads for Fall"
NYLON's "25 New Books to Read This Fall"
Publishers Weekly "Big Indie Books of Fall 2017"
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick
Literary Hub's "Best Reviewed Books of the Week"
Rumpus's "What to Read When It's Mental Health Month"
Entertainment Weekly's "15 Books to Read in October 2017"
Powell's Books "Staff Top Fives: Our Favorite Books of 2017"
Amazon's "Best Books of the Month: Biographies & Memoirs"
Poets & Writers's "Five Best Literary Nonfiction Debuts of 2017"
Bustle's "16 of the Best Nonfiction Books Coming in October 2017"
New York magazine's "What to Do in New York. . . Read The Glass Eye"
Newsweek's "Seven New Books That Will Make You Happy You Can Read"
Newsweek's "What to Read This Fall ... Recommended at Brooklyn Book Fest"
Bustle's "11 Memoirs About Grief to Remind You That You're Not Alone in Your Journey"
Bustle's "13 Memoirs By Millennials That Prove You're Never Too Young to Tell Your Story"
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 escalating mania, in and out of hospitals―increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. Obsession turns to investigation as Jeannie plumbs her childhood awareness of her dead half sibling and hunts for clues into the mysterious circumstances of her death. It becomes a puzzle Jeannie feels she must solve to better understand herself and her father.
Jeannie Vanasco pulls us into her unraveling with such intimacy that her insanity becomes palpable, even logical. A brilliant exploration of the human psyche, The Glass Eye deepens our definitions of love, sanity, grief, and recovery.
After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals―increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. Obsession turns to investigation as Jeannie plumbs her childhood awareness of her dead half sibling and hunts for clues into the mysterious circumstances of her death. It becomes a puzzle Jeannie feels she must solve to better understand herself and her father.
Jeannie Vanasco pulls us into her unraveling with such intimacy that her insanity becomes palpable, even logical. A brilliant exploration of the human psyche, The Glass Eye deepens our definitions of love, sanity, grief, and recovery.
PRAISE FOR THE GLASS EYE
“The death of a parent is a stunning experience, and can upend even the most grounded soul. But what happens when the bereaved is already teetering on loose pins? How does a sensitive young writer make sense of life without a father to whom she was fiercely devoted? She writes him a book. In The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco remembers her father with great affection while turning an unflinching gaze of the insupportable grief that visits her upon his death. The book is a fascinating meditation on loss, and an enduring monument to what remains. Wise, brave and beautifully wrought, The Glass Eye signals the arrival of an exceptionally fine new voice.” —Alexandra Styron, author of Reading My Father
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is memoir as it ought to be, but so rarely is: beautiful and painfully raw, but also restrained and lyrical. Vanasco is brilliant, and this book proves it.” —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
“Every memoir is a reckoning with the past, but only the most skilled and courageous memoirist can simultaneously inhabit the story that haunts her and the story of her reckoning with equal urgency. In The Glass Eye, Jeanne Vanasco shows us why rules should be broken: because an elegy that pulses with immediacy, a fragment that is inextricable from a whole, a book that comments on its own writing can smash what you think you know into pieces, and expose a piece of truth so bright it might be your own broken heart, handed back to you.” —Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me
“One month after going away to college, Jeannie Vanasco learned that her father had died, and with him his unconditional and sometimes all-consuming love for her. In The Glass Eye the writer asks, in prose that mesmerizes with geometric precision, how we can orient ourselves to the world when our only compass is grief. What begins as an experience of profound loss becomes an obsession, the fierce intensity of which propels readers through this breathtaking book.” —Lacy Johnson, author of The Other Side
“With The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco has produced a debut of incisive vision. In prose as vivid as a novel and as chiseled as poetry, Vanasco shows the reader that memoir can entail an unexpected, ultimately liberating reckoning. Delving into her family's traumatic and moving history, Vanasco unearths the true story of her late namesake Jeanne, her father’s enduring sorrows, and how both have informed her own often difficult personal journey.” —John Keene, author of Counternarratives
“I loved every word of The Glass Eye. It’s a story about stories, a story about the impossibility of ever telling the whole story. It’s a detective story that interprets itself as it goes, raising the stakes and thickening the plot. It’s also a love story, a ghost story, a story about the most important man who ever lived: the narrator’s dad. Her literal reason for being. But it’s also a story that I can’t help but feel was written just for me.” —Daniel Raeburn, author of Vessels
“Alberto Giacometti famously proclaimed that in a fire, he’d save a cat before a Rembrandt. Thankfully, in this case, we can have both the art and the life. The Glass Eye is heartbreaking and harrowing and at times painfully intimate, but it ends on a note of tentative closure: Vanasco has found a loving partner, moved to the Baltimore area to teach writing, and fulfilled her promise to her father, splendidly.” —Kelsey Osgood, author of How to Disappear Completely
“This heartbreaking memoir is so smart, so tightly constructed, and so moving that it broke me—both formally and emotionally.” —Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is an intense and unforgettable memoir, as fascinating for its artistry as for its subject matter. . . . Lyric, haunted, smart and tortured, this is an obsessive love letter to a dead father as well as a singular work of literature. The Glass Eye will attract memoir fans and readers concerned with mental illness and bereavement, as well as writers concerned with craft.” —Julia Jenkins, Shelf Awareness
“Hypnotic . . . a haunting exploration of perception, memory, and the complexities of grief. In language that is understated and economical, Vanasco brings to life the father she loved with an almost frightening force . . . Vanasco's characters and settings are vivid, prismatic, and surreal.” —Marya Hornbacher, The New York Times Book Review
“In this stunning, quite meta memoir, Vanasco attempts to come to terms with many things: Her beloved father's death, the name she shares with a dead half-sister she never met, and her own crescendoing mental illness. All the while, she talks the reader through her obsessive, meticulous writing process as she tries to finish the memoir she promised her dying father she'd write for him.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Brilliant, obsessive . . . Reminiscent of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, The Glass Eye isn't a straightforward memoir: Rather, it's a self-aware chronicle of her struggles as she talks us through her process on the page ("I worry I'm too easily swayed by the sonic impact of a line") or researches the sparse facts of her half sister's death. As the pages fly by, we're right by Vanasco, breathlessly experiencing her grief, mania, revelations, and—ultimately—her relief.” —Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly
“What Vanasco does in her book is way more compelling than filling in what she doesn’t know: she experiments with form by shattering the story into shards of poetic prose. Throughout the piece, she provides a meta-narrative about the process of writing the memoir we are reading. The resulting book is not only beautiful and complex, but also a great example of what is possible when a very skilled storyteller starts manipulating form in a way that allows her to go deeper into the subject, in part by commenting openly on all the things she might not remember. We don’t need more dramatic scenes in which the memoirist loses it; we have a form that allows us to experience the mind—whether psychotic or lucid, spinning or still—at work.” —Melissa Oliveira, Hippocampus
“The language cuts quick to the heart of Vanasco’s hurt; readers will immediately fall into the rhythm of her unrelenting inner dialogue. . . . Vanasco’s candor, curiosity, and commitment to human understanding are not to be missed.” —Courtney Eathorne, Booklist, starred review
“The author’s relentless introspection, which includes almost offhanded recollections of terrible self-harm and institutionalization, manages to cast a spotlight on the art of memoir itself, as she valiantly struggles to find the best medium possible to convey the true essence of a daughter’s love for her father. A deceptively spare life story that sneaks up and surprises you with its sudden fecundity and power.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In this powerful and ruminative memoir, Vanasco explores the years following her father’s death as her grief transforms into an increasing obsession with her half-sister Jeanne, who died before Vanasco was born. . . . An illuminating manual for understanding grief and the strange places it leads.” —Publishers Weekly
“This powerful, haunting memoir starts off with one of the more compelling first sentences I’ve read in some time: 'The night before he died, I promised my dad I would write a book for him.' From there, Vanasco takes readers along on her struggle to properly pay homage to her father, but also to better understand who this man—her personal hero, bestower of boundless love upon her—actually was. It’s a journey that takes Vanasco into the dark depths of her family history, as well as her own psyche, and it shows in an incredibly intimate way the methods we use to cope with loss, disappointment, and grief, and how we can try and make our way out of the darkness and into a place of recovery.” —Kristin Iversen, NYLON
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is the beautiful and multilayered journey of a writer paying tribute to her father, while also discovering herself.” —E. Ce Miller, Bustle
“Jeannie Vanasco writes about her personal struggle with grief and obsession in The Glass Eye. Her memoir reveals how she spiraled after her father’s death, in part because she had been named after her dead half-sister. Her story isn’t always comfortable for the reader, but it is captivating.” —Stephanie Topacio Long, Bustle
“Jeannie Vanasco’s debut memoir is a portrait of a daughter’s grief for her father with a twist: It’s also a wildly innovative tale of the author’s own mental breakdown after his death.” —New York
“This book has a blazing lyricism to it, one that’s bound to be a trademark of Vanasco’s limber mind. . . . The Glass Eye—spare, deep, and kaleidoscopic—will make you want to read the first page again after you finish the last.” —Amy Jo Burns, Ploughshares
“A memoir about a woman named for her dead sister, whose shadow she can’t seem to escape. Vanasco explores the intricacies of the human psyche with stunning poignancy.” —Newsweek
“Vanasco’s memoir is valuable reading for anyone who has ever tried to create something. Artists of all stripes will see that it is, in fact, Vanasco’s tireless self-awareness of her own role (as memoirist, as careful practitioner of her craft) that allows The Glass Eye to function as a fruitful addition to the genre.” —The Arkansas International
“The form is a beautiful, effective illumination of Vanasco’s process in working through her grief and mental illness, but also in constructing the book. . . . The Glass Eye doesn’t attempt to explain grief so much as to illuminate it, showing its effects on Jeannie’s life and those connected to her. Despite this, the book is not somber. It doesn’t ask for sympathy or pity. Instead, it invites the reader in to examine, with Vanasco, the nuances of life as a human being searching for meaning, for connections to the people we love, and the moments that stay with us, for whatever reason, long after they’ve passed into memory.” —Rachel Wooley, Atticus Review
“Many male writers have written about their relationships with their fathers, but a new generation of women memoirists are revealing how their fathers shaped their lives. In Vanasco’s account, the death of her father sends her on a perilous journey of the psyche, struggling both with his loss but also her quest to know who she was. Her father had another daughter who had died, and she, too, had been named “Jeanne.” Unpacking the meanings of her name, her identity, and how to live without her father makes for a fascinating, poignant story that will speak to many readers.” —Lorraine Berry, Signature
“Vanasco writes movingly about mourning for a beloved parent, bipolar disorder and searching for the dead sister she never knew — who non-coincidentally shared her name.” —Baltimore Sun
“Jeannie Vanasco chronicles her spiral into mental illness in the moments following her father’s death with the urgency of lost love. Jumping back and forth in time, Vanasco recalls her family’s history, from childhood up to her father’s death, each chapter a meditation on her struggle not only to write the book but to tell the right story for her dead father. Her memoir reads like a documentary unfolding in the mind’s eye, a camera pointing at the subsections of her life—Dad, Mom, mental illness, death, life, love—to craft a complete story of grief and loss.” —Nada Sewidan, Vanguard
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye [is] a remarkable and peculiar memoir/meta-memoir. ... Vanasco uses her preoccupation with metaphor and with deciphering meaning to bring her readers into a mind in chaos.” —Emery Ross, The Seattle Review of Books
“There’s a bit of a battle among the staff at the Women & Children First Bookstore: They can’t decide who gets to put Jeannie Vanasco’s memoir The Glass Eye as their staff pick—too many of them want to recommend it.” —Tracy Mumford, Minnesota Public Radio
“An absolutely beautiful exploration of family, grief, memory, and madness, this book is outstanding. Jeannie Vanasco promised her father before his death that she would write a book for him, never knowing the psychological and mental toll the process would ultimately take on her. Vanasco explores her family’s history: the entirely separate family her father had before she was born; the late-in-life marriage that led to Jeannie’s birth; her own destructive behavior as she falls in and out of a mental illness that informs the truly fascinating structure of the book. The layers found in this memoir are as plentiful as the layers found in the human eye; ultimately, it is as deeply layered as the human experience itself.” —Jamie Thomas, Women & Children First
“The Glass Eye, at its heart, is a memoir of Jeannie’s relationship with her late father and the grief she experienced after his death. But it’s also about her half-sister, Jeanne, who died before she was born; it’s about mental illness; and it’s about family and what that means. This is memoir at its best. The prose is powerful and often breathtaking—it’ll make your heart break, it might make you cry, and you’ll probably even laugh a few times. This is an elegy fierce and lyrical and raw, like none I’ve read before.” —Sarah Malley, Newtonville Books
“Jeannie was named after her father’s dead daughter, Jeanne, from a previous marriage and The Glass Eye is the story of how Jeannie, in turn, copes with the grief of her own father’s death. Vanasco has this unique and brilliant way of structuring her narrative that leaves the reader bewildered and enlightened at the same time. She talks about the frustration of writing this book for her father, her hero, as she copes with her own mental breakdowns. I am not one for memoirs, but this is a rare gem that highlights something so sacred as a daughter’s relationship to her father.” —Jason Kennedy, Boswell Book Company
“Grief, Jeannie Vanasco writes in The Glass Eye, is inexplicable. To really describe it, one must often approach it adjacently through metaphor, as Vanasco does in her attempts to piece together the story of her unravelling after her father’s death. How can words adequately represent the oceans of pain that swell and drown us? How can we make sense of grief, which often renders us senseless? How does one capture the magnitude of loss? Vanasco struggles with these questions in her memoir, the book she promised her father she’d write for him. But it’s a different book than she’d envisioned; it’s the story of the human mind as it attempts to cope with the illogical. It’s her exploration of the devastation she suffered, the fine thread of her sanity barely holding her together. And, in a way, it’s what she always meant to write: in her mourning and her struggle to cope with a new reality, we see that at the heart of it all lies a woman whose love for her father is all-consuming, is extraordinary. An experimental memoir that would make Maggie Nelson proud, The Glass Eye is a literary tour de force, a hurricane of language and emotions that fly off the page, a testament to love and loss and how the lexicon of grief, though universal, is always a personal discourse.” —Rachel Kaplan, Avid Bookshop
“I have never read anything quite like The Glass Eye. The story takes us so deep into the author’s mind, we feel the mania as she goes up and the depression as she goes down. I could not stop telling people about Jeannie’s life, from the death of her half sister (her namesake), to the downward spiral she takes after her father’s death, to the stints in mental institutions. I’ve never read a book where the author is experiencing mental illness at the time of writing, not in retrospect. The writing is fierce and engaging, and I truly couldn’t put it down.” —Courtney Flynn, Trident Booksellers & Cafe
“Somewhere between grief and madness lies The Glass Eye―an unfettered dive into a brilliant, unraveling mind. Vanasco’s memoir is visceral, poignant, and ultimately an affirmation of the healing power of literature and the resilience of the human soul. Astounding.” —Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore
“It would be easy to describe this book as a memoir about grief and mental illness, but The Glass Eye is the sort of book that requires more than your standard pat descriptors. Jeannie Vanasco has crafted a book that will worm its way under your skin, a book that will not give you easy answers or heartwarming takeaways, much in the same way that life will not give you easy answers or heartwarming takeaways. Jeannie Vanasco has created a book that I cannot stop thinking about.” —Emily Ballaine, Green Apple Books
“In her luminous memoir, The Glass Eye, written following the death of her father, Jeannie Vanasco takes us on a tender journey through her childhood and early adulthood. I was completely immersed in Jeannie’s life and her affectionate and vivid portraits of her parents, especially her dad, who was 60 when Jeannie was born and completely devoted to her. Jeannie is a gifted writer with a unique voice and the story of her family’s mysteries, including her discovery of a dead half-sister with her same name, and, of course, her father’s glass eye, are compelling and haunting. The Glass Eye is reminiscent of other memoirs of grief and madness, but that makes this enchanting book sound darker than it really is. Vanasco’s humor and intelligence shine through her journey of loss.” —Sarah Goddin, Quail Ridge Books
“Jeannie Vanasco grew up in the shadow of her dead half-sister, Jeanne. In her deftly written memoir, she examines how this experience, along with her father’s death and a difficult-to-diagnose mental illness, left her haunted and obsessed. You too will be transfixed by Vanasco’s strange, remarkable story.”—Renee P., Powell's Books
“The Glass Eye is absolutely brilliant! ... Jeannie’s ability to express the complexities of the human mind in such a beautiful and honest way made her mania appear almost rational. For me, this memoir transcends beyond a daughter’s love and loss of her cherished father. One of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long time.” —Stephanie Coleman, Tattered Cover Book Store
“The Glass Eye is a beautifully written memoir about love, loss, grief, and mental illness. . . a book I won’t soon forget.” —Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale Books
“The Glass Eye was a surprise. Instead of being a simple story about a daughter who loses her father, it takes on a life on its own. Vanasco’s grief isn’t simple. Instead, you’re left sitting there with tears in your eyes and a sob in your throat, because you realize just how much her father’s death affected her, even when the subject switches to her mental illness or relationships with her mother and others. Read this book. It will change you.” —Katherine M., Powell's Books
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is memoir as it ought to be, but so rarely is: beautiful and painfully raw, but also restrained and lyrical. Vanasco is brilliant, and this book proves it.” —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
“Every memoir is a reckoning with the past, but only the most skilled and courageous memoirist can simultaneously inhabit the story that haunts her and the story of her reckoning with equal urgency. In The Glass Eye, Jeanne Vanasco shows us why rules should be broken: because an elegy that pulses with immediacy, a fragment that is inextricable from a whole, a book that comments on its own writing can smash what you think you know into pieces, and expose a piece of truth so bright it might be your own broken heart, handed back to you.” —Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me
“One month after going away to college, Jeannie Vanasco learned that her father had died, and with him his unconditional and sometimes all-consuming love for her. In The Glass Eye the writer asks, in prose that mesmerizes with geometric precision, how we can orient ourselves to the world when our only compass is grief. What begins as an experience of profound loss becomes an obsession, the fierce intensity of which propels readers through this breathtaking book.” —Lacy Johnson, author of The Other Side
“With The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco has produced a debut of incisive vision. In prose as vivid as a novel and as chiseled as poetry, Vanasco shows the reader that memoir can entail an unexpected, ultimately liberating reckoning. Delving into her family's traumatic and moving history, Vanasco unearths the true story of her late namesake Jeanne, her father’s enduring sorrows, and how both have informed her own often difficult personal journey.” —John Keene, author of Counternarratives
“I loved every word of The Glass Eye. It’s a story about stories, a story about the impossibility of ever telling the whole story. It’s a detective story that interprets itself as it goes, raising the stakes and thickening the plot. It’s also a love story, a ghost story, a story about the most important man who ever lived: the narrator’s dad. Her literal reason for being. But it’s also a story that I can’t help but feel was written just for me.” —Daniel Raeburn, author of Vessels
“Alberto Giacometti famously proclaimed that in a fire, he’d save a cat before a Rembrandt. Thankfully, in this case, we can have both the art and the life. The Glass Eye is heartbreaking and harrowing and at times painfully intimate, but it ends on a note of tentative closure: Vanasco has found a loving partner, moved to the Baltimore area to teach writing, and fulfilled her promise to her father, splendidly.” —Kelsey Osgood, author of How to Disappear Completely
“This heartbreaking memoir is so smart, so tightly constructed, and so moving that it broke me—both formally and emotionally.” —Michael Kimball, author of Big Ray
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is an intense and unforgettable memoir, as fascinating for its artistry as for its subject matter. . . . Lyric, haunted, smart and tortured, this is an obsessive love letter to a dead father as well as a singular work of literature. The Glass Eye will attract memoir fans and readers concerned with mental illness and bereavement, as well as writers concerned with craft.” —Julia Jenkins, Shelf Awareness
“Hypnotic . . . a haunting exploration of perception, memory, and the complexities of grief. In language that is understated and economical, Vanasco brings to life the father she loved with an almost frightening force . . . Vanasco's characters and settings are vivid, prismatic, and surreal.” —Marya Hornbacher, The New York Times Book Review
“In this stunning, quite meta memoir, Vanasco attempts to come to terms with many things: Her beloved father's death, the name she shares with a dead half-sister she never met, and her own crescendoing mental illness. All the while, she talks the reader through her obsessive, meticulous writing process as she tries to finish the memoir she promised her dying father she'd write for him.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Brilliant, obsessive . . . Reminiscent of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, The Glass Eye isn't a straightforward memoir: Rather, it's a self-aware chronicle of her struggles as she talks us through her process on the page ("I worry I'm too easily swayed by the sonic impact of a line") or researches the sparse facts of her half sister's death. As the pages fly by, we're right by Vanasco, breathlessly experiencing her grief, mania, revelations, and—ultimately—her relief.” —Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly
“What Vanasco does in her book is way more compelling than filling in what she doesn’t know: she experiments with form by shattering the story into shards of poetic prose. Throughout the piece, she provides a meta-narrative about the process of writing the memoir we are reading. The resulting book is not only beautiful and complex, but also a great example of what is possible when a very skilled storyteller starts manipulating form in a way that allows her to go deeper into the subject, in part by commenting openly on all the things she might not remember. We don’t need more dramatic scenes in which the memoirist loses it; we have a form that allows us to experience the mind—whether psychotic or lucid, spinning or still—at work.” —Melissa Oliveira, Hippocampus
“The language cuts quick to the heart of Vanasco’s hurt; readers will immediately fall into the rhythm of her unrelenting inner dialogue. . . . Vanasco’s candor, curiosity, and commitment to human understanding are not to be missed.” —Courtney Eathorne, Booklist, starred review
“The author’s relentless introspection, which includes almost offhanded recollections of terrible self-harm and institutionalization, manages to cast a spotlight on the art of memoir itself, as she valiantly struggles to find the best medium possible to convey the true essence of a daughter’s love for her father. A deceptively spare life story that sneaks up and surprises you with its sudden fecundity and power.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In this powerful and ruminative memoir, Vanasco explores the years following her father’s death as her grief transforms into an increasing obsession with her half-sister Jeanne, who died before Vanasco was born. . . . An illuminating manual for understanding grief and the strange places it leads.” —Publishers Weekly
“This powerful, haunting memoir starts off with one of the more compelling first sentences I’ve read in some time: 'The night before he died, I promised my dad I would write a book for him.' From there, Vanasco takes readers along on her struggle to properly pay homage to her father, but also to better understand who this man—her personal hero, bestower of boundless love upon her—actually was. It’s a journey that takes Vanasco into the dark depths of her family history, as well as her own psyche, and it shows in an incredibly intimate way the methods we use to cope with loss, disappointment, and grief, and how we can try and make our way out of the darkness and into a place of recovery.” —Kristin Iversen, NYLON
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye is the beautiful and multilayered journey of a writer paying tribute to her father, while also discovering herself.” —E. Ce Miller, Bustle
“Jeannie Vanasco writes about her personal struggle with grief and obsession in The Glass Eye. Her memoir reveals how she spiraled after her father’s death, in part because she had been named after her dead half-sister. Her story isn’t always comfortable for the reader, but it is captivating.” —Stephanie Topacio Long, Bustle
“Jeannie Vanasco’s debut memoir is a portrait of a daughter’s grief for her father with a twist: It’s also a wildly innovative tale of the author’s own mental breakdown after his death.” —New York
“This book has a blazing lyricism to it, one that’s bound to be a trademark of Vanasco’s limber mind. . . . The Glass Eye—spare, deep, and kaleidoscopic—will make you want to read the first page again after you finish the last.” —Amy Jo Burns, Ploughshares
“A memoir about a woman named for her dead sister, whose shadow she can’t seem to escape. Vanasco explores the intricacies of the human psyche with stunning poignancy.” —Newsweek
“Vanasco’s memoir is valuable reading for anyone who has ever tried to create something. Artists of all stripes will see that it is, in fact, Vanasco’s tireless self-awareness of her own role (as memoirist, as careful practitioner of her craft) that allows The Glass Eye to function as a fruitful addition to the genre.” —The Arkansas International
“The form is a beautiful, effective illumination of Vanasco’s process in working through her grief and mental illness, but also in constructing the book. . . . The Glass Eye doesn’t attempt to explain grief so much as to illuminate it, showing its effects on Jeannie’s life and those connected to her. Despite this, the book is not somber. It doesn’t ask for sympathy or pity. Instead, it invites the reader in to examine, with Vanasco, the nuances of life as a human being searching for meaning, for connections to the people we love, and the moments that stay with us, for whatever reason, long after they’ve passed into memory.” —Rachel Wooley, Atticus Review
“Many male writers have written about their relationships with their fathers, but a new generation of women memoirists are revealing how their fathers shaped their lives. In Vanasco’s account, the death of her father sends her on a perilous journey of the psyche, struggling both with his loss but also her quest to know who she was. Her father had another daughter who had died, and she, too, had been named “Jeanne.” Unpacking the meanings of her name, her identity, and how to live without her father makes for a fascinating, poignant story that will speak to many readers.” —Lorraine Berry, Signature
“Vanasco writes movingly about mourning for a beloved parent, bipolar disorder and searching for the dead sister she never knew — who non-coincidentally shared her name.” —Baltimore Sun
“Jeannie Vanasco chronicles her spiral into mental illness in the moments following her father’s death with the urgency of lost love. Jumping back and forth in time, Vanasco recalls her family’s history, from childhood up to her father’s death, each chapter a meditation on her struggle not only to write the book but to tell the right story for her dead father. Her memoir reads like a documentary unfolding in the mind’s eye, a camera pointing at the subsections of her life—Dad, Mom, mental illness, death, life, love—to craft a complete story of grief and loss.” —Nada Sewidan, Vanguard
“Jeannie Vanasco’s The Glass Eye [is] a remarkable and peculiar memoir/meta-memoir. ... Vanasco uses her preoccupation with metaphor and with deciphering meaning to bring her readers into a mind in chaos.” —Emery Ross, The Seattle Review of Books
“There’s a bit of a battle among the staff at the Women & Children First Bookstore: They can’t decide who gets to put Jeannie Vanasco’s memoir The Glass Eye as their staff pick—too many of them want to recommend it.” —Tracy Mumford, Minnesota Public Radio
“An absolutely beautiful exploration of family, grief, memory, and madness, this book is outstanding. Jeannie Vanasco promised her father before his death that she would write a book for him, never knowing the psychological and mental toll the process would ultimately take on her. Vanasco explores her family’s history: the entirely separate family her father had before she was born; the late-in-life marriage that led to Jeannie’s birth; her own destructive behavior as she falls in and out of a mental illness that informs the truly fascinating structure of the book. The layers found in this memoir are as plentiful as the layers found in the human eye; ultimately, it is as deeply layered as the human experience itself.” —Jamie Thomas, Women & Children First
“The Glass Eye, at its heart, is a memoir of Jeannie’s relationship with her late father and the grief she experienced after his death. But it’s also about her half-sister, Jeanne, who died before she was born; it’s about mental illness; and it’s about family and what that means. This is memoir at its best. The prose is powerful and often breathtaking—it’ll make your heart break, it might make you cry, and you’ll probably even laugh a few times. This is an elegy fierce and lyrical and raw, like none I’ve read before.” —Sarah Malley, Newtonville Books
“Jeannie was named after her father’s dead daughter, Jeanne, from a previous marriage and The Glass Eye is the story of how Jeannie, in turn, copes with the grief of her own father’s death. Vanasco has this unique and brilliant way of structuring her narrative that leaves the reader bewildered and enlightened at the same time. She talks about the frustration of writing this book for her father, her hero, as she copes with her own mental breakdowns. I am not one for memoirs, but this is a rare gem that highlights something so sacred as a daughter’s relationship to her father.” —Jason Kennedy, Boswell Book Company
“Grief, Jeannie Vanasco writes in The Glass Eye, is inexplicable. To really describe it, one must often approach it adjacently through metaphor, as Vanasco does in her attempts to piece together the story of her unravelling after her father’s death. How can words adequately represent the oceans of pain that swell and drown us? How can we make sense of grief, which often renders us senseless? How does one capture the magnitude of loss? Vanasco struggles with these questions in her memoir, the book she promised her father she’d write for him. But it’s a different book than she’d envisioned; it’s the story of the human mind as it attempts to cope with the illogical. It’s her exploration of the devastation she suffered, the fine thread of her sanity barely holding her together. And, in a way, it’s what she always meant to write: in her mourning and her struggle to cope with a new reality, we see that at the heart of it all lies a woman whose love for her father is all-consuming, is extraordinary. An experimental memoir that would make Maggie Nelson proud, The Glass Eye is a literary tour de force, a hurricane of language and emotions that fly off the page, a testament to love and loss and how the lexicon of grief, though universal, is always a personal discourse.” —Rachel Kaplan, Avid Bookshop
“I have never read anything quite like The Glass Eye. The story takes us so deep into the author’s mind, we feel the mania as she goes up and the depression as she goes down. I could not stop telling people about Jeannie’s life, from the death of her half sister (her namesake), to the downward spiral she takes after her father’s death, to the stints in mental institutions. I’ve never read a book where the author is experiencing mental illness at the time of writing, not in retrospect. The writing is fierce and engaging, and I truly couldn’t put it down.” —Courtney Flynn, Trident Booksellers & Cafe
“Somewhere between grief and madness lies The Glass Eye―an unfettered dive into a brilliant, unraveling mind. Vanasco’s memoir is visceral, poignant, and ultimately an affirmation of the healing power of literature and the resilience of the human soul. Astounding.” —Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore
“It would be easy to describe this book as a memoir about grief and mental illness, but The Glass Eye is the sort of book that requires more than your standard pat descriptors. Jeannie Vanasco has crafted a book that will worm its way under your skin, a book that will not give you easy answers or heartwarming takeaways, much in the same way that life will not give you easy answers or heartwarming takeaways. Jeannie Vanasco has created a book that I cannot stop thinking about.” —Emily Ballaine, Green Apple Books
“In her luminous memoir, The Glass Eye, written following the death of her father, Jeannie Vanasco takes us on a tender journey through her childhood and early adulthood. I was completely immersed in Jeannie’s life and her affectionate and vivid portraits of her parents, especially her dad, who was 60 when Jeannie was born and completely devoted to her. Jeannie is a gifted writer with a unique voice and the story of her family’s mysteries, including her discovery of a dead half-sister with her same name, and, of course, her father’s glass eye, are compelling and haunting. The Glass Eye is reminiscent of other memoirs of grief and madness, but that makes this enchanting book sound darker than it really is. Vanasco’s humor and intelligence shine through her journey of loss.” —Sarah Goddin, Quail Ridge Books
“Jeannie Vanasco grew up in the shadow of her dead half-sister, Jeanne. In her deftly written memoir, she examines how this experience, along with her father’s death and a difficult-to-diagnose mental illness, left her haunted and obsessed. You too will be transfixed by Vanasco’s strange, remarkable story.”—Renee P., Powell's Books
“The Glass Eye is absolutely brilliant! ... Jeannie’s ability to express the complexities of the human mind in such a beautiful and honest way made her mania appear almost rational. For me, this memoir transcends beyond a daughter’s love and loss of her cherished father. One of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long time.” —Stephanie Coleman, Tattered Cover Book Store
“The Glass Eye is a beautifully written memoir about love, loss, grief, and mental illness. . . a book I won’t soon forget.” —Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale Books
“The Glass Eye was a surprise. Instead of being a simple story about a daughter who loses her father, it takes on a life on its own. Vanasco’s grief isn’t simple. Instead, you’re left sitting there with tears in your eyes and a sob in your throat, because you realize just how much her father’s death affected her, even when the subject switches to her mental illness or relationships with her mother and others. Read this book. It will change you.” —Katherine M., Powell's Books