​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.
ADVANCE PRAISE
A Fall Pick of 2019 at
Time, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Nylon, Bustle,
Evening Standard, Publishers Marketplace, FGRLS Club, The Millions, The Rumpus,
Book Riot, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Domino, She Reads, Waterstones, Pacific Standard, and more.
The Rumpus Book Club Pick. Also featured at Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and more.
Time, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Nylon, Bustle,
Evening Standard, Publishers Marketplace, FGRLS Club, The Millions, The Rumpus,
Book Riot, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Domino, She Reads, Waterstones, Pacific Standard, and more.
The Rumpus Book Club Pick. Also featured at Lit Hub, The Paris Review, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and more.
“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
“With deep self-consciousness, courage, and nuance, the author reveals the inner universe of her survivorship and interrogates the notion that rapists are two-dimensionally evil . . . An extraordinarily brave work of self- and cultural reflection.” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Vanasco's second memoir sets the canon of #MeToo-era creative nonfiction on fire: she interviews her rapist . . . This is a slow-burning, reverberating meditation on the nuances of morality, masculinity, and punishment . . . Inimitable." – Courtney Eathorne, Booklist, starred review
"In this singular, gutting memoir, perhaps the most important book of the season, Vanasco interviews her own rapist . . . This book lives masterfully in the messy, liminal space between punishment and forgiveness, asking us to consider the path forward from the unthinkable.” – Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“A memoir that thoughtfully illustrates the lasting impact of trauma.” – Time
“A firecracker of a book — a hot, burning account of her own sexual assault by a close friend and her endeavor, decades later, to talk to him about what happened . . . Vanasco expertly dissects the nuances of sexual assault, especially at the hands of someone you know and love.” – Bustle
“Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is aware of itself, frequently commenting on process and prospective readership. This kind of self-regard is difficult to pull off, but it is clearly Vanasco's natural style, and she wields it expertly . . . heartfelt, painful and essential.” – Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness
“'Vanasco gets at so many of the gray areas in our conversations about rape and the rehabilitation of its perpetrators. If some traumas don't fit into neat little narratives, then the pleasure of reading Vanasco is in knowing that messiness is OK, that there's no right way to handle such betrayals.” – Maris Kreizman, Pacific Standard
“Thought-provoking, unmooring, and haunting . . . an interrogation into what it means both to be raped and to rape someone, how this act marks both the victim and the aggressor, and how powerful it can be for someone who has been raped to reclaim their narrative, and write their own story.” –Kristin Iversen, Nylon
“I can’t stress enough the necessity of this book.” – Chloe Laws, FGRLS Club
"Adds new layers to the larger discussions about sexual violence. Vanasco’s story challenges readers to question their own interactions and reject ideas of what victimhood should look like." – Lia Assimakopoulos, Washington City Paper
"Thoughtful and nuanced, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a measured response to a horrific act that broadens and deepens the debate around sexual violence." – Waterstones
“It is a powerful and timely book, and one that is sure to stay with you long after you’ve finished it.” – BookBub
"It’s hard to overstate the importance of this gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking book, which tackles sexual violence and its aftermath while also articulating the singular pain of knowing — or loving, or caring for, or having a history with — one’s rapist. Vanasco is whip-smart and tender, open and ruthless; she is the perfect guide through the minefield of her trauma, and ours.” –Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of My Body Is a Book of Rules
“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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of Ars Botanica
“If ever there were a book certain to elicit responses that say more about the reader than the writer, it may be this one. That Jeannie Vanasco’s experience becomes, throughout, grist for the mills of other people’s thinking and feeling offers an equally troubling and (possibly) restorative statement about how we encounter and consume and interpret the stories of survivors. And while that could seem like a clever trap, it’s actually an act of generosity—a gift Vanasco gives to her readers, if only we can accept it as such. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is an essential, unforgettable work.” – Erik Anderson, author of Flutter Point
“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
“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.” – 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
“This is a wholly original memoir grappling with the author’s sexual assault by a friend, which led to years of silence between them that only ended when she contacted him for this book. It’s an amazing, potentially dangerous prospect and Vanasco is wildly brave and honest as she explores her own reticence to lay blame where it is deserved. This book is aching and so important—I applaud and applaud the author for delving so deeply into this.” – Mary Cotton, Newtonville Books
“Jeannie Vanasco's Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is one of the bravest, most honest, and most unusual memoirs I've read. Vanasco's decision to confront her college rapist, who was at the time a close friend, is extraordinary enough, but her narrative voice — her lyricism throughout her interrogation of her motivations and thought processes, as well as 'Mark's' and their shared history — makes this a riveting reading experience, and an incredibly important work." – Jill O., Powell's
“With deep self-consciousness, courage, and nuance, the author reveals the inner universe of her survivorship and interrogates the notion that rapists are two-dimensionally evil . . . An extraordinarily brave work of self- and cultural reflection.” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Vanasco's second memoir sets the canon of #MeToo-era creative nonfiction on fire: she interviews her rapist . . . This is a slow-burning, reverberating meditation on the nuances of morality, masculinity, and punishment . . . Inimitable." – Courtney Eathorne, Booklist, starred review
"In this singular, gutting memoir, perhaps the most important book of the season, Vanasco interviews her own rapist . . . This book lives masterfully in the messy, liminal space between punishment and forgiveness, asking us to consider the path forward from the unthinkable.” – Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
“A memoir that thoughtfully illustrates the lasting impact of trauma.” – Time
“A firecracker of a book — a hot, burning account of her own sexual assault by a close friend and her endeavor, decades later, to talk to him about what happened . . . Vanasco expertly dissects the nuances of sexual assault, especially at the hands of someone you know and love.” – Bustle
“Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is aware of itself, frequently commenting on process and prospective readership. This kind of self-regard is difficult to pull off, but it is clearly Vanasco's natural style, and she wields it expertly . . . heartfelt, painful and essential.” – Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness
“'Vanasco gets at so many of the gray areas in our conversations about rape and the rehabilitation of its perpetrators. If some traumas don't fit into neat little narratives, then the pleasure of reading Vanasco is in knowing that messiness is OK, that there's no right way to handle such betrayals.” – Maris Kreizman, Pacific Standard
“Thought-provoking, unmooring, and haunting . . . an interrogation into what it means both to be raped and to rape someone, how this act marks both the victim and the aggressor, and how powerful it can be for someone who has been raped to reclaim their narrative, and write their own story.” –Kristin Iversen, Nylon
“I can’t stress enough the necessity of this book.” – Chloe Laws, FGRLS Club
"Adds new layers to the larger discussions about sexual violence. Vanasco’s story challenges readers to question their own interactions and reject ideas of what victimhood should look like." – Lia Assimakopoulos, Washington City Paper
"Thoughtful and nuanced, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is a measured response to a horrific act that broadens and deepens the debate around sexual violence." – Waterstones
“It is a powerful and timely book, and one that is sure to stay with you long after you’ve finished it.” – BookBub
"It’s hard to overstate the importance of this gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking book, which tackles sexual violence and its aftermath while also articulating the singular pain of knowing — or loving, or caring for, or having a history with — one’s rapist. Vanasco is whip-smart and tender, open and ruthless; she is the perfect guide through the minefield of her trauma, and ours.” –Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
“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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of My Body Is a Book of Rules
“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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of 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, author of Ars Botanica
“If ever there were a book certain to elicit responses that say more about the reader than the writer, it may be this one. That Jeannie Vanasco’s experience becomes, throughout, grist for the mills of other people’s thinking and feeling offers an equally troubling and (possibly) restorative statement about how we encounter and consume and interpret the stories of survivors. And while that could seem like a clever trap, it’s actually an act of generosity—a gift Vanasco gives to her readers, if only we can accept it as such. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is an essential, unforgettable work.” – Erik Anderson, author of Flutter Point
“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
“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.” – 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
“This is a wholly original memoir grappling with the author’s sexual assault by a friend, which led to years of silence between them that only ended when she contacted him for this book. It’s an amazing, potentially dangerous prospect and Vanasco is wildly brave and honest as she explores her own reticence to lay blame where it is deserved. This book is aching and so important—I applaud and applaud the author for delving so deeply into this.” – Mary Cotton, Newtonville Books
“Jeannie Vanasco's Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is one of the bravest, most honest, and most unusual memoirs I've read. Vanasco's decision to confront her college rapist, who was at the time a close friend, is extraordinary enough, but her narrative voice — her lyricism throughout her interrogation of her motivations and thought processes, as well as 'Mark's' and their shared history — makes this a riveting reading experience, and an incredibly important work." – Jill O., Powell's