Cover design by Beth Steidle
|
Coming September 9, 2025
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 at TIME "Unspeakably compelling.” – Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams "Spirited in form and pensive with its subject, A Silent Treatment confronts both the complexity of family and the quandary of capturing a family's shapeshifting and perplexing love, their truthful and devoted love, in the amber of memoir.” – Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn’t want to say something they’d regret. What does she want to say now that she’d regret? Jeannie Vanasco’s mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie’s home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother’s childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and—in big and small ways—succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again. |
Please support your local bookstore. If you don't live near an independent bookstore, please use Bookshop.org.