Articulating the pain of a removal, something that is not there, is massively challenging, and yet Jeannie Vanasco has done it—filled the scarcity of silence with an abundance of thrilling, exacting prose. A Silent Treatment is a gift for those of us who’ve been punished by the particular cruelty of silence and an opportunity for those who use this method of punishment to understand their frailty. A salve and a method of healing, this memoir will help countless people.
– Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland
I look to Jeannie Vanasco to learn where memoir can go next, what psychic spaces it has yet to broach. In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco’s response to her mom’s silence unearths rage, loyalty, bottomless need, and probes the bounds of reality itself. It’s impossible to read without questioning one’s own primary relationships: How can we be enough to each other? How should we relate to those who love and harm us most deeply? What do we owe our parents and ourselves? Provocative, gripping, and dancing on the edge of madness, A Silent Treatment is a transformative thriller. I couldn’t put it down, and it still hasn’t let go of me.
– Jenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin
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 Guardian and a Thief
With each new book Jeannie Vanasco completely reimagines what life writing can be. I am in awe of what she has done in A Silent Treatment, which is such a nuanced and open-hearted exploration of how we tell our mothers’ stories, and what it’s like to be a daughter of complicated women. This is a book charged with the authority of love, a tribute without romanticization, and an indelible portrait of what can emerge from the terrifying blank space of silence.
– Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest
Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment deftly explores the targeted omission of speech with both insight and compassion. In bursts of poignant, staccato prose, Vanasco lyrically traces the particular and cumulative harm of withholding. A Silent Treatment is a ground-breaking, complex, and moving contribution to the genre, demonstrating her unique ability to write about and through the moral complexity of our deepest intimacies.
– Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name
In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco writes from within her mother’s punitive silence, an ever-present, pressurized force that radiates through the floorboards from her apartment below. Vanasco’s precise language chisels into the quiet white space of each page, conveying her urgent need to communicate while avoiding harm. In this way, the two women are mirrors to each other, caught in that age-old question: how best to love those closest to us. This is a book I’ll turn to again and again, and I’m grateful Vanasco has written it.
– Sarah Perry, author of Sweet Nothings
Vanasco is without question one of the most versatile and inventive memoirists working today, and her latest tells a powerful story of the gulfs that separate people and the love that bridges them.
– Rafael Frumkin, WBEZ Chicago.
I just read a memoir I loved. It’s called A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco.
- Maggie Smith, The Slowdown
It’s because Jeannie Vanasco is a good writer that this memoir feels raw and intimate – kind of like listening in on someone else’s therapy session – but it’s because she’s a good person that it also feels like a remarkably kind, patient and empathetic book.
– Samantha Balaban, NPR
A Silent Treatment is a gripping journey through the writer’s mind as she tries to understand and help her mother — both of which are mostly impossible to do. ... “I resent what my mom did and is doing,” she writes. “I don’t resent my mom, however. This distinction seems important.” That distinction is at the heart of this generous book.
– Laurie Hertzel, Minnesota Star Tribune
Vanasco has a beautiful and elastic compassion for her mother that anyone familiar with a complicated parental relationship will relate to. Overall, a beautiful gift to all who have struggled to care for a loved one in the way they needed.
– Courtney Eathorne, Booklist, starred review
In Vanasco's skilled hands, A Silent Treatment peels back the layers of these maternally inflicted silences, grappling with not only how it feels to experience them, but how it feels to write about them.
– Kerry McHugh, Shelf Awareness, starred review
Vanasco’s artistry turned the nothingness of silence into something undeniably concrete, the finesse of her portrayal ensuring that we all partake of its stifled potency.
– Christa Laib, On the Seawall
Like Annie Ernaux, Jeannie has a genius for immediacy, writing from within an experience while at the same time offering a perspective that is self-aware, wise, and wry.
– Kate Reed Petty, BOMB
Vanasco dissects how truly damaging and isolating this experience can be while simultaneously unraveling the complexities at the core of their mother-daughter relationship.
– Chelsey Sanchez, Harper's Bazaar
A Silent Treatment is a brave, relatable testament to one daughter’s commitment to stay in relationship with her mother, no matter how difficult and painful. And, for those who write memoir and personal narrative, it also serves as an excellent example of how one author answers the question of whether it’s possible to write multiple memoirs. In Vanasco’s case, each is distinct, skillfully, meaningfully excavating different parts, different slices, of a life.
– Dorothy Rice, Hippocampus
The memoir is both a personal excavation and a meditation on communication, love, and the void left behind when someone refuses to speak.
– Electric Literature
Enthralling…. uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds.
– Publishers Weekly
An elliptical, meditative portrayal of wounded women.
– Kirkus
You could never for a moment think this is a revenge memoir. It’s written with such obvious love for her mother, and with the kind of empathy often exalted but little demonstrated in contemporary memoirs.
– Sarah Malley, what has my friend smalls been reading?
Jeannie Vanasco’s memoir A Silent Treatment is a captivating account of how painful (and powerful) withholding communication can be to a family.
– Largehearted Boy
If fall is memoir time, the theme this year is daughters and mothers. ... My favorite of this subgenre was A Silent Treatment, Jeannie Vanasco’s unsettling account of what happened when her mother moved in with her — and the pair stopped talking entirely.
– Christopher Borrelli, The Chicago Tribune
A Best Book of 2025, NPR
A Best Nonfiction Book of 2025, Electric Literature
A Best Book of 2025, Largehearted Boy
Otherppl Book Club Pick for December 2025
The Book of the Day, NPR
One of the 39 Most Anticipated Books of 2025, TIME
The 30 Best Book Releases of Fall 2025, Harper's Bazaar
A favorite book of the year, For Dear Life with Maggie Smith
Ten Books by Maryland Authors You Will Want to Read This Summer, Baltimore Sun
A Most Anticipated Book, The Millions
7 of the Best New Nonfiction Books of September, Book Riot
30 Books We Can't Wait to Read: September 2025, Write or Die
Recommended Books: September 2025, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Fall Book Picks, The Chicago Tribune
Best Books for Your Senior Book Club in 2025, Freedom Plaza
– Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland
I look to Jeannie Vanasco to learn where memoir can go next, what psychic spaces it has yet to broach. In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco’s response to her mom’s silence unearths rage, loyalty, bottomless need, and probes the bounds of reality itself. It’s impossible to read without questioning one’s own primary relationships: How can we be enough to each other? How should we relate to those who love and harm us most deeply? What do we owe our parents and ourselves? Provocative, gripping, and dancing on the edge of madness, A Silent Treatment is a transformative thriller. I couldn’t put it down, and it still hasn’t let go of me.
– Jenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin
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 Guardian and a Thief
With each new book Jeannie Vanasco completely reimagines what life writing can be. I am in awe of what she has done in A Silent Treatment, which is such a nuanced and open-hearted exploration of how we tell our mothers’ stories, and what it’s like to be a daughter of complicated women. This is a book charged with the authority of love, a tribute without romanticization, and an indelible portrait of what can emerge from the terrifying blank space of silence.
– Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest
Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment deftly explores the targeted omission of speech with both insight and compassion. In bursts of poignant, staccato prose, Vanasco lyrically traces the particular and cumulative harm of withholding. A Silent Treatment is a ground-breaking, complex, and moving contribution to the genre, demonstrating her unique ability to write about and through the moral complexity of our deepest intimacies.
– Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name
In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco writes from within her mother’s punitive silence, an ever-present, pressurized force that radiates through the floorboards from her apartment below. Vanasco’s precise language chisels into the quiet white space of each page, conveying her urgent need to communicate while avoiding harm. In this way, the two women are mirrors to each other, caught in that age-old question: how best to love those closest to us. This is a book I’ll turn to again and again, and I’m grateful Vanasco has written it.
– Sarah Perry, author of Sweet Nothings
Vanasco is without question one of the most versatile and inventive memoirists working today, and her latest tells a powerful story of the gulfs that separate people and the love that bridges them.
– Rafael Frumkin, WBEZ Chicago.
I just read a memoir I loved. It’s called A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco.
- Maggie Smith, The Slowdown
It’s because Jeannie Vanasco is a good writer that this memoir feels raw and intimate – kind of like listening in on someone else’s therapy session – but it’s because she’s a good person that it also feels like a remarkably kind, patient and empathetic book.
– Samantha Balaban, NPR
A Silent Treatment is a gripping journey through the writer’s mind as she tries to understand and help her mother — both of which are mostly impossible to do. ... “I resent what my mom did and is doing,” she writes. “I don’t resent my mom, however. This distinction seems important.” That distinction is at the heart of this generous book.
– Laurie Hertzel, Minnesota Star Tribune
Vanasco has a beautiful and elastic compassion for her mother that anyone familiar with a complicated parental relationship will relate to. Overall, a beautiful gift to all who have struggled to care for a loved one in the way they needed.
– Courtney Eathorne, Booklist, starred review
In Vanasco's skilled hands, A Silent Treatment peels back the layers of these maternally inflicted silences, grappling with not only how it feels to experience them, but how it feels to write about them.
– Kerry McHugh, Shelf Awareness, starred review
Vanasco’s artistry turned the nothingness of silence into something undeniably concrete, the finesse of her portrayal ensuring that we all partake of its stifled potency.
– Christa Laib, On the Seawall
Like Annie Ernaux, Jeannie has a genius for immediacy, writing from within an experience while at the same time offering a perspective that is self-aware, wise, and wry.
– Kate Reed Petty, BOMB
Vanasco dissects how truly damaging and isolating this experience can be while simultaneously unraveling the complexities at the core of their mother-daughter relationship.
– Chelsey Sanchez, Harper's Bazaar
A Silent Treatment is a brave, relatable testament to one daughter’s commitment to stay in relationship with her mother, no matter how difficult and painful. And, for those who write memoir and personal narrative, it also serves as an excellent example of how one author answers the question of whether it’s possible to write multiple memoirs. In Vanasco’s case, each is distinct, skillfully, meaningfully excavating different parts, different slices, of a life.
– Dorothy Rice, Hippocampus
The memoir is both a personal excavation and a meditation on communication, love, and the void left behind when someone refuses to speak.
– Electric Literature
Enthralling…. uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds.
– Publishers Weekly
An elliptical, meditative portrayal of wounded women.
– Kirkus
You could never for a moment think this is a revenge memoir. It’s written with such obvious love for her mother, and with the kind of empathy often exalted but little demonstrated in contemporary memoirs.
– Sarah Malley, what has my friend smalls been reading?
Jeannie Vanasco’s memoir A Silent Treatment is a captivating account of how painful (and powerful) withholding communication can be to a family.
– Largehearted Boy
If fall is memoir time, the theme this year is daughters and mothers. ... My favorite of this subgenre was A Silent Treatment, Jeannie Vanasco’s unsettling account of what happened when her mother moved in with her — and the pair stopped talking entirely.
– Christopher Borrelli, The Chicago Tribune
A Best Book of 2025, NPR
A Best Nonfiction Book of 2025, Electric Literature
A Best Book of 2025, Largehearted Boy
Otherppl Book Club Pick for December 2025
The Book of the Day, NPR
One of the 39 Most Anticipated Books of 2025, TIME
The 30 Best Book Releases of Fall 2025, Harper's Bazaar
A favorite book of the year, For Dear Life with Maggie Smith
Ten Books by Maryland Authors You Will Want to Read This Summer, Baltimore Sun
A Most Anticipated Book, The Millions
7 of the Best New Nonfiction Books of September, Book Riot
30 Books We Can't Wait to Read: September 2025, Write or Die
Recommended Books: September 2025, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Fall Book Picks, The Chicago Tribune
Best Books for Your Senior Book Club in 2025, Freedom Plaza