THINGS WE DIDN'T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL

UK: Duckworth; Poland: Grupa Wydawnicza Relacja;

With matchless grit and a vibrant mind, Jeannie Vanasco performs an absorbing autopsy on a friendship that ended in rape. Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl cuts through the silence of deep betrayal, gives contour to the aching space between forgiveness and absolution, and offers a living testament to the endless wreckage of sexual assault. (Amy Jo Burns, Cinderland)

"Unsettling and timely... [Vanasco] has created a reckoning with injustice told in real time, with all the hesitations and concerns of a wounded heart. She provides few answers but compels readers to ask as we all move forward: How many abusers would act if they knew they'd be called to account, not only legally, but also morally?" Read more...

Jeannie Vanasco's rigorous and nuanced investigation of crime, trauma, secrets, and the telling of our stories, applies an agile mind and penetrating insight to the enforced silences that surround rape and its aftermath. Vanasco incinerates shame and beckons us into the holy smoke. Searching, searing, and sacred, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is the cleansing flame we have been waiting for. (Lisa Locascio, Open Me)

A victim of sexual assault, Jeannie Vanasco's narration of her experience is nuanced and complex. In sharp, purposeful prose, she explores what is demanded of victims—that we live in a world where the consequences for victims and perpetrators are grotesquely reversed, where the identities and reputations of perpetrators are protected, sometimes by the very people they've harmed. Unflinching in her honesty and approach, Vanasco interrogates boundaries further shaping and re-shaping memoir as we know it. Wickedly clever and powerful, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was A Girl is a necessary book. (Krystal A. Sital, Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad)

By unflinchingly inhabiting complex emotions and uncomfortable positions, Jeannie Vanasco has given us the rare book that lays bare to readers just how much the writing of it is itself a journey. Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl explores the common experience of rape with uncommon nuance and intense tenderness. In the process, the book also unexpectedly becomes a warm celebration of female friendship. Vanasco reveals the boundaries of your thoughts and feelings. Then she takes you beyond. (YZ Chin, Though I Get Home)

Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is a work of astounding control, able to reach places I never expected a book to reach. It is both a conversation between Jeannie Vanasco and her former friend, Mark, and a conversation between Vanasco and herself —about paradox and betrayal, owing and being owed, and the complex terminology of sexual violence. Vanasco writes not just about whether it is possible to be “a good person who commits a terrible act,” but about having to consider the weight of the word good. It has left me transfixed. (Thomas Mira Y Lopez, The Book of Resting Places)

"Jeannie Vanasco has had plenty of nightmares, but the story she tells in “Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl” is not one of revenge. It's about violence and forgiveness, about friendship and the unwanted title of victim, about digging deeper and deeper to seek answers — from yourself and from your bogeyman. But in this memoir, questions beget more questions, and few are sufficiently answered. Trauma cannot be tied with a tidy bow." Read more...

"In this singular, gutting memoir, perhaps the most important book of the season, Vanasco interviews her own rapist. Fourteen years later, Vanasco and the high school friend who raped her struggle together through the landmines of a harrowing conversation about consent, betrayal, and rehabilitation. This book lives masterfully in the messy, liminal space between punishment and forgiveness, asking us to consider the path forward from the unthinkable." (The best nonfiction books of 2019) Read more...

In Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco has done something extraordinary. She explodes rape culture at the level of language, shows us how we are trapped and how we might make ourselves free. This is a brilliant book, an astonishingly fierce inquiry into the places language won't go. It charts a path through the things we don't have words for yet and the things we don't know how to say. (Emily Geminder, Dead Girls)

"a brave and difficult memoir" Read more...

In this brave and urgent memoir, Jeannie Vanasco asks if it's possible for a good person to commit a terrible act. In a moment where morality is so often rendered in flat, simplistic terms, Vanasco refuses to take the easy way out: she is generous yet exacting, fair yet relentless. Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl is a searching, brilliant book and Jeannie Vanasco is a formidable talent. We are lucky to have her. (Daniel Gumbiner, The Boatbuilder)