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| Jeannie Vanasco (photo: JCPenney Studios) |
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Jeannie Vanasco is a professor of English and a memoirist. A Silent Treatment (Tin House Books; reviewed in this issue), her third memoir, examines her mother's extended silences, lasting days to months: what motivates them, what ends them, what it feels like to be on the receiving end of them, and how these silences fit into the larger historical and scientific research around silent treatment. Vanasco lives and writes in Baltimore, Md.
Your book is titled A Silent Treatment, but in reality, you have experienced many silent treatments from your mother over time, correct?
I don't know how many silent treatments my mom used. On some level, I'm impressed by how frequently she did it. I'm pretty sure I always knew that was going to be the title, I originally thought the book was going to be set during a different silent treatment, her longest period of silence, which lasted six months. The more I worked on the book, the more I realized, oh, that silent treatment won't work because I barely wrote during it. I couldn't write, and I found myself trying to reconstruct scenes, and it just didn't feel real to me. I almost gave up on the book after that. I thought about just returning the advance. But my editor encouraged me, saying it didn't have to be that particular silence. So kind of fortunately, maybe? There was another silent treatment, and I could write from inside of that. It gave me a frame.
I love memoir, but I also often mistrust the very genre that I work within. And I really like when memoirs seem to unfold in real time, writing something very close to an event. Like I say in the book, I do believe that the moment you're experience is the truest thing, and that we never really have perspective. When I'm going to write about the past, I find that having a period of time, a narrative present that I'm working within, one that is relative and recent, gives me more flexibility. I feel like I'm getting closer to the truth.
That's contrary to the oft-repeated advice not to write about something until you have some distance from it, emotionally.
Absolutely. What I most commonly hear from writing instructors is to wait until you've had enough perspective to write about something, and I just don't know if that's necessarily the best advice.
When I think about it, my experience of my mom's silent treatment is kind of like my experience of writing about her silent treatment, where when it's happening, I'm miserable. And when it's over, I'm like, I know that was bad. But I have trouble recovering the feelings.
That feels true about writing in general. When it's happening, I'm like, I can't do this, this is too hard, I don't know if I can make it through. And then, when I'm on the other side, I can see it in a much more organized way. Whereas when I'm inside of an experience--whether that's a silent treatment or writing--it feels so disorganized. I was trying to capture that feeling, also, in the writing of the book, but then also have it not be so disorganized that it's disorienting to read.
You mentioned that you don't always trust your own memories. Does that create a tension in you as a writer of memoir?
I think I'm hyper-aware that I might be getting something wrong, and I'm very deeply afraid of getting something wrong. In memoirs, unless you're doing something really experimental, you're usually writing about other people. So I'm thinking about the ethics of writing memoir, which is connected to my foregrounding craft. How do I do this in such a way that I'm not hurting myself, not hurting other people, but not come across as throat clearing?
You wrote your first book for your father after he died, and this one for your mother, who is still very much alive. How did the experience shift given that context?
I had a lot of anxiety writing a book for my dad, because he was dead and couldn't defend himself. Writing about someone you care about, but what if you're misrepresenting? Or misunderstanding? I hadn't really experienced writing about someone not just alive, but someone I'm living with, in a way that is not the most flattering. I could literally hear her in my house when I was working on it. It became an ever-present anxiety, even when she wasn't using the silent treatment. And she still has not read the book. She says she'll read it when everybody else does.
It's interesting, because I'm showing my mom in many ways at her worst, when she's being deeply emotionally immature. And yet, she is so emotionally mature about my writing. She told me that if she were to tell me what I could or couldn't say, it would no longer be my book.
Before the silent treatments began, I would say our relationship was almost perfect. So then the silent treatment I found very generative; silence can be generative, because you're projecting narrative. It's asking for narrative. Although punitive silence didn't feel super generative when it was happening. It feels stressful, when you don't know what you've done wrong and you go back to think about how you've messed up. But often times that silence is not as much about the person receiving it as the person inflicting it. Being able to remove oneself from that dynamic, see it that way, can be really difficult.
One of the things that really stood out in this book was that writing about the writing; it's as much about your mother's silent treatments as it is about the act of writing a memoir.
I wanted the form of the book to mirror the experience, which is true to my experience of the silent treatment. With my mom, a lot of times, I'm like, okay, day one, day two, day three, I'm keeping track. And then I just lose track of time. Or sometimes I don't even know when a silent treatment has started. That's why I thought it was interesting to begin with "2 or 3 days later." But, to get crafty, I then decided it would be too boring to just write this happens, and this happens, and this happens. So how do I play around with the form in such a way that there are surprises for the reader? Not just will her mother start speaking to her again, but more texture.
I think I feel pulled toward that referencing of the writing process because, in nonfiction, you're usually not trying to pull one over on the reader, trying to make the reader forget that you, the writer, exist. Acknowledging the writing process then just seems like reflection. A lot of writers do it to varying degrees, I just pressed pretty hard on the craft side. That could be a result, also, of teaching creative writing. I'm often thinking about craft, but also about how we can de-intellectualize it to some extent, and look at how it's deeply connected to the emotions of an experience. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer