This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jeannie Vanasco, whose memoir A Silent Treatment is out today from Tin House. Vanasco’s latest book is an honest portrait of her uneasy relationship with her mother, Barbara, who after moving into the apartment beneath her daughter’s home, stops speaking to her for periods stretching anywhere from a few weeks to months at a time. The silences prompt Vanasco and her partner, Chris, to search for clues about Barbara’s past to better understand her behavior. “While Vanasco’s subject matter is familiar, her account is uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “This is difficult to shake.” Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (2019) and The Glass Eye (2017), both published by Tin House. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
Jeannie Vanasco, author of A Silent Treatment.
1. How long did it take you to write A Silent Treatment?
A few years. I sold it on proposal, thinking: This will be so much easier to write than my second book! A few years isn’t long, but neither is the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living with my mom while writing about my mom.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
About ten minutes from my house, there’s a parking garage with free three-hour parking. It’s my new favorite writing spot. I know exactly how much time I have, so I use it wisely. And I like how high stakes it is. Friends have recommended the Pomodoro Method. A timer, however, I can easily ignore. But a tow truck?
Mostly, though, I still write at home. 4 AM is best, but more realistically I start at 5:30. I avoid following a strict routine. Sometimes I have to miss a morning, and I need to be okay with that.
4. What are you reading right now?
Books are pitched like tents around my house. The ones camped here on my desk: Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face—the sequel to her extraordinary The Lesser Bohemians—and John Keene’s Punks. I’m rereading them as part of my fall course prep. Keene and McBride are two of the greatest writers working in the English language. I’m also rereading Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, translated by Shaun Whiteside, and Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton. Most of my reading time is spent rereading books I love.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Dorothy Richardson. Her thirteen-volume novel, Pilgrimage, explores her narrator’s day-to-day life in an ongoing present. I won’t pretend to have finished even one volume. I wish I’d learned about her sooner, though. Her influence on Modernism is enormous. In one of the earliest reviews of Mrs Dalloway, the TLS described Woolf’s writing style as “extending the method of Miss Dorothy Richardson.”
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When an impediment arrives, I try writing about it. This helps me remain patient.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
A year after I sold A Silent Treatment, I told my editor I couldn’t write the version I pitched—one that included a sweeping examination of punitive silence—and she said, “I don’t care how closely you stay to the original proposal. I’m excited to read whatever you come up with.” So instead of trying to be an expert about the silent treatment, I documented my experience being inside my mom’s silent treatment. I kept some academic research, but I introduced it modestly. For example, I asked my Google Home Mini for help, and it gave idiotic answers, which was fun. It quoted Quora a lot. But this helped me transition into a few peer-reviewed studies that I wanted to include. I guess the literal device became a literary device. Without my editor’s encouragement, I might still be neck deep in articles about “dyadic ostracism."
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started A Silent Treatment, what would you say?
You’re going to revise the same short passage—for at least four hours every day, for two months straight—and it won’t make its way into the book. Accept that this is part of your process, or seek professional help.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of A Silent Treatment?
Watching standup comedy. I love studying comics’ syntax, examining why certain bits land more than others. This way I’m still “working” during my working hours.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write the truth,” my mom told me. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be honest. Or interesting.”
