so much a book as a book about a book, Most of the wordcount is spent on Vanasco wrestling with questions of authorship: how to frame the story, how to portray her rapist, how to portray herself, whether she's using writing techniques to hide from the truth.
This approach will probably frustrate anyone hoping for cathartic fury, but it's the right means to her ends, Vanasco's book isn't really about rape so much as it's about living with trauma, about how we rewrite narratives when our world falls apart.
A difficult but unforgettable read, Really. also content warning for open discussion of sexual violence
I read Jeannie Vanasco's first memoir, The Glass Eye, a few years ago and enjoyed it.
And as in so many memoirs where women and genderqueer and other folks who are often marginalized are telling their stories, I wondered aloud about whether she had experienced sexual violence that she was not including.
I have done antirape work foryears and this is OFTEN something that I wonder, A difficult year that the author glosses over, an ongoing mental health struggle or some form of disordered eating that is mentioned, but not discussed, any of those is enough and really, the author just being a woman or marginalized person to make me pause and wonder about trauma responses to a form of trauma not shared with the reader.
And now, here is Jeannie Vanasco'snd memoir, this one focused on a rape that happened when she was in her teens by a trusted friend.
And while that is the central victimization in this powerful exploration of sexual violence, forgiveness, and healing, it isn't the only one that the author experienced.
She also details a teacher's inappropriate sexual behavior and a rape by another friend later in her life, Ah, I thought, those were the invisible traumas that I sensed hiding, And in this book, they are doing the opposite of hiding the rape by her childhood friend is the book, Her experience of it, her need to contextualize it more thoroughly by actually talking with her former friend/rapist to try to better understand so much about the situation.
She says, early in the book, “Ill ask him: Do you still think about what happened Is it the reason you dropped out of college Did you ever tell anyone A therapist, maybe How did you feel the next morning The next month The next year Today Do you remember how I felt, or seemed to feel Did you ever miss me Has my contacting you upset you Have you dated anyone Have you done to anyone else what you did to me” and she also says in the same list of things that she will ask him, remind him, tell him, "I'll tell him: I still have nightmares about you.
"
The review in the Columbia Journal says, "At multiple points in Things We Didnt Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco says that the goal of her project contacting the man who raped her after years of close friendship when they were both teenagers is to “show what seemingly nice guys are capable of.
” “Mark” she gives the rapist a pseudonym speaks with her openly about the assault which does, I suppose, seem like something a nice guy would do.
His reflections on his own actions in their conversations reveal apparent remorse and indicate that the rape,years in the past at that point, has had a major impact on his life.
At the very least, hes thoughtful about it, The text, however, does not actually function as the banalityofevil accounting that her statement of intent promises, Instead, its an exploration of the messiness of confrontation and the possibility of forgiveness, "
That is part of why I welcome this memoir, this different experience of rape and confrontation, Because for so many survivors, the script that Vanasco says she can't follow, that she describes as “boy rapes girl, girl never talks to boy again.
”, is not the script at all, There is such complexity in what survivors need for healing, for closure, for a new way of thinking about the experience of rape, especially when it is at the hands of someone trusted, loved, known to us.
She wonders in the book, if writing it will end the nightmares, and also says, “But thats not why Im writing this, Im writing this because I want to interview Mark, interrogate Mark, confirm that Mark feels terriblebecause if he does feel terrible, then our friendship mattered to him.
Also, I want him to call the assault significantbecause if he does, I might stop feeling ashamed about the occasional flashbacks and nightmares, Sometimes I question whether my feelings are too big for the crime, I often remind myself, He only used his fingers, Sure, I could censor my antiquated, patriarchal logic sexual assault only matters if the man says it matters, but I want to be honest herebecause I doubt Im the only woman sexually assaulted by a friend and confused about her feelings.
”
And I can say loudly and clearly that the author is definitely not the only one sexually assaulted by a friend and confused about her feelings evenyears or more later.
That was a fairly consistent theme with the survivors of sexual violence that I have worked or spoken with sometimes YEARS and YEARS after the assault.
Confusion and uncertainty because the way they felt didn't seem like the "right" way to feel, not following the cultural script that we expect survivors to play their part in after the assault.
Twenty five years after I began this work with survivors of sexual violence, I am WAY more able to articulate and embrace the complexity of responses and forms of healing that survivors have shared with me.
The amazing variety of things that would feel like justice to survivors, The ways that punitive or retributive justice is not what survivors may want, yet what feels often, like their only option, I am so grateful for this book where Jeannie Vanasco is willing to dig into her own messy feelings and desires for a different form of justice, and in doing so, opens that conversation for many others.
At one point in the book, as she continues to grapple with her need to be in dialogue with her rapist/ former friend and to hear directly from him about "things we didn't talk about when I was girl", as the title lays out, she says, “Kant argued that retributive harshness was a good thingbecause it expresses respect for the perpetrator by holding him responsible for his act.
If we hold criminals responsible and then offer ways to make reparations and reenter society, we strengthen our commitment to human dignity, This, then, can be Marks community service, ”
Thank you, Jeannie Vanasco, for allowing Mark's
community service to be shared with us through your eyes, your words, and your book.
BookofWowza, I've never read anything like "Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl" before, It's a fascinating look into the mind of a "nice guy" who rapes a friend, how that particular kind of betrayal is processed by both the victim and the perpetrator, and the complications of writing about it.
It's so rare to get the perspective of the perpetrator, and the result here is stunning, I was especially moved by Vanasco's wrestling with whether or not to describe what happened to her as rape that entire thread is devastatingly relatable.
I'm so happy and grateful that this book was published, DNF at.
I don't remember how I encountered this book, but I want to say that it was a "books similar to" recommendation from my library after reading sitelinkNot That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.
So I added it, and then waited for ages on hold for it, . . and now I've read less than a quarter of it, which has taken me four days already, and I'm returning it,
This is a memoir about a woman's sexual assault when she was a teen, and her coming to terms with all that that entails regarding what counts as rape and how that has changed SINCE her rape, how she should feel about it, how she should feel about the man who assaulted her, how she should feel about how she feels, how she feels about how HE feels about what happened, how she feels about caring about how he feels.
. . How she feels about writing about this, how she feels about how HE will feel about her writing about this, how she feels about her feeling anything about him feeling something about writing this.
. . etc etc etc.
On the surface, this seems right up my alley, Examinations of the nuance of rape culture are important, and I appreciate them, But this one just did not work for me,
The style, right off the bat, was offputting, This is written in staccato sentence clusters, sans quotation marks, and on top of that, it jumps around not only in time one sentence speaking about now, and the next about the past but also randomly among disparate and seemingly unconnected thoughts and ideas.
And because of that, it has a very, . . mishmash, unfocused, first draft feel, Because a lot of this so far is the author's thoughts and feelings about the PROCESS of writing this book, it enhances that first draft feel even more.
It's so meta that it bothers me, I get that it's relevant, but my Kindle informs me that there are approximatelyandhours left to read in the book, and I already feel the repetitiveness and my interest is waning.
In addition to that, I'm finding it hard to identify with the author and her friends here, and their responses and analyses of his actions, her actions, her reactions, his words, her words, etc.
I know that everyone's experience is different, and people react and process very differently to their assaults than I have to mine, But these examinations of all of the feelings and underlying intent and analysis of every word, etc and the WAY that they discuss it.
. . It feels less like friends discussing a traumatic experience and offering support than it does a critical analysis of a writing assignment, Already I've lost count of how many times the phrase "performance of gender" has been used, But THIS paragraph is where I stopped reading because, . . it's just too much.
Rebekah says, You're wrestling with a really important question, which is, How can someone who seems so harmless or acts so well or is so intelligent be capable of committing what is understandably kind of an evil act and how can it happen I'm going into the whole banality of evil thing but not in an Arendtian sense, more in like a how can that act occur in such a commonplace setting and now you're going back and talking to the guy and the guy is still himself.
It's just fascinating to me, It's a fascinating work of journalism and memoir, I think that a lot of what gets shown online is conforming to a very flat intersectional narrative, simply because it has to be flat, it has to be blunt, or else it's not consumable.
Your narrative is to be chewed and thought over and reflected upon in a way that maybe MeToo isn't, MeToo is more political activism, I think I would do the exact same, be the exact same way as you are, figuring this all out,
Really.
It takes a certain amount of guts to write a memoir solely focused on one's sexual assault and reactions to it and to incorporate confronting one's abuser into it.
I'll give it that. But She's hardly the first person to write about their assault, Hardly the first to think about it or ask these questions, to wonder how it could have happened, how the person they trusted could have done this, etc etc etc.
This paragraph comes across as so pretentiously congratulatory that it just Noped me right out of the rest of the book, I am sorry that she was raped, I'm sorry that I was, and that millions of women have been and will be raped, I read a lot of difficult subject matter, so it's not the depictions of rape or suicide or mental illness or any of that that is bothering me and making this hard to read.
It's the writing and the style and all the rest, Honestly, I feel like the way that this is structured and written is so clinically detached that I just, . . don't like it. It feels more about her writing than anything, and the assault is just the catalyst for it, That may work for some people, but it's not working for me, So I'm out. .