A Silent Treatment With Jeannie Vanasco

Author Jeannie Vanasco discusses her new memoir, A Silent Treatment, with poet Lindsay Bernal. Book sales and signings to follow.

Jeannie Vanasco’s mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie’s home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother’s childhood, their shared past and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing and -- in big and small ways -- succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: That her mother will never speak to her again.

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