A Silent Treatment
A Memoir
by Jeannie Vanasco
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Pub Date Sep 09 2025 | Archive Date Aug 31 2025
Tin House | Tin House Books
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Description
She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn't want to say something they'd regret.
What does she want to say now that she'd regret?
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.
From the acclaimed author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I was a Girl and The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment is a searingly honest and lasting testament to the power of all things left unsaid.
Advance Praise
"Spirited in form and pensive with its subject, A Silent Treatment confronts both the complexity of family and the quandary of capturing a family's shapeshifting and perplexing love, their truthful and devoted love, in the amber of memoir." -Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
"I look to Jeannie Vanasco to learn where memoir can go next, what psychic spaces it has yet to broach. In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco's response to her mom's silence unearths rage, loyalty, bottomless need, and probes the bounds of reality itself. It's impossible to read without questioning one's own primary relationships: How can we be enough to each other? How should we relate to those who love and harm us most deeply? What do we owe our parents and ourselves? Provocative, gripping, and dancing on the edge of madness, A Silent Treatment is a transformative thriller. I couldn't put it down, and it still hasn't let go of me." -Jenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin
"With each new book Jeannie Vanasco completely reimagines what life writing can be. I am in awe of what she has done in A Silent Treatment, which is such a nuanced and open-hearted exploration of how we tell our mothers' stories, and what it's like to be a daughter of complicated women. This is a book charged with the authority of love, a tribute without romanticization, and an indelible portrait of what can emerge from the terrifying blank space of silence." -Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea
"Jeannie Vanasco's A Silent Treatment deftly explores the targeted omission of speech with both insight and compassion. In bursts of poignant, staccato prose, Vanasco lyrically traces the particular and cumulative harm of withholding. A Silent Treatment is a ground-breaking, complex, and moving contribution to the genre, demonstrating her unique ability to write about and through the moral complexity of our deepest intimacies." -Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name
"In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco writes from within her mother’s punitive silence, an ever-present, pressurized force that radiates through the floorboards from her apartment below. Vanasco’s precise language chisels into the quiet white space of each page, conveying her urgent need to communicate while avoiding harm. In this way, the two women are mirrors to each other, caught in that age-old question: how best to love those closest to us. This is a book I’ll turn to again and again, and I’m grateful Vanasco has written it." -Sarah Perry, author of After the Eclipse
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9781963108453 |
PRICE | $26.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 304 |