Author Jeannie Vanasco talks 'Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl,' forgiveness, and memory
Jeannie Vanasco's new memoir, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, is poised to make a big splash in the #MeToo era. In it, she interviews her high school friend-turned-rapist in search of an explanation for his crime. The book is a meditation on the myth of the"nice guy," truth in nonfiction, and the possibility of forgiveness.
I was all in. What a fascinating thought experiment on the nature of forgiveness and the banality of evil! I just wanted you to go for the jugular because my antipathy for him was so strong. I remember saying I would've done the same.What really fascinated me was that I was more worried about Mark's mental health while researching and writing the book. I thought, Well, you know, I'm on meds, I'm stable, I can handle talking to my rapist.
With my first book, which was about having hallucinations and psychosis, I remember a lot of people asking me about certain passages,"Well, are you sure you didn't hallucinate that?" [Laughs] That's the thing about being a writer! You can have something bad happen to you and be like, Oh, but I get to write about this!
This reminds me of something that interested me about your book [The Comedown]. I write in this really particular way with a lot of white space and short chapters, and I could never do what you did: write this big, dense multigenerational family saga. That kind of writing is often associated with men, and it's also usually about men—Infinite Jest is the big example that comes to mind.
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