Anyone can become Little Edie
Jeannie Vanasco on A Silent Treatment
It’s not often that I get to film a podstack episode with someone I’ve known for almost a decade — my god, how does time even work?1 Which is precisely why today’s interview is so gosh darn phenomenal, subscriber.
I’ve been friends with Jeannie Vanasco since 2017, when I stumbled upon a Modern Love column of hers that swiftly became my favorite Modern Love column. I emailed her via the contact form on her website (oftentimes a black hole for a busy writer), and to my delight she responded. The rest, as they say, has been history. Or rather, it’s been memoir.
If those of you meeting Jeannie today learn just one thing about her, it ought to be that she’s a bomb memoirist. Three books in and the world sure does seem to agree. Her writing is rigorously honest, compellingly reflective, and downright addictive: I challenge anyone who buys a book by her not to read it in a single sitting!
Happily for us, Jeannie’s third memoir, A Silent Treatment, is making its way to shelves on September 9th. This book is no less searing and searching than her previous two, and this time she’s trained her eye on another topic as explosive as it is under-explored: the mother-daughter relationship.
A Silent Treatment describes how Jeannie’s mother — with whom she shares a name and not long ago shared a home — subjected Jeannie to the silent treatment at various points during their cohabitation, sometimes for periods as long as six months. If that premise sounds harrowing, it’s because it is. Luckily, this wouldn’t be the first emotional maelstrom that Jeannie has written her way through. From Clytemnestra and Electra to Big Edie and Little Edie, we’ve seen the troubled mother-daughter relationship as revenge-steeped or bathos-soaked. We rarely see it as a story about two women who love each other doing their best to choose compassion over hurt. The latter is a human story, and it’s precisely what Jeannie gives us.
The below interview is about how she accomplished that. It’s also about other fascinating topics, like the ethics of memoir, fluency bias, and what it means to write a book “for” someone as opposed to “about” them. I hope you’ll enjoy, and if you do: why not support a fantastic indie bookstore by pre-ordering a signed copy of A Silent Treatment?
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Enjoy today’s podstack? Want to write some creative nonfiction of your own? Then come hang out with Jeannie and other great writers during my essay class this Saturday! You can fill out this sign-up form and read more about the class below :)
Introducing: Craft of the Essay Intensive!
One question I’ve been asked with not a little frequency in the past year: Do you miss teaching?
Is it shapeless or is it every shape at once? Am I thinking about quantum physics or am I just getting old?