A Silent Treatment

A Memoir

De: Jeannie Vanasco

Narrado por: Jeannie Vanasco

"Unspeakably compelling."―Ed Park

“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

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.

©2025 by Jeannie Vanasco. (P)2025 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Enthralling…. uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds."―Publishers Weekly

"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