Jeannie Vanasco: Thanks for inviting me to do this. I’m a memoirist and a creative writing professor. A Silent Treatment is my third book. I never thought I’d write one memoir, and now here I am with a fourth under contract.

            In all my memoirs, I’m thinking through a question, one that carries some internal conflict. With A Silent Treatment, the conflict arrived when my mom moved in with me and started using the silent treatment. I asked myself, “Why does she keep doing this?” and “Why am I so obsessed with wanting to be a good daughter?” and “Why, if I’m obsessed with being a good daughter, am I writing a book showing my mom at her worst?” I’m very much of the philosophy: if something is getting in my way, it is my way.

PE: That is a wonderful introduction, because it lends so well into many of the themes and topics that I picked up while reading A Silent Treatment. I have the book here, and it’s probably so marked up that I probably couldn’t lend it to anyone. There’s so much good stuff in it. I really enjoyed reading it! Your introduction is great because it also leans into some of the questions I wrote up. Some of them are inspired by your book talk at George Mason last week.

            One of the main themes was conflict, as you mentioned. Of course, the main conflict is your conflict with your mother. But you also mentioned all these other small conflicts as well, with other people, passersby, neighbors, your partner. With the conflict often not boiling over, I saw it as simmering, what was the process of figuring out where these other smaller conflicts come in to push along this overarching story?

JV: I knew the book couldn’t be, “My mom’s not talking to me, my mom’s not talking to me, my mom’s not talking to me.” How boring that would be—and it’d misrepresent my experience. Conflict often radiates outward. My mom’s silent treatment, for example, influenced my interpretations of the world around me. I’d assume people were mad at me, or I’d feel on edge about potentially saying the wrong thing to someone and destroying that relationship. I tried to bring in that anxiety. I didn’t make up conflict. I just considered the different forms of conflict. I’ll give an example. A draft of the early pages was so tedious to read, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Then I noticed I hadn’t introduced any conflict between my partner, Chris, and me—even though he was very present. I inserted a scene that I hadn’t thought to write: a moment when he and I disagreed about how to handle my mom’s silent treatment. The scene between him and me had happened. I didn’t make it up. I just forgot about it.

PE: That’s perfect. I think it’s really interesting to see how, while reading, you focus on this main conflict of your mother’s silence, but it’s not the only thing you do in life. And I think that’s a really good way to connect, to use a character, because it’s like, “Wow, everyone has had to struggle through something and still had to do all of the other stuff in their life.” I thought that was very compelling how when you have this thing weighing you down, how do you go about everything else? Especially when you are trying to actively write the book.

            It’s very much a book about writing the memoir, which I really enjoyed how you did that. You clearly laid out that you have this deal with your publisher. You are trying to write the book, and it’s not going exactly as planned. And right from the beginning, you tell your mother the subject of the book, and she says don’t pull any punches. I think you wrote, “If I didn’t want you to write about it, I shouldn’t have done it.”

JV: Yeah, I feel very lucky she was so open to the book. I feel very lucky.

PE: I couldn’t imagine doing that. I think if I were to write something similar, and I think a lot of people have said similar things, it’s hard to write a narrative when you’re worrying about how to portray people or how people might receive it. How did you navigate the narrator’s awareness of writing the memoir and telling the story as truthfully as possible?

JV: Trying to write about my mom while she lived with me introduced a whole new level of stress. After my reading at George Mason, one of your classmates asked me, “If your mom had told you not to write the book, would you have listened?” And I said I would have listened. But I’m not saying that other memoirists need permission. If there were clear rules about writing memoir, I’d be out of a teaching job. For me, permission is important—at least from the people I love—but memoirists will have different points of view on this, and that’s okay. That’s good, actually. Situations differ because human relationships are complicated. Even though my mom gave me permission, I still debated what was permissible.

            Writing fairly about anyone—including oneself—is hard because people are so complicated. My portrayal of someone is my interpretation of them. It’s not them. And I think a lot of readers understand that, but some readers will conflate the characters with the actual people. I’m not saying that’s a dumb thing to do, but I am often thinking about how constructed a memoir is, and I think that’s why I resort to meta writing. I want to remind the reader that this is just my version of events.

            I’m sorry, your question was originally, how do you handle writing about people in your life?

PE: How do you navigate this awareness of writing the memoir, both you as a narrator and you as a person. And then, how do you tell that story as truthfully as possible?

JV: I like that you use the word “narrator.” When I’m writing the book, I’m trying to get as close as I can to the voice in my head. I’m not thinking of myself as a narrator. I think of my narrator during revision. But to write a draft, I need to be vulnerable. I need to risk embarrassment. Embarrassment usually arrives when I think about the story or events from another person’s point of view. I ask myself, “What’s the worst thing that this person could or would say about me? Or has said about me?” I then think about the ways in which I’ve failed them. I’m not suggesting we, as memoirists, should be unnecessarily hard on ourselves. But I do think we owe it to others to consider their points of view.

PE: That very much hits all the parts of the question. Because, at the end of the day, you’re telling the story, your story, your side of things. But you are still writing a creative work. You do have to balance how you do this in a way that makes the most sense to tell the story, to get your side across. I feel like a lot of people outside of nonfiction looking in, they think it’s like, “This is what happened. This has to be the truth.” Or they see it as some old, dusty history book: this is what happened to who and what and when. No, we’re telling something fun. We’re telling something interesting. We’re telling a story the best way we can. I thought your answer was perfectly hit on that.

JV: Thank you. Every time I write a memoir, I search for the right form for my version of the story. When my mom inflicted silence, she felt extremely present to me. The challenge then became: How do I bring her voice into the narrative when she’s not talking to me—to emphasize how present she felt? Putting some of her dialogue into parentheticals that interrupt the prose—stuff that I remembered she’d either said or written—that helped me find a form.

PE: That’s really interesting. One of the things that I was taught in the first semester of my MFA program is that on experimental work and non-standard storytelling, like standard body essays and all that, is that the harder it is to tell the story, the more likely you’re going to do things differently. I think reading this, I could really tell this was the best way for you to tell the story.

JV: I needed to hear that. I’m in the middle of recording my audiobook, and it’s been hard. My version of hell is having to read my books straight through.

PE: And this was something you mentioned at George Mason last week that very much goes off what you just said. You mentioned something along the lines of “who you are as the writer in relation to the story and the narrative.” I’ve never really heard anything like that before, but it made perfect sense to me. I was wondering if you could kind of go into that idea more specifically, and how it’s like, impacted your writing.

JV: Vivian Gornick writes about this in The Situation and the Story—about deciding what your identity is in relation to the story you’re telling. With A Silent Treatment, my primary identity was my mother’s daughter. With my first book, The Glass Eye, my primary identity was my father’s daughter. Thinking about my narrator and my character in this way helps me focus a book—though I don’t want the focus to be so narrow that I misrepresent my experience. But a memoir is selective. It has to be.

At one point when I was writing A Silent Treatment, I really debated, and I don’t know if this is quite getting at your question so follow up with me if I don’t get to it, but there was a point at which I was trying to decide whether to mention that I share a name with a dead half-sister. And when I found these letters that my dad had saved—cruel letters that my mom wrote for him to find—I thought about his daughter Jeanne. In one of the letters, my mom wrote, “He ruins everything he touches.” Jeanne died in a car accident when she was 16, and he blamed himself for her death. And his first wife blamed him for giving Jeanne permission to go out that night. When I read, “He ruins everything he touches”—I thought about Jeanne, but that was the only time I thought about her while writing A Silent Treatment. I knew that if I brought her into the manuscript, my dad would become a bigger part of the book. And I’d already written a book focused on him.

            You also mentioned the narrator. Can you refresh my memory again? I feel bad because I must have explained something, and now I don’t remember how I explained it.

PE: My problem is I’m also trying to refresh myself too, but what I think I was trying to get at, because it is nonfiction about yourself, it’s figuring out, since you are the narrator, who is this you? How are you figuring out how this narrator operates?

JV: With each memoir I write, I’m getting closer and closer to the now. The distance between my narrator and my character keeps narrowing. Thinking about who am I in relation to the story helps me determine what can enter the “now” of the story. Knowing my identity in relation to the story helps me notice more in my day-to-day life. That’s probably why I feel most alive when I’m writing.

PE: The idea of framing it as “mother’s daughter” is very interesting. It shows how everyone’s a multifaceted individual, but you have to pick one side to tell the story. And specifically, your mother’s daughter, I think was a really interesting way of framing the narrative. I usually never think that much, and now I’m trying to look at what I’ve written and say, “Who was I? How was I telling this story?”

            One thing you also mentioned was what to include in the story. This also goes back to the reading last week. I think we were discussing your cats, actually. I think you said you could put them in much more, you could put in other animals, other family members. But you’re just trying to figure out who feels comfortable to be in the book. I habitually add way too many people. It’s like a cast list at the end of a movie when I’m writing sometimes. That was good to remind myself. But in that idea, I was wondering, what was your process to figure out who needs to be included and who doesn’t? Or if there’s anyone who barely made the cut, or you did want to have them in the story, but couldn’t?

JV: A lot of important people in my life didn’t make the cut. I’d ask myself, “Are any of them, as characters, performing the same function?” This goes back to varying the conflict. And if I’m going to include someone who’s a minor character, I ask myself, “What have they said or done that’s revealing of my character or the themes of the book?”

            I’ll give you an example. I had this colleague who, at a committee meeting, pointed out the wrinkles on my forehead. He called them “stress lines.” He’d said far, far worse things to me, but the wrinkles comment seemed relevant—because one of the themes of the book is aging. This was embarrassing to write about, but I bought fake bangs, wore them around the house. So I included his character almost for comedic relief—because my obsession with my wrinkles said more about me than it said about him. So this became another form of conflict. When Chris said, “You don’t have lines on your forehead,” I said something like, “This is why I don’t share work in progress with you.” The fake bangs allowed me to address other anxieties.

It’s hard, though, to know what to include. As a writer, you make choices, and then the choices you make you have to work with, have to live with. I just do the best I can.

PE: That was really, really cool! Putting characters and scenes, and the work they do for the novel or story, on the same level, is something I’ve never thought about like that.

            I’ve got one more question about A Silent Treatment, and then one question about the new project you mentioned earlier. For the last question about A Silent Treatment, one thing you repeated throughout the book was a quote from a podcast: “Artists tend to put their fingers in the wounds in the silences.” As I read, I was thinking alongside you as you told the story, what does that quote mean? The quote is compelling because it’s something you hear, but once you put it on the page, it doesn’t make sense until you get the definitive interpretation. Hearing your different interpretations throughout the book was a helpful way to unpack the idea. But then you finally get a reply from the podcaster, and he’s like, “This is how I think of the quote, but your idea is really cool too!” That reply almost feels like a non-answer. So, I was wondering, how do you interpret that quote now that the book is out, now that you’re moving on, or as you wrote, was there some shift in your interpretation?

JV: I haven’t really thought about it since publishing the book. When I was writing the book, I thought about the quote in relation to my mom. For me, right now, I think the quote is about taking emotional risks in writing—going to the places I don’t want to go. The quote also prompts another question: whose wounds are we putting our fingers in? Is wound-pressing an act of empathy? Who are we hurting by doing this? And is it even fair to put our fingers in our wounds? I like that there isn’t one meaning, that the reader can make of it what they make of it. And I want the reader to participate in the meaning-making. When I’m writing, I’m often thinking, “What do I not answer?” And usually the simple answer is, “What I can’t answer.” I can’t answer what that quote means, per se, except I like that you can interpret it different ways. 

PE: I love the idea of that conversation that you want to make the reader do some work. Make them do some of the thinking, too. But you don’t want the reader to think, “Did you even think about it?” When discussing books, essays, TV, movies, or anything else with people, I often hear people say, “This makes me think too much.” Or “I don’t want to think too much.”

            I think that’s a trait of good creative work. An important part of artistry is that you got to make people think. I appreciate the balancing between making the reader do work, but not doing too much work for them.

            Onto my last question. At your reading at George Mason, you gave us a little snippet from the new project, which sounds wonderful. Is there anything you can tell us about the project, or what we can expect?

JV: My editor has the same question. Here’s how I sold the next book: In my twenties, I struggled to navigate government support—Social Security Disability, Medicaid, free public clinics—and the mental health system—psych hospitals, partial hospitalization programs, sliding-scale therapy—while trying to pursue a career in literary publishing and keep my bipolar I diagnosis a secret from friends, family, and coworkers. What I think the book is also about: the ways in which I treated my bipolar I diagnosis as a form of self-knowledge. It’ll likely have a lot to do with interpreting human behavior through a name or label.

            What’s most interesting to me, though, is why am I questioning my diagnosis now? Almost twenty years ago exactly was when I first received a diagnosis of bipolar I. I have the benefit of hindsight perspective, and hindsight tends to make everything look a lot neater, more obvious, than it really is. And, for a brief time, I contemplated going off my meds—maybe because I had this idea that there was another self, a truer version of myself, that I wasn’t living.

             I might have mentioned this at George Mason, but I’ve had a lot of readers respond to A Silent Treatment by offering diagnoses. One said, “You know, you really described your ADHD so well.” I told her, “I don’t have ADHD.” And she said, “No, you definitely have ADHD.” Another reader said, “You definitely have OCD.” And some readers asked if I thought my mom had borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder. It’s just interesting how frequently we talk with the language of diagnoses. I’m not saying that’s always a bad thing. I simply find it fascinating.

PE: It does seem like the idea really hits the taboo of mental health, but also this growing awareness of it. As you were saying, people seem to be diagnosing you or your mother when they read the book. Is that taboo? I’ve even seen it in my own life, too. Mental health often seems to be both talked about and not talked about. Stigmatized and not stigmatized. I think the way you described your project, it seems like it’s going to be a really interesting insight into all of that.

JV: As human beings, we want to categorize—it helps us understand things, and I get it. For a lot of people, a diagnosis helps make their pain legible. I was talking with a friend about this, and she was saying, “I can’t tell my boss, ‘I can’t come to work because I’m crying.’ But if I say, ‘Oh, I have major depression, and it’s documented,’ now my boss will have to let me miss work.”

             The thing is, I don’t have an argument about how mental illness is or should be discussed. Ultimately, when I’m writing a memoir, I’m trying to capture an experience.

PE: I think that hits the idea that creating these works of art is also a way to help ourselves figure out parts of our lives, figure out things that have happened to us, our own experiences. And then David also has a question.

PE: Hearing you talk at George Mason, and hearing you during this interview, I think that you exhibit a lot of empathy for the people around you. At the same time, and I don’t want this to sound wrong, you do always think of, like, yourself in these situations too. There’s an empathy for other people in situations and their complexities, and an empathy for yourself in those same situations and their complexities. Do you see that empathy as related? And how important is empathy to memoir writing?

JV: Empathizing with others helps you have patience with yourself, I think. We all make mistakes, and we have to be able to live with ourselves to keep going. If we’re constantly feeling guilty about things, it’s going to be hard to move on and do better next time.

            I really don’t know how one would write a memoir without empathy. I wouldn’t want to read a memoir lacking empathy. At the same time, not all the characters in a memoir need to be dynamic. For example, the colleague who was rude to me—I don’t think he’s an awful person. I just don’t think his complexity is relevant to the story I’m telling.

PE: Just you showing those two are inseparable things: empathy is ingredient zero, before you begin writing something that you really can’t do without. I do appreciate that too, that this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to make every single character the most complicated person in the world, right? Your relationship with the story is the central thing with memoirs, while still thinking of other people’s relations around that story.

JV: Exactly. I’ve said that my next book will be my last memoir, but I doubt that’s true. If I can’t get a question out of my brain, I don’t know what else to do but write about it—and there’s something about the memoir form, about using the truth as a formal constraint, that I find exciting.

PE: Beautifully said! Thank you so much! This has been wonderful. I found so much good in this conversation. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us for this interview, to talk about your book and your upcoming book! It’s super exciting, and we can’t wait to get the results for the competition this year! Thank you!