Review by Katie Smith
Tin House Books / October, 2019 / 360 pp
“There’s nothing original about my story, and that’s the point.”
That’s how writer Jeannie Vanasco starts off the second part of her memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, in which she interviews her rapist. Her story, that of a lifetime of sexual trauma at the hands of the men in her life, is horrifyingly common, given that one out of every six women in the United States has survived attempted, if not completed, rape.
Yet, I can think of no one who has then painstakingly interviewed the perpetrator—in this case a high school friend—at length about why they did it. Intentionally placed within the larger context of the #MeToo movement, Vanasco’s memoir takes a horrible narrative and makes it her own, asking complicated, fraught questions of herself and her former friend. She also asks larger questions about the kinds of stories of sexual violence we’re used to hearing in wider culture.
I have never read a book as experimental, brave, and complicated as Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl. Vanasco does what so many survivors can only dream of, whether fondly or in their worst nightmares. Over three phone calls, a handful of emails and texts, and two days of in-person interviewing, she confronts “Mark” (a pseudonym) about the rape, their friendship, and how his action has affected both of their lives.
That last part—learning about both of their lives, including Mark’s—is a tough sell. My copy of the book is covered with exclamation points, underlining, and “ugh” in the margins where readers get his sob story. For instance, Mark sends Vanasco some photos he’s taken as a way to process the feelings that have come up from their conversations—a decayed power station in ruins next to a train track, probably in black and white—and she actually examines them and thanks him for sharing. I wanted to throw the book across the room.
But hearing from Mark is a necessary evil; Vanasco’s examination of his guilt and motivation behind raping her is worth it. The attack took place during a house party full of Vanasco’s closest friends, in the basement where Mark lived, on the first night she’d ever been drunk. Some of what she hoped to explore with this project was how this could have happened in such a “safe” place, by a friend she loved, and how she’s supposed to feel about it after:
I’m writing this because I want to interview Mark, interrogate Mark, confirm that Mark feels terrible—because if he does feel terrible, then our friendship mattered to him. Also, I want him to call the assault significant—because if he does, I might stop feeling ashamed about the occasional flashbacks and nightmares...I doubt I’m the only woman sexually assaulted by a friend and confused about her feelings.
A specific question she returns to throughout the memoir is whether the rape was premeditiated. Mark lived in the basement and took the trouble of enlisting another friend to help him carry Vanasco down the stairs to sleep off her drunkenness. How long had he been planning this?
“[T]he more I think about it, the more I’m certain that some version of what happened was in my head,” Mark admits to the author in the transcript. “That something might happen. I don’t think I thought, ‘If I could just get her downstairs, I could do this.’ I’m sure I thought downstairs was to my advantage.” No one can know what was in his head then, or even what is in his head now, but his words help Vanasco, and the reader, to understand his mindset. She interprets his admission to mean that getting her alone was premeditated, and that he clearly wanted something to happen between them, even if he wasn’t clear on what it would be.
Vanasco examines her own feelings in equal measure to Mark’s, delivering a truly metatextual memoir that, at times, is written more like the notes for a book than a completed work. Considering the topic’s nature, it makes complete sense: the fragmentary writing reflects the author’s conflict. And her conflict is visceral—about her friendship with Mark, why and how to forgive him, why she can’t get angry, and, transparently, how to write a #MeToo story. The latter truly sets Vanasco’s work apart, delving into the mechanics of which stories that movement allows for and excludes.
If you can’t tell, Things We Didn’t Talk About is messy. Vanasco allows her rapist to have a voice in her own story, and while the result is a powerful interrogation of power and gender, Mark doesn’t make it easy.
“Already, I feel the need to stop,” she writes early on. “If I botch some detail (Was it a blackboard or a whiteboard? Did our physics teacher use a projector?) I risk discrediting myself—and then nothing I say will be believed.”
The result of her struggle is equal parts memoir, meditation on writing through trauma, feedback from Vanasco’s friends, and the transcript of her interviews with Mark. The back-and-forth between prose and Q&A takes the reader out of the story every few pages before bringing us back into Vanasco’s narration. At times, that is frustrating—especially during the particularly cringey sections where the author grants Mark too much leeway. Yet the hybridity also allows the reader to take a breath from a very intense confrontation between the author and her rapist.
The core of Vanasco’s memoir is friendship and solidarity among women and femmes. She constantly seeks feedback on this wild project from friends and colleagues, which often pushes the narrative in more interesting or creative directions. When her friends Molly and Jung read the section where Mark shows Vanasco his photography, they take the reaction right out of my mouth: “I find it annoying that he went out and took photos,” and “If the rape is all he remembers of you...then what does that say about your friendship?”
The author continues, “I think of Aristotle’s belief that friends provide us with self-knowledge that might otherwise be hard to grasp. We deceive ourselves of our motives, even when we don’t mean to.”
Vanasco’s friends check in on her constantly throughout this project and demonstrate a level of support that I could only wish for every survivor of rape. In turn, she chronicles her conversations with female college students, who often disclose their sexual assaults in the author’s creative nonfiction classes, where her second job, beyond teaching them how to write, inevitably becomes reinforcing their power, listening to their stories, and offering help to report the rape or find therapy. So, of course, when she considers her goals for Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, her ideal audience is college women. Her message?
“Don’t worry about protecting the guy who assaulted you.”
Katie Smith is a Philadelphia-based writer and immigration paralegal. Find her on Instagram at @realmoaningmyrtle for cat pics.