A Silent Treatment

“Vanasco’s third memoir, focusing on her relationship with her mother, is her most potent yet…. Vanasco captures the hurtful confusion of the silent treatment so clearly…. A beautiful gift to all who have struggled to care for a loved one in the way they needed.”—Booklist, Starred Review

“A captivating account of the how painful (and powerful) withholding communication can be to a family.”—Largehearted Boy, A Favorite Nonfiction Collection of 2025

“Vanasco is without question one of the most versatile and inventive memoirists working today, and her latest tells a powerful story of the gulfs that separate people and the love that bridges them.”—WBEZ Chicago

“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

“With each new book Jeannie Vanasco completely reimagines what life writing can be. I am in awe of what she has done in A Silent Treatment, which is such a nuanced and open-hearted exploration of how we tell our mothers’ stories, and what it’s like to be a daughter of complicated women. This is a book charged with the authority of love, a tribute without romanticization, and an indelible portrait of what can emerge from the terrifying blank space of silence.” —Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

“Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment deftly explores the targeted omission of speech with both insight and compassion. In bursts of poignant, staccato prose, Vanasco lyrically traces the particular and cumulative harm of withholding. A Silent Treatment is a ground-breaking, complex, and moving contribution to the genre, demonstrating her unique ability to write about and through the moral complexity of our deepest intimacies.” —Cyrus Dunham, author of A Year Without a Name

“In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco writes from within her mother’s punitive silence, an ever-present, pressurized force that radiates through the floorboards from her apartment below. Vanasco’s precise language chisels into the quiet white space of each page, conveying her urgent need to communicate while avoiding harm. In this way, the two women are mirrors to each other, caught in that age-old question: how best to love those closest to us. This is a book I’ll turn to again and again, and I’m grateful Vanasco has written it.” —Sarah Perry, author of After the Eclipse

“Articulating the pain of a removal, something that is not there, is massively challenging, and yet Jeannie Vanasco has done it—filled the scarcity of silence with an abundance of thrilling, exacting prose. A Silent Treatment is a gift for those of us who’ve been punished by the particular cruelty of silence and an opportunity for those who use this method of punishment to understand their frailty. A salve and a method of healing, this memoir will help countless people.”—Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland