Shelf Awareness: enlightenment for readers

Things We Didn't Talk About
When I Was a Girl: A Memoir
by Jeannie Vanasco

Fourteen years after her friend Mark raped her, Jeannie Vanasco (The Glass Eye) asks him if he'll talk to her about it. The result is Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, a nuanced effort to come to terms with Vanasco's own trauma; her decision to include Mark's voice in her memoir is only one of its surprising elements. Editor Masie Cochran says, "To me, the idea was devastating and captivating. Why are we not talking about these things? Jeannie destroys simplistic, binary ways of thinking about victimhood and perpetrators. She invites--demands, really--all of us all to be more rigorous in our cultural investigation and self-excavation." This book is self-aware, scrupulously questioning every assumption at every turn. Courageous, smart and painstaking, it's some of the most compelling required reading you'll encounter. --Julia Kastner

(Tin House Books, $24.95 hardcover, 9781947793453,
October 1, 2019)