Jeannie Vanasco will read from her newest memoir, A Silent Treatment, and will be joined in conversation with University of Iowa Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Mira y Lopez. Tin House gives this summary of A Silent Treatment:

“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.”

Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland, praises A Silent Treatment as “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,” while Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning, says: “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.”