Jeannie Vanasco has unintentionally built a reputation for an unusual degree of grace and forgiveness than your average human (me). Most notably, her second book, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, is one in which she investigates her rape and interviews her rapist. Over the course of the book, which she wrote in eight months (perhaps no coincidence that she moved through it quickly—can you imagine such an assignment?), she develops a working relationship with this man in search of understanding of what happened.

Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment—a memoir about her mother’s chronic silence toward Jeannie while living in the basement apartment of the home she shares with Jeannie and her husband—is, again, an interrogation of her own anger, resentment, and handling of a v

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