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

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

 
I’ve had my eye on this one for a while – thanks to @allisonreadsdc for originally putting it on my radar. And I’ve passed by it a number of times on the shelf at work without checking it out. But I don’t know…just recently, the time felt right. 
 
In this memoir, Vanasco recalls being sexually assaulted – raped, as she gets used to calling it through these pages – by a close friend in college. While comparing it to a number of other instances in which she was sexually harassed, assaulted, and raped over her lifetime (which, take a moment to just sit with how horrible it is that that’s a reality that she just has had to…live with), this one stands out to her. In this case, she felt that the friendship she had with her rapist, prior to that incident, was affecting the way she saw it, affecting her ability to really be angry about it (like she felt like she should be, like she was about the other times), and she wondered if they were, in fact, the friends she thought they were, if he was able to do something like that to her. So, she decides to reach out to him, to ask, to see if his recollections of their relationship match hers, to see what reasons/excuses he has for his actions. After years of no communication, she reaches out to ask him if he’s ok being interviewed for this memoir. And she records it all, along with her process and reactions, in this book.  
 
Let me just start by saying, this was an absolutely stunning reading experience. First, the writing. Vanasco opens and closes with her own memories, process and how she arrived at deciding to write this, and how she imagines things going. Then, she produces exact transcriptions of her phone conversations and in-person meetings with her rapist (pseudonym: Mark), with breaks throughout for her to add in her reflections/remembrances/responses and conversations with friends and mentors about the process and transcriptions, etc. Those sections are written in a sort of a unique poetic prose, with shades of a novel written in verse, but not quite to that extent. The style allows for a cutting to the core of things - the jumbled, scattered, conflicting feelings and reactions - in a way that feels real and to the point, cutting out unnecessary words and transitions. It makes every line hit that much harder. And it was already a hard-hitting read. There so many passages and reflections that I highlighted and noted…you’ll get a taste for it throughout the review and at the end, when my “pull quotes” section hits and there are many examples. Just, phew.  
 
As far as my personal thoughts and reactions while reading…they were legion. I took many breaks while reading to process and take notes on that. It was a really intense and reflective reading experience for me. I want to keep them all together here, for posterity and revisiting, so I am going to just reproduce them all here in a list format. If you are interested, please keep reading! If you aren’t…skip to the end and just know that I really recommend reading this yourself. 
 
-          There were so many key insights into what makes a telling of sexual assault/rape. Vanasco wants to make it unique and believable and worth telling, but she also questions – profoundly – why it’s necessary to meet all those expectations in the first place. Who gets to tell the story and who decides that and to what effect is it told? 
-          The way that Vanasco explores how language and perspective matter is really insightful. She speaks about sexual assault or, as definitions change, a rape…and how regardless of the definitions and language used, the act, and its after affects, remain the same. But she is somehow not confident calling her sexual assault a rape, in this case. That difficulty is refreshing in its openness and self-examination, and comforting in its recognizability (which I’m as uncomfortable admitting as she clearly was to communicate it to begin with). 
-          “We need to hear stories about guys who aren’t be try powerful.” I mean…what a message! Sexual assault is clearly happening at rates high enough that many ‘regular’ people (mostly guys) are perpetrators, but with the airtime celebrities get when their stories come out, are we conditioned to not bother about the regular guys? And are they getting away with more because of it? 
-          “What stories do the men tell themselves?”  This is a perspective we have never really gotten (What rapist/abuser would write a memoir of this on their own?). It’s breaking silences I didn’t even realize were there in a way that is so emotionally complex and reflective and, while perhaps without answers, still quite enlightening. 
-          I am found the power dynamics introspection fascinating. I can’t get over it – when Mark had the power, he used it and assaulted Vanasco. Now that she has the power, she’s trying so hard not to abuse it (and is almost angrier at herself about not using it more, about how careful she’s being about his feelings, than she is at him for abusing it in the first place). And yet, she continues softly anyways – an observation, not a criticism, that was fascinating. 
-          The aspect of friendships with other women that come to the forefront, as Vanasco processes the writing of this memoir with them, is a surprise theme that is so tender and really filled me up. 
-          Vanasco’s empathy being sparked by her need to prove that their friendship meant something, and his showing remorse, makes it harder to be angry at Mark than a developmentally flat “big bad” guy. But does that history of friendship and/or having remorse make it more ok for him to get away with what he did? 
-          The way thinking about this one event of rape opens the memory to so many more violations of a sexual nature, “larger” and “smaller,” suffered and survived and forgotten as a matter of course over the years (for self-preservation or due to of the sheer number of and impossibility of remembering them all) is absolutely infuriating. 
-          The repetitiveness of their conversations is interesting. Is that due to tiptoeing around the sensitivity and guilt and embarrassment of the topic or part of the nature of qualitative/interview based research? Or both? 
-          “It’s so much work to come forward. And yet a lot of people blame the victims for not reporting sexual assault, as if it’s entirely their responsibility to rid the world of rapists.” / “We end up identifying with the aggressor. We’ll get angry with the victims because she’s not doing the work of coming forward.” And that includes like, not telling the rapist’s family/friends, so they ‘get away’ clean. But when the only option to avoid that is to do so much work on your own end, after being the victim in the first place…like, of course its underreported and no one wants to deal with that. Also, a great simile about it being the same as when someone has to do all the work to recover from an injury caused by a wreck that was someone else’s fault. Even going after that person for damages doesn’t change how much healing work the victim must do.  
 
I cannot put my finger on how, exactly, but this reminds me of Febos’ writing in Girlhood a bit. Or, at least, the reading experience – a deeply resonant and impactful one – was very similar for me. I’d recommend them as comp reads. It’s captivating, the complexities and nuances and contradictions and perspectives that Vanasco delves into. Her growth, but unresolved “end,” of this memoir is perfectly authentic. Overall, this is an incredibly emotional reading experience. More women than not will find a level of relatability in these pages, yet it is simultaneously specifically one person’s complicated journey. And just…wow. What a stirring book. 
 
“I want this to be artful, but the artistry can’t interfere with the honesty. I’m not sure how to do this, but I want to know how to do this.” 
 
“Sometimes I question whether my feelings are too big for the crime. […] …but I want to be honest here - because I doubt I’m the only woman sexually assaulted by a friend and confused about her feelings.” 
 
“Don’t let them twist what you know is true.” 
 
“I treated men how I treated literature: I feared misinterpreting their intentions.” 
 
“The best I can figure: duplicity, intentional or not, is part of the human experience.” 
 
“I want him to become beside the point. I want him in the past. I want the reader to reappropriate her own narrative. I want her to stop listening to him and recognize that in giving him so much voice, it's a reenactment, in a way, of the rape. Where he talks more than she does.” 
 
“He smiles, and I see where a friend once was.” 
 
 “That it’s easier for the guilty person to move on, or at least to pretend it didn’t happen. It’s harder for the innocent person.” 
 
“But that’s why I’m interested in the project. Because I can’t work out my feelings.” 
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