A silent treatment A memoir

Memoirist Vanasco (Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl) delivers an enthralling examination of her complicated relationship with her mother. After Vanasco's father died, her mother moved into an apartment below Vanasco's home. Once settled, she frequently stopped speaking to Vanasco following minor disagreements or misunderstandings--sometimes for months at a time. In response, Vanasco and her partner, Chris, became detectives, listening for signs of life through their floorboards, scouring the premises for her mother's handwritten notes, and trying to separate instances of mismatched schedules from deliberate snubs. Much of the book finds Vanasco analyzing her mother's past while trying to make sense of her present behavior. She stumbles on unaddressed letters that indicate early trouble in her parents' relationship, turns to friends for their takes on her mother, and, most intriguingly, grapples with the project of writing it all down, openly questioning how much to reveal while weathering her mother's sometimes grateful, sometimes dismissive responses to having a book written about her. While Vanasco's subject matter is familiar, her account is uncommonly revealing, with each new anecdote successfully capturing the admiration and anxiety that can underpin parent-child bonds. This is difficult to shake. (Sept.)

Suffering in silence. As in her previous two memoirs, Vanasco focuses on pain--the pain she feels when her mother, who has moved into the basement apartment of her house, stops speaking to her and her ever-patient partner, Chris, for weeks, or sometimes months, at a time. In the five years she lived there, Vanasco reports, the silences have added up to a year and a half. With her mother's permission, Vanasco engages in writing about the silent treatment, in an effort to understand her mother's motivation for not speaking and her own emotional response to the silence and to the anger or anguish that evokes it. She consults friends, experts, and even her Google Home Mini, but finds their answers only partly helpful. One psychologist suggests that wielding silence is a kind of power: "When you highlight how their actions impact you, they'll keep doing it to remain in control. The more out of control you appear to be, the more in control they feel." She tries to connect the silent treatment to her mother's being abused as a child, beaten for even the smallest infraction, and abused, as well, by her first husband. Widowed after Vanasco's father died, her mother was lonely, prompting the move. Now, she complains that she's still lonely, unhappy living in the basement, and that she feels useless. But when Vanasco finds classes, a volunteer opportunity, and a book club, her mother is dismissive. In probing the history of their mother-daughter relationship, Vanasco reveals an unusual complication: Although the author calls herself Jeannie, her birth name is the same as her mother's--Barbara--causing confusion for doctors, banks, the gym where they both are members--and, it appears, intensifying an interdependence that both women struggle to resist. An elliptical, meditative portrayal of wounded women. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.