The book comes out one year after the Kavanaugh hearings. She decides, as she prepares to contact him, that talking to her so that she might write this book is what Mark owes her rather than another apology. Early on, she recognizes that she is afraid of writing “yet another story about yet another sexual assault.” Of course, such a book can still have new things to say, but Vanasco determines her book will “stand out” if it includes Mark. She thinks she wants Mark to feel what she is feeling. What Vanasco is after when she uses the word, it seems to me, more closely resembles those Latin roots. Being able to feel together may sound like empathy, but its original Latin meaning was lost as the word was adapted into first French and then English. It is derived from the Latin words com (with) and sentire (to feel). The word “consent,” through its Latin etymology, carries a subtlety of meaning that isn’t covered simply by the idea of someone agreeing to do something.

She knows that she doesn’t want another apology-he has already apologized-but she is after something that he denied to her the night of the assault. But what if the person being written about did a villainous thing? With powerful prose, a writer can make someone into a villain, and the subject will not have the ability to fight back. A published writer has access to an audience that her subject typically does not. Even before she reaches out to Mark, she catalogues the reasons why she wants to include him in the memoir she is about to write, including an acknowledgment of the inherent power imbalance between a writer and their subject. And that’s what this is about: boundaries,” she writes.

In Things We Didn’t Talk About, Vanasco lets readers inside her head as she considers approaching the man she decides to call “Mark,” a name with purpose. As readers learn early in her newest work, released October 1, she refused to discuss the rape with any of the therapists she saw throughout her 20s. In that work, she explored the outer edges of grief as she documented the impact of her father’s death when she was just 18 and her struggles with mental illness. Vanasco published a previous memoir, The Glass Eye, in 2017. If sexual violence is part of your experience, and you had the opportunity to ask the person who hurt you one question, what would it be? What if the person who raped you had also been your best friend at the time? What then? These basic questions-and a host of smart, nuanced follow-ups-serve as the premise behind Jeannie Vanasco’s new memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl. Content note: This article contains a graphic description of sexual assault.

The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco