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.)