Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl: A Memoir

by Jeannie Vanasco

I approach therapy the way I approached the Catholic confessional: keep it interesting. During weeks of stability, I worry about boring Adam. And I’m the one who usually ends therapy sessions, saying: Well, it looks like we’re out of time.

Suddenly I realize: all along I judged the assault’s severity based on Mark’s body—which part he used. I never judged the severity based on my body—which part he violated. I rarely believe the Suddenly I realize line in stories. But it’s true: until Adam’s question, my vagina seemed almost irrelevant.

If he’s Googled me, he knows I’m a writer. If I were him, I wouldn’t trust me.

I want to feel angry, but I’m grateful. Angry and grateful? I don’t want my reaction to Mark to disappoint other feminists. I’m supposed to be angry.

I know how messed up this is: that my exploration of the assault matters to me only if the assault mattered to Mark. It should matter to me regardless.

Her mom still has the letter. I’ll give it to you, she says. I just can’t bring myself to go back in her room right now.

But maybe there’s not much the perpetrator can say. That’s why jail time exists.

So, I believed in boundaries—could even set boundaries. The problem: in the moment, I found it hard to articulate what those boundaries were—because doing so might embarrass a man. I treated men how I treated literature: I feared misinterpreting their intentions.

I’m too embarrassed to share this transcript with anyone, which is why I should share it.

This isn’t meant to sting, Adam says, but it’s inevitably going to sting a bit, but I just want to see if I can open your mind to a different angle. I think there are times when you reflect on—let’s use your first boyfriend, how you’ve told me that he came from a broken home and he’d threaten to kill himself and somehow it felt like your responsibility to stay with him. I don’t know, there are probably a number of examples in your life where you feel drawn to that thinking. It doesn’t feel like it inside of you—even though I’m not inside of you, I know that it doesn’t feel like it—but it’s kind of like a grandiosity. It has more of a feeling of compassion, like a need to help. And maybe you think, Fuck you, I’m not grandiose. But it doesn’t feel like that. The idea is that you become a linchpin to somebody else’s survival.

The grandiosity that I see in you sometimes manifests in helping others, not in helping yourself. It’s an alternate universe; when you’re doing things for you, it never happens. When you feel like you need to do something for others, that’s usually when the grandiosity kicks in. Yours is usually wrapped up in guilt or a sense of duty.

But why does it carry too much shock value? she asks. Why should the reader be shocked? Never mind. I think you should keep it. If the reader feels shocked, then that’s good.

I think there’s something fascinating about how every time you talk about helping him, I just want to say, Stop, stop, stop, stop. Which I think is great that the reader has that experience. But eventually, I want the memoirist to know at least as much as I do.

At the risk of sounding sentimental, here’s what I’m learning: This book isn’t just about my friendship with Mark. It’s about my friendships with other women. I wish I’d shared the first transcript with Sarah before calling Mark again.

That’s what I want, she says, as a reader, for the character. I want her off of the circle of is he a good person, is he not a good person. I want him to become beside the point. I want him in the past. I want the narrator 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.

My friend Tom calls, asks how this project is going. It’s okay, I tell him. Actually, it’s not. I feel like I’ll disappoint my friends—and women in general—by including so much of Mark’s voice. You’re not going to please everybody, Tom says. And that’s a good thing.

Yeah, he says. They’ve executed friends of mine. I don’t agree with ISIS at all. But in order to fix a problem, you have to understand the enemy.

Suddenly Mark approaches. I remain seated. He sits without expecting me to stand. He smiles, and I see where a friend once was.