About The Book

A Silent Treatment: A Memoir: Jeannie Vanasco's mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie's home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother's childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and--in big and small ways--succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again.

"A Silent Treatment confronts both the complexity of family and the quandary of capturing a family's shapeshifting and perplexing love, their truthful and devoted love, in the amber of memoir." – Megha Majumdar, best-selling author of A Guardian and a Thief

About The Author

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of A Silent Treatment, which was named a best book of 2025 by NPR, Electric Literature, Largehearted Boy, and elsewhere. Her other memoirs include Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University. Her fourth book is under contract with Tin House, publisher of her other memoirs.

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The Banner Book Club is your chance to meet and speak directly with prize-winning authors about their latest books and connect with a community of fellow book lovers. It’s an opportunity to explore Maryland’s literary heritage and engage with the trusted journalism that drives positive change. You’ll be the first to know of our upcoming book club events. And it’s free!