1011 S Washington Ave
Open Book, 1st Floor
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
Free and open to the public.
Milkweed Books is thrilled to present authors Jeannie Vanasco (Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Tin House) and Angela Pelster (Limber, Sarabande) for a reading and conversation in the bookstore.
Friday, October 18 | 7:00 p.m.
Milkweed Books | Open Book, 1st Floor
1011 Washington Ave, Minneapolis, 55415
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
❗NOTE: This event will include discussions of sexual assault.❗
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Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
Jeannie Vanasco has had the same nightmare since she was a teenager. She startles awake, saying his name. It is always about him: one of her closest high school friends, a boy named Mark. A boy who raped her.
When her nightmares worsen, Jeannie decides―after fourteen years of silence―to reach out to Mark. He agrees to talk on the record and meet in person. “It’s the least I can do,” he says.
Jeannie details her friendship with Mark before and after the assault, asking the brave and urgent question: Is it possible for a good person to commit a terrible act? Jeannie interviews Mark, exploring how rape has impacted his life as well as her own. She examines the language surrounding sexual assault and pushes against its confines, contributing to and deepening the #MeToo discussion.
Exacting and courageous, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is part memoir, part true crime record, and part testament to the strength of female friendships―a recounting and reckoning that will inspire us to ask harder questions and interrogate our biases. Jeannie Vanasco examines and dismantles long-held myths of victimhood, discovering grace and power in this genre-bending investigation into the trauma of sexual violence.
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?Jeannie Vanasco is the author of The Glass Eye: A Memoir (Tin House, 2017). Her work has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times Modern Love, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and is an assistant professor at Towson University. Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl is her second book.
?Angela Pelster’s most recent book Limber (Sarabande, 2018) won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for best new book in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review and The Gettysburg Review amongst others. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and was recently awarded a fellowship in nonfiction to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant for 2016-17. She lives with her family in St Paul, Minnesota and teaches at Hamline University.