Why Would a Woman See Her Rapist Again?
Nonfiction
A Woman Confronted Her Rapist 14 Years Later. Hither's What He Said.
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THINGS Nosotros DIDN'T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL
A Memoir
Past Jeannie Vanasco
Facing the person who betrayed you, who preyed upon yous, who haunts you: Information technology's the stuff of vengeful daydreams, built-in of nightmares. Jeannie Vanasco has had plenty of nightmares, but the story she tells in "Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl" is not one of revenge. It's about violence and forgiveness, about friendship and the unwanted title of victim, near digging deeper and deeper to seek answers — from yourself and from your bogeyman. But in this memoir, questions beget more questions, and few are sufficiently answered. Trauma cannot be tied with a tidy bow.
Vanasco was xix when one of her closest friends raped her. She gives him the pseudonym Mark ("its main definition: a purlieus. And that's what this is nearly: boundaries"), just little else has been changed to protect his privacy. Her father had just died (the subject field of her previous memoir, "The Glass Middle"). She was grappling with mental disease.
For this book, Vanasco reaches out to Mark for the first time since higher, to face up him about the drunken nighttime fourteen years before when he carried her to his basement room, penetrated her with his fingers and masturbated over her. "You're dreaming," she remembers him repeating to her as she lay still, quietly sobbing.
Vanasco and Marker substitution several emails and phone calls. They meet again in person. Many pages are devoted to conversations she has had with Mark and her friends (some contempo, some non), also as with her partner and her therapist. Woven throughout these communications are Vanasco'south inner reflections: "I can't end thinking about Hannah," she writes about her artistic nonfiction educatee who committed suicide after submitting an essay that revealed she had been raped.
Vanasco'due south prose sometimes feels like a stream-of-consciousness seesaw, leaving readers disoriented and frustrated. But nowhere virtually as disoriented and frustrated equally Vanasco feels equally she bends over backward to condolement and shield Marker, to thank him for talking with her. "I want to write about it, just I don't want to write it in a way that would be hurtful to you," she tells him. She beats herself up for this: "Hearing myself thank Marker for talking to me about sexually assaulting me, I don't know how to describe the feeling it induces. Mortified isn't stiff enough."
The properties of the #MeToo movement is non lost on Vanasco: She worries she'll "disappoint my friends — and women in general — by including so much of Marking'southward phonation," to which her journalist friend, who has reported on ISIS, replies that "in order to fix a problem, you have to empathise the enemy."
Understanding the enemy is function of her motive, but it'south not the crux. "The bespeak of this projection is to show what seemingly nice guys are capable of," she writes. The #MeToo stories nosotros hear about in the media "mostly concern politicians and Hollywood directors and actors. What nearly guys like Mark?" He works an ordinary job. He has never had a girlfriend and is a virgin. Information technology comes across as remarkable — and what does this say about how our culture processes sexual assault? — that he agrees to talk about what he did. To admit he'd been depressed. That he is deplorable, very pitiful.
His story dominates the book, but other men have also violated Vanasco. These stories are only as gutting: Another (less close) friend raped her after a literary political party in New York; and her high school newspaper adviser molested her and tried to control her and sabotage her education. She reported this instructor, to no avail; instead, "they investigated me."
I'thousand not a perfect victim, Vanasco confesses. In that location's no such matter. And that fear of not being believed is what scares so many into silence. The night Marking raped her was the showtime time Vanasco had ever been boozer, just what if information technology had been the hundredth?
"Perchance this volume will end my nightmares about Mark," she hopes. Spoiler: It doesn't.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/books/review/things-we-didnt-talk-about-when-i-was-a-girl-jeannie-vanasco.html
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