Contemporary Authors

• The Glass Eye ( memoir) Tin House Books (Portland, OR), 2017

1. The glass eye LCCN 2017010542 Type of material Book Personal name Vanasco, Jeannie, author. Main title The glass eye / by Jeannie Vanasco. Edition First U.S. edition. Published/Produced Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, [2017] Projected pub date 1710 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781941040775

• Jeannie Vanasco - https://www.jeannievanasco.com/author.html

  Photograph by Theresa Keil
  Jeannie Vanasco is the author of The Glass Eye: A Memoir. Featured by Poets & Writers as one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017, The Glass Eye was also selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Indies Introduce Pick, and an Indie Next Pick.

  Her nonfiction has appeared in the Believer, the New York Times​, the Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, and on NewYorker.com, and her essays have twice been named notable selections in Best American Essays. Her poetry honors include an Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers.

  She is an assistant professor of English at Towson University and lives in Baltimore. She is working on her second book.

• Tin House - http://tinhouse.com/glass-eye-conversation-jeannie-vanasco-masie-cochran/

  QUOTED: "The night before he died, I told my dad I would write a book for him. I wanted him to die knowing that I would never stop loving him, that he would not be forgotten. But I didn’t expect to promise him a book. The words just came out. They surprised me. I was eighteen when he died, and I was twenty-seven when I started writing The Glass Eye as memoir."

  The Glass Eye: A Conversation with Jeannie Vanasco and Masie Cochran
  TIN HOUSE STAFF
  The Glass Eye begins, refreshingly, with a happy childhood. At the heart of this stunning debut memoir is Jeannie Vanasco’s love for her father and, after his death, her conviction that if only she can understand his experience of grief, she’ll come to terms with her own. And so she delves into the loss that clung to her father throughout his life: the mysterious death of his other daughter, the half-sibling after whom Jeannie is named. Weaving childhood memories with fragments from her turbulent early adulthood, in and out of hospitals, Jeannie crafts a narrative that’s at once intimate memoir and a literal investigation into her half-sister’s death.

  The Glass Eye
  JEANNIE VANASCO
  buying options
  Not long after The Glass Eye went to the printer, Jeannie sat down with her editor, Masie Cochran, to discuss the risks of writing memoir, balancing dark themes with happy memories, and not worrying (too much) about your audience.

  Masie Cochran: What was your initial goal in writing The Glass Eye?

  Jeannie Vanasco: The night before he died, I told my dad I would write a book for him. I wanted him to die knowing that I would never stop loving him, that he would not be forgotten. But I didn’t expect to promise him a book. The words just came out. They surprised me. I was eighteen when he died, and I was twenty-seven when I started writing The Glass Eye as memoir. In the years between, I tried to fulfill the promise through poetry and fiction. I even attempted a mafia novel set in the 1930s and told in the point of view of a boy loosely based on my dad—all because my dad loved books about mobsters. That’s how much it never occurred to me to write a memoir. It’s not that I objected to the genre on principle or anything. I simply didn’t see it as a possibility. What memoirs I had read usually involved bad parents. I think that’s why I avoided the genre for so long. I didn’t think that my central intention—to show my love for my dad—fit within the genre.

  MC: Though there are certainly dark themes in The Glass Eye, at its core is a happy childhood. How did you strike this balance?

  JV: In early drafts, I didn’t think about the balance. I didn’t think that I needed to establish my happy childhood. My parents showed me love before I even knew the word love. That’s how lucky I was. Also, the happy memories were hard to reconstruct emotionally. I think that’s why some memoirs about grief focus on the death and its aftermath instead of the life. Memories of my dad braiding my hair, building my dollhouse, drinking invisible tea with me in my playhouse—those sadden me far more than the memory of him in his coffin.

  Hallucinations make for a gripping read, but had chapter one been set in the psych ward, the book’s tension would be lost. Instead of a grieving daughter, my character would be and always be a walking DSM entry. The reader would question which diagnosis I had, instead of seeing my behavior in the context of my grief. Not surprisingly, agents and early readers pressured me to open with my first hospitalization—and from a marketing point of view, sure, it makes sense. But I like that the reader doesn’t see me in the psych ward until page 131. For a long time, my psychotic episodes felt like proof of grief, and that’s why I included them. But if I want the reader inside my head, it’s best if the reader is with me when I’m lucid and not hallucinating that my eyes have fallen out.

  MC: You expand readers’ definitions of grief throughout your memoir. Why was it important to you to do so?

  JV: I was twenty-nine when a psychiatrist finally acknowledged my grief. Turns out, complicated grief had just been added to the DSM. Until then, every one of my doctors had viewed my experience as an either/or thing: you were grieving, but now it’s about the mental illness. But after one psychiatrist acknowledged my grief, my dad’s death became an important part of my medical records and my treatment. That’s why I’m an advocate for complicated grief being a diagnosis. It’s not about simplifying or pathologizing grief. It’s about acknowledging it.

  MC: The Glass Eye turns into a literal investigation as you look into the details of your half-sister’s death. At the time, did you know this sleuthing would be a part of the memoir?

  JV: In a novel that I tried to write—back before I ever considered writing a memoir—Jeanne appears in one line: “My dad named me after his dead daughter from his first marriage and a soap opera star he liked.” She was part of a throw-away line meant to be amusing. It was exploitive. For the memoir, she needed to exist beyond one sentence—because I wanted to understand my dad and his grief.

  But I never thought that I’d walk inside the house where she lived or visit her grave. I think that’s when I started to see her as a human being and not as a character in my manuscript. Suddenly I was grieving her, but how do you grieve someone you’ve never met? Is it even okay to do that? I felt intensely guilty about having any feelings about Jeanne. The whole reason I included her is because I was trying to understand her death’s impact on my dad. I thought that if I could understand her, then I could understand him. For a long time, it didn’t occur to me to understand myself.

  MC: Some of the most powerful passages detail mania. Was it hard to write coherently about times in your life that were anything but?

  JV: Yes, definitely. Writing about mania sometimes triggered mania. I think that’s because I wanted to describe my episodes in evocative, unusual ways. Instead of DSM language, such as “flight of ideas” or “experience that thoughts are racing,” I described my racing thoughts as “a flock of birds scattering from a field.” But I felt a real ethical dilemma in trying to sound capital-L literary. So I tempered the tone. I used contractions. I stopped trying to sound poetic in every sentence. I didn’t want to romanticize mental illness, though I sort of hope The Glass Eye is something sensitive bookish teenage girls bring with them to the psych ward, along with Girl, Interrupted and The Bell Jar. From my experience, there’s always a young female patient with one of those two books. But I want those girls to see that meds helped me finish a book. Untreated mania slowed me down creatively.

  Of course, it’s sort of nerve-wracking to think of strangers and mild acquaintances reading my passages about mania and psychosis. I’m someone who will change her clothes in front of an open window. Not because I want people to see me naked. My God, no. I do it because I assume no one is looking. And it was that sort of thinking that made drafting the memoir possible. Had I thought about audience in the early writing stages, I never would have finished.

  MC: You’ve been compared Maggie Nelson and Meghan O’Rourke—are these writers influential? Are there any other books that were touchstones for The Glass Eye?

  JV: Maggie Nelson and Meghan O’Rourke are two writers whose work I really admire. The first poem that I read by Meghan O’Rourke begins: “My poor eye. It has done / so much looking.” I almost used that for my epigraph. I admire the lyricism in her poetry and her memoir. And as soon as I finish this Q&A, I’ll be drafting lesson plans for Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Every time I teach her writing, I notice something that I didn’t notice before. I naturally gravitate toward formally inventive books like hers.

  As for touchstones, it never occurred to me to write memoir until after I read Darin Strauss’s Half a Life. I own two copies because the first is unreadable from all my marginalia and post-its. Also, I found novels instructive, particularly Christine Schutt’s Florida and Justin Torres’s We the Animals. Their sentences are nonstop breathtaking.

  fiction | May 18, 2018
  He Was Trying to Say Something and He Couldn’t Get It Out
  KAJ TANAKA
  It’s getting dark, and I’m out back of our trailer where I practice taekwondo. No one who lives in the trailer park can see me back there. My dad and I made a sparring ring and there’s a pull-up bar. I’m running through kicking combinations in the twilight when the screen door opens.

  READ MORE

  interviews, general | May 17, 2018
  DEAR READER: A Q&A with Naomi Jackson
  THSTAFF
  Naomi Jackson burst onto the scene with her acclaimed debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill (Penguin Press, 2015). The brilliantly observed story of three generations of Caribbean women torn between Brooklyn and Barbados, it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, […]

• Bustle - https://www.bustle.com/p/jeannie-vanasco-dives-deep-into-family-secrets-mental-health-grief-in-the-glass-eye-2791685

  Jeannie Vanasco Dives Deep Into Family Secrets, Mental Health, And Grief In 'The Glass Eye'
  ByE. CE MILLER
  Oct 17 2017

  Courtesy Of Jeannie Vanasco

  Jeannie Vanasco spent over ten years writing her debut memoir, The Glass Eye, published by Tin House Books earlier this fall; but readers wouldn’t guess it. Not because the memoir isn’t skillfully written and thoughtfully structured — it is — but rather because Vanasco’s deeply intimate story of loss, grief, and mental illness reads as though it happened just last week, yesterday, today. There’s a particular “nowness” to The Glass Eye: an in-the-moment immediacy that plants readers directly into Vanasco’s experience. That experience is the loss of Vanasco’s father when she was just 18-years-old, and the subsequent mania that threatened to take over her life.

  But The Glass Eye navigates far more than the staggering loss of a parent. Readers discover that Jeannie’s father — her lifelong hero — named her after his daughter from a previous marriage — a daughter who died in a car accident at just 16-years-old. Discovering the truth about that other Jeanne (Vanasco’s half-sibling, without the ‘i’) becomes central to the writer’s own journey of self-discovery and healing.

  Author Jeannie Vanasco connected with Bustle after The Glass Eye was published, to discuss her writing process, what it was like to research her own personal history, what insight her experiences with mental illness have given her on the current healthcare crisis in the United States, and so much more.

  “As a reader, I’m not interested in a memoir’s synopsis. I’m interested in its author’s exploration of thoughts and feelings, thoughts about feelings, and feelings about thoughts. To me, that’s what makes a memoir feel alive,” says Vanasco, when asked what it was like to spend so many years in the throes of one manuscript. “For several years, my memoir was a tonally cold collection of scenes: this happened, then this happened. I didn’t reflect much on my thoughts and feelings. They were mentioned but not explored. After I started adding passages from my journals, that’s when the book’s meaning took hold. There’s a vulnerability to trying hard, and to making it known that you tried hard. I wanted the reader to feel that vulnerability.”

  The night before her father passed away, the then-teenaged Vanasco promised him she would write a book for him. As readers will quickly discover, The Glass Eye is as much about Vanasco’s story as it is about Vanasco trying — and struggling — to write that story. It was a creative decision supported by Vanasco’s editor, Masie Cochran, who told her: “I think the book is about the struggle to write the book.” With that vision and insight, The Glass Eye really took off.

  The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco, $11, Amazon

  “My best writing happens when I trust my instincts, when I go by ear or gut,” Vanasco says. “After the rough draft exists, I can let my brain unpack the meaning. The mistake I made with The Glass Eye: my brain moved in before the manuscript was ready for it. I drafted excessive outlines, imposed insignificant image patterns, almost as soon as I started the memoir. I tried to control the writing process, but that’s likely because I felt no control in my life, emotionally or mentally.”

  It was important for Vanaco to include these details of her writing process in the book. “In memoir, I think it’s important to remind readers that they’re reading just one person’s interpretation of the story,” she says. “Reminding readers of the artifice reminds them that they’re reading a true story, or as true as the writer can make it. The most authentic thing I could do would be to show the lack of control — without sacrificing my authority as a narrator. My book’s structure asks the reader to do a little work.”

  Vanasco’s research into her own life is compelling — which she conducts as though she were a biographer writing about someone else, not a memoirist outlining the rises and falls of her own life. She writes about being unable to trust her own medical records because she often lied to her doctors. She includes present-tense conversations with her mother, clarifying Vanasco’s own memories of her father. The details of her half-sibling Jeanne’s death shift depending on the source — and Vanasco often learns that her own recollections aren’t necessarily supported by fact.

  “I feel so estranged from the research experience,” Vanasco says. “The best I remember, it aggravated my symptoms, landing me in the hospital a lot. The research that probably pushed me over: learning that shortly after I was born, my dad was holding me and pacing around the back yard, crying. He wouldn’t put me down. When my mom asked him what he was doing, he said: “It’s a hard day.” It must have been late May, my half-sister Jeanne’s birthday. She died in 1961. I was born in 1984. Hearing that story, that’s when I registered the extent of my dad’s ongoing grief.”

  Many memoirists don’t go quite the distance Vanasco did — it’s clear from The Glass Eye that she often researched relentlessly. I asked her why getting the facts right, even when they directly conflicted with her own memories and experiences, was so important.

  “As a memoirist, I felt it necessary to get the facts right, she says. “I’m not saying that I always did. That’d be impossible. But I tried. And I wanted to show myself trying. I really worry that nonfiction writers are exploiting the idea of Truth, embellishing facts because it makes the writing process easier. I prefer to treat facts as constraints. They push me into a deeper place, forcing me into corners I don’t want to be in. And finding ways out of those corners, that often makes for more interesting reflection.”

  Vanasco writes about her episodes of mental illness in a way that makes them so accessible, almost seeming rational at times. During periods of mania, she connects sounds, images, events, and coincidences in ways that make sense — at least, right up until that moment they don’t. Often, her musings simply read like the mind of an overly-enthusiastic writer, rather than the compulsions of someone struggling with mental illness.

  “I definitely do not want to pathologize the creative process,” she says. “Writing a book can be messy and difficult for even the most mentally stable individual. The process, as disorganized as it is, can look rational from the outside. For example, I sometimes used a tape recorder. It’s not absurd, as a writer, to use a tape recorder. But the reason I turned to a tape recorder: my thoughts moved faster than my typing; I’d been writing on my arms and legs and ran out of room. My process went too far. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. [But] it’s not weird to connect sounds, images, events, and coincidences; they make sense — ‘right up until the moment they don’t.’”

  Courtesy Of Jeannie Vanasco

  Throughout the memoir, Vanasco describes receiving care from a variety of free clinics and mental health facilities, at times with and without insurance. I ask if her experiences — both with access and lack thereof to different levels of care — have given her any perspective on the debate over the right to healthcare that is happening in the United States right now, and that has been ongoing for years.

  “I think it’s essential that we not romanticize mental illness, and that we also remove the stigma surrounding public programs,” she says. “The Affordable Care Act lifted the stigma surrounding public health insurance. I no longer felt guilty using public benefits like Medicaid, Social Security Disability, and Medicare. Those programs provided me access to good treatment, and now I have a full-time job with benefits. If we don’t help one another, if we don’t acknowledge the country’s structural problems — a major reason why we need public benefits — we are not going to move forward in this country.”

  She has a wealth of personal experience to back up her beliefs. “Off and on, in my early twenties, I accidentally took methadone,” Vanasco shares. “I feel pretty dumb admitting it. But I didn’t always have health insurance. I couldn’t afford my medications — and because I felt guilty being on Medicaid, which I needed because I couldn’t hold a full-time job that offered benefits — I turned to an online Canadian pharmacy, ordering what I thought was my prescribed medication. A few years later, when I ended up in the hospital for an overdose, the doctors found methadone in my system. I was so confused and embarrassed. But how was I supposed to know that I was taking methadone? In my teens and twenties, I hadn’t experienced consistent emotional or mental stability. I had no standard of comparison. I hadn’t had good treatment — because I didn’t have consistent health coverage.”

  It’s because of this experience, and others, that Vanasco is so passionate about healthcare, and so concerned about the current administration’s steps towards dismantling the Affordable Care Act.

  “A major conservative policy belief that infuriates me: deregulation of the pharmaceutical industry. Trump has been pushing to speed up, if not dismantle, the approval process for prescription drugs. Shortly after his inauguration, he told pharmaceutical executives [the administration will] ‘be cutting regulations at a level that nobody’s ever seen before, and we’re going to have tremendous protection for the people.’ At least ninety-seven percent of all drugs fail clinical trials. The approval process should not be treated as a nuisance. Drug companies should be required to prove their drugs work before the FDA legalizes them. However, provided the drugs pass the “safe” test, as in “won’t kill you,” they could be approved. But safe isn’t the same as effective. That’s why deregulation is a bad idea, and why public health insurance is a good idea.”

  But, she says, she believes that reading and writing memoirs could actually help the country.

  “At their core, they reveal what’s human about us. They allow us to inhabit a consciousness that’s not our own,” Vanasco says. “The good memoirs, at least — memoirs that are self-aware, not self-absorbed. The problem is, how do you get Americans to read good memoirs when we’re inundated with easy, mass-appeal entertainment? It requires a certain level of education and self-discipline to choose Speak, Memory over Game of Thrones, and it terrifies me, because mass entertainment is what got Trump elected.”

  I ask Vanasco if she thinks writing was healing or enabling to her experiences of mania — and whether or not it can be both, if the risks outweigh the rewards.

  “I didn’t know how to write about my dad’s death without reliving it, which in turn aggravated the mania and depression. Same thing with my psychotic episodes,” she says. “I won’t lie: I miss mania. I could write for several days straight without sleeping. I could go several days without eating. I felt passionate about topics ranging from nineteenth-century copyright law to the portrayal of black cats in Medieval literature. Once a reserved, insecure perfectionist, I lost track of how many men I’d slept with — and, for the first time, I enjoyed sex — however, one could argue that this was a numbers game; the more men I slept with, the more likely I would find one who was good at it. My mania felt phenomenal — to me, at least. But, in retrospect, my writing from those manic episodes was bad. I know it was bad. And I lost so many friendships, which only furthered my depression.”

  But the overall message, again, turns to compassionate, comprehensive healthcare. “The goal is, I think, to find medication that doesn’t blunt one’s thoughts and feelings, but rather helps the individual feel more alive, more human. Thoughts and feelings don’t simply make good memoirs; they make us human.”

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2018/01/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-120-jeannie-vanasco/

  QUOTED: "I organized my entire adult life around the promise to write a book for my dad. Writing The Glass Eye gave me a reason to think about him every day. Writing the memoir rationalized my obsession with him. And now that organizing principle is gone. Which is not to say that I’m unhappy the book is done."

  THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #120: JEANNIE VANASCO
  BY KELSEY OSGOOD

  January 25th, 2018

  Though I am a voracious consumer of memoir––a genre in which a reader can find no shortage of authorial struggles––I’m not sure I’ve ever read a memoir in which the writer had to endure so much for the final product as The Glass Eye, by Jeannie Vanasco.

  On the surface, it appears to be about grief, but its plot is actually composed of many strands that curl around and into themselves like a sailor’s knot: the investigation into the life and premature death of Vanasco’s half-sister, with whom she shares a name; her devotion to her father (the titular glass eye is his) and her protracted grief over his death; the development of her mental illness; and her quest to write the book itself, which she promised her father on his deathbed she would do. That quest becomes so obsessive, and at times appears to exacerbate the symptoms of her bipolar disorder so severely, that readers might wonder if she will emerge intact from the process.

  Alberto Giacometti famously proclaimed that in a fire, he’d save a cat before a Rembrandt. Thankfully, in this case, we can have both the art and the life. The Glass Eye is heartbreaking and harrowing and at times painfully intimate, but it ends on a note of tentative closure: Vanasco has found a loving partner, moved to the Baltimore area to teach writing, and fulfilled her promise to her father, splendidly.

  In December, we exchanged emails about unconventional narrative structures, if creation provides as much catharsis as we hope it will, and the joys of living without social media.

  ***

  The Rumpus: The Glass Eye is a remarkable book for, among other reasons, its unconventional structure. Did you set out to write a more chronological or straightforward narrative, or had you always wanted to push the boundaries of form?

  Jeannie Vanasco: I hadn’t really thought about this until you asked, but initially, when I worked on The Glass Eye as poetry and then fiction, I didn’t feel pressured to find an unconventional structure. But as soon as I realized that The Glass Eye would be a memoir, that’s when I started to obsess over form. I think that’s because I wanted to write something literary, and memoir isn’t usually perceived as inherently literary—not in the way that poetry, for example, so often is. But what even makes something literary? Usually, the story is less important than how the story is told. And a literary book usually asks the reader to do a certain amount of work. To parse the meaning without being told the meaning. But in memoir, to leave too much open to interpretation implies that you lack control over your own story. The question that bugged me throughout the writing process: How do you truthfully and artfully show the messiness of mania, grief, and reality in general—all while maintaining authority as a narrator?

  I doubt I could have answered that question without my editor, Masie Cochran. She’s the one who suggested the binder structure—where scenes are categorized by either “Mom,” “Dad,” Jeanne,” or “Mental Illness.” In an earlier draft, I’d mentioned the binders—how and why I used them in the writing process. I didn’t think the binders would turn into the organizing principle. In the book itself, the binder headings don’t always align perfectly with the events they describe. That’s because I wanted to push the form into its own way of showing. Manic, I imposed meaning where it rarely existed. But even when I felt better, when I was just a writer struggling to finish a book, I also was trying to find meaning. I added the meta sections, those present-tense craft sections prefacing each chapter. They allowed me to question my memories, to make sure I wasn’t simply choosing or editing memories to fit plot points. The meta-technique is also so deeply intertwined with the memoir’s impetus—because writing the book was my deathbed promise to my dad.

  Rumpus: In a similar vein, literature is rife with memoirs written by people who resent or even loathe their parents. I can think of a few examples of works about “complicated” but loving parent-child relationships. But none that, like yours, are almost entirely tender in tone. Were you aware of that as breaking the mold? Did you walk away from the book with a more “nuanced” idea of your parents, as your mother put it?

  Vanasco: You’re right. Not many memoirs explore great childhoods. That’s probably because it’s hard to make happiness interesting on the page. Books benefit from conflict—internal and external. Also: not many kids are lucky enough to have two loving parents at home. But it would have seemed a little strange not to acknowledge conflict between me and my parents, as well as conflict between my mom and my dad. No relationship is idyllic. I decided that if I was going to show those conflicts, I’d reflect on the motivations behind them. My dad, for example, could be extraordinarily over-protective. But that’s because he lost his daughter Jeanne to a car accident, and his first wife blamed him. He also could be possessive of my mom, but that’s because he caught his first wife running around on him.

  Your question is a good one. No one has asked me about how, now that the book is done, I view my parents. I still think my dad was an amazing dad, and my mom was and is an amazing mom. It’s easy to see somebody else’s faults—especially those of one’s parents. What parent hasn’t screwed up in one way or another? But I’m really lucky. My parents’ mistakes, when it came to raising me, were few and well-meaning. My mom recently moved in with me and my partner, Chris. We turned part of our house into an apartment for her. I love her deeply, but we have our arguments. However, when she’s angry, she usually holds it in. I hate the silent treatment. Hate it. I used to hold in my anger, but then all my East Coast therapy sessions broke me out of it. Recently, she seemed mad at me but she wouldn’t explain why. It was driving me crazy. To get her talking, I jokingly told her: “The mommy dearest memoir is next.” And then we were okay. She told me that she wasn’t angry with me, but with herself. It’s been hard for her to adjust to a new city where she knows no one except for Chris and me.

  Rumpus: One of the (sometimes annoying) things people asked me when my book was published was whether I “needed” to write about my anorexia to recover from it. You talk about this a lot in The Glass Eye––promising your dad a book, with the implicit hope that if you fulfilled your promise, you could move on. Did it work in any way?

  Vanasco: I think so—to a degree. I’m still sad about my dad’s death, but I feel more comfortable with the sadness. After I submitted the final draft of the manuscript, I felt lost. I organized my entire adult life around the promise to write a book for my dad. Writing The Glass Eye gave me a reason to think about him every day. Writing the memoir rationalized my obsession with him. And now that organizing principle is gone. Which is not to say that I’m unhappy the book is done. Suddenly, within the past week, I’ve found myself obsessed with the next project.

  Rumpus: What about with respect to your mental illness? Of course, writing a book can’t “cure” bipolar disorder, but did writing about it provide you any clarity?

  Vanasco: Just the other day, I experienced horrible racing thoughts—worse than I’ve had in a while. If you’ve ever seen a video by somebody running and filming at the same time, that’s what the world looked like: shaky, fast, in and out of focus. Then I became paranoid that almost everybody was angry at me. But then I reminded myself: you’ll pull out of this. I didn’t feel like I would, but I knew that I would—if that makes any sense. Writing the book gave me that perspective.

  Rumpus: Having now completed a memoir that chronicles your mental illness, do you believe bipolar disorder is more or less integral to your identity?

  Vanasco: I don’t think about my diagnosis as much as I used to. But I do think it’s integral to my identity. Every time a doctor or therapist told me, “You are not your illness,” I’d get frustrated. Because my illness inevitably shapes how I see and process the world. Now, of course, I’m getting into epistemological territory: What is a self? So let me jump past the philosophizing and say: I don’t want to romanticize bipolar disorder, but I do believe it has benefits. If we simply see bipolar disorder as wholly bad and something to get rid of completely, then we can fall prey to dangerous arguments, such as: people with bipolar shouldn’t be allowed to have children. Even in the twentieth-century, doctors used that as an excuse to sterilize Americans with mental illnesses.

  Rumpus: The Glass Eye feels sui generis, but are there any writers you feel strongly influenced by, or any books that provided a template for yours? (“Template” is the wrong word but you get where I’m going.)

  Vanasco: Virginia Woolf’s unfinished memoir, A Sketch of the Past, influenced me a lot. She examines the art of writing memoir within her memoir. And she writes so beautifully about her love for her mother. Also, Sarah Polley’s documentary film, Stories We Tell, gave me ideas for how to layer memories and let characters correct one another.

  Initially, I studied poetry. One of my favorite poems narrates its own writing: James Schuyler’s sixty-page poem, “The Morning of the Poem.” But fiction helped me, too. John Keene’s Annotations is perfect. I first read it in undergrad—before taking a class with him. I’d never read anything so formally inventive. He’s a genius.

  Rumpus: There’s a lot in the book about memory. You’re always calling your mom to confirm you remember something correctly, and you’re always questioning your own recollections of an event, and subsequent analysis of it. Was there a sense, while you were doing this, that it was in service of healing, or in service of the book? Or were those lines always blurry?

  Vanasco: In service of the book. My whole life was in service of The Glass Eye. I probably should have been thinking about healing. Even when doctors told me that the book was triggering my mania, I couldn’t stop writing.

  Rumpus: This is unrelated to the book, but is related to your writing life, generally: we bonded briefly over the fact that neither one of us have social media. Was that a conscious choice you made, to forego that? Is there a reason behind not having it?

  Vanasco: I know some writers who function just fine on social media. I couldn’t. I found it distracting creatively. I needed my space. I deleted my Facebook account five years ago, and I don’t miss it. I didn’t want to think about likes or shares or whatever. A few writers told me that I was making a mistake, but I didn’t care.

  The other big reason I deleted my Facebook account: I couldn’t handle the ideologically reductive discourse. I was angry—even at people I agreed with politically. I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, but how many social media users have really been convinced to interrogate their thinking based on a Facebook post or tweet? I was recently watching season two of The Good Place, and there’s this great line: “It’s a rare occurrence, like a double rainbow, or someone on the Internet saying, ‘You know what? You’ve convinced me I was wrong.’”

  Kelsey Osgood has contributed pieces to publications including New York, The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog, Harper's and Longreads. Her 2013 book, How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. She lives in London. More from this author →

• American Booksellers Association - http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-jeannie-vanasco-101051

  QUOTED: "The Glass Eye, ultimately, is about confronting grief through writing. For a year or so, after I began the book as memoir, I didn’t trust the writing process. I made narrative outlines, which left no room for exploration. Those outlines went into binders labeled by character. Each binder divided scenes into tabbed sections, organized by theme or symbol. But those methods shifted, based on whatever Moment of Clarity I had supposedly reached. ... Finding image patterns can be useful, but I was nearing a full-blown manic episode. The more I organized my writing, the more disorganized my thoughts became."
  "But here’s the useful, sane part of my process: my process journal. There, I reflected on my writing experience. I never planned to weave those entries—where I’m basically talking to myself—into The Glass Eye."

  An Indies Introduce Q&A With Jeannie Vanasco
  By Jessica Stauffer on Thursday, Sep 28, 2017
  Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend by emailSend by email
  Indies Introduce logoJeannie Vanasco is the author of The Glass Eye (Tin House Books), a Summer/Fall 2017 Indies Introduce adult debut and an October Indie Next List pick.

  “Jeannie Vanasco promised her father before his death that she would write a book for him, never knowing the psychological and mental toll the process would ultimately take on her,” said Jamie Thomas of Chicago’s Women & Children First, who served on the Indies Introduce panel that selected Vanasco’s debut.

  “Vanasco explores her family’s history: the entirely separate family her father had before she was born; the late-in-life marriage that led to Jeannie’s birth; and her own destructive behavior as she falls in and out of mental illness, which informs the truly fascinating structure of the book. The layers found in this memoir are as plentiful as the layers found in the human eye; ultimately, it is as deeply layered as the human experience itself,” said Thomas.

  An Ohio native, Vanasco has published work in the Believer, the Times Literary Supplement, Tin House, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Baltimore and teaches English at Towson University.

  Thomas recently spoke with the author about how her grief and mental illness affected the writing of her debut.

  Jamie Thomas: The Glass Eye is a multifaceted memoir about your childhood and your relationship with your parents, but it also focuses on the emergence of your mental illness and grief after your father’s death. Can you talk about your writing process?

  Jeannie VanascoJeannie Vanasco: That’s a really great first question, because The Glass Eye, ultimately, is about confronting grief through writing. For a year or so, after I began the book as memoir, I didn’t trust the writing process. I made narrative outlines, which left no room for exploration. Those outlines went into binders labeled by character. Each binder divided scenes into tabbed sections, organized by theme or symbol. But those methods shifted, based on whatever Moment of Clarity I had supposedly reached. For example, at one point I thought: Staircases are the solution! The binding principle! So, I drew staircases and cut out — with scissors — scenes with staircases. Then I pasted the sentences about staircases into shapes of staircases, and rearranged the narrative arc according to staircases. If no literal staircase appeared in a scene, then clearly some metaphorical staircase existed, which was really a metaphor for finding Meaning, or some nonsense like that.

  Finding image patterns can be useful, but I was nearing a full-blown manic episode. The more I organized my writing, the more disorganized my thoughts became. I remember spending my grocery money on the Martha Stewart office supply line. I asked myself: Do I buy tofu or binder tabs? I chose binder tabs. I wasn’t hungry, or even tired; I craved order and meaning. And I needed my signs and symbols color-coded.

  But here’s the useful, sane part of my process: my process journal. There, I reflected on my writing experience. I never planned to weave those entries — where I’m basically talking to myself — into The Glass Eye. Those passages get pretty overt and heavy about technique, yet they also reveal the book’s emotional core, the through-line: my attempts at writing a book for my dad. My editor, Masie Cochran, reassured me that The Glass Eye could be about that struggle. Without Masie, I’d still be collaging staircase sentences. Or maybe I’d have moved on to windows, ceilings, and doors.

  JT: Your debut is nostalgic for your childhood, but also very present. Some of the most compelling sections reference the writing of the book as you’re writing it, so readers are in the moment with you. How did you balance the past and the present?

  The Glass Eye by Jeannie VanascoJV: I wanted the writing sections to deliver the emotional punch of classical narrative all while reminding the reader that they’re words on a page. I’m not interested in constructing an arc the way one traditionally constructs plot in narrative writing. Life almost never happens that way, unless the experience is human-made. I wanted a different type of order, not a narrative of my experiences but a narrative of myself, the ways I perceived and processed my experiences. As a reader, I don’t care a whole lot about a memoir’s premise. I’m interested in how a memoirist finds a form to tell the story. The conventions that we break — in writing and in life — reveal the texture of our feelings and thoughts.

  But I can theorize about the technical and moral dimensions of hindsight perspective all day. In practice, balancing the past and present is tough. I think that’s because the balance is intuitive, which — as I rewind this sentence — sounds counter-intuitive. So let me try again: I couldn’t find the balance because I’d been working on the book for so long. I’d ask myself: When does my narrative present become my past? After three months? After three years? I remember explaining the problem to a doctor in the psych ward: “I can’t figure out my narrative present.” Say it in a writing class, and yeah, it makes perfect sense. Say it in the psych ward, and you’ve just added an involuntary week to your stay.

  I didn’t find the balance between past and present until Masie became my editor. After she recommended integrating my process journal, the book came together. She and I went back to an earlier draft, which was mostly chronological, and she helped me build the real arc by lifting my journal passages. It’s weird: exploiting the artifice of writing was the most honest thing I could do in my writing.

  JT: You don’t shy away from bringing the reader along with you for some of the more confusing and scary moments you’ve lived through, from manic episodes to sexual assault to the grieving process. How did you work through writing about such difficult subjects?

  JV: I felt lonely for a long time after my dad’s death. I didn’t know how to talk about my grief. I definitely didn’t know how to talk about my hallucinations. And I figured I should be over the sexual assault stuff. My silence motivated my writing.

  Throughout most of my 20s, however, I had an extraordinarily hard time writing. Manic, I couldn’t organize my thoughts. I’d get hypergraphia so bad I’d write on my arms and legs when I ran out of paper. Depressed, I couldn’t write at all. Locked in a mixed-state, I wanted to scratch off my skin I felt so anxious inside my body. Untreated, I had maybe one productive month a year.

  My therapist and psychiatrists deserve a lot of credit. Thanks to them, I gained enough distance to process and write about my most painful memories.

  JT: So much of the book is about how humans try to place meaning on what could be merely coincidental — meeting a woman named Genie while you’re trying to find out more information about your half-sister Jeanne, or changing the letters around in words to give them a stronger significance. Has your concept of fate and coincidence changed over the course of writing this book?

  JV: Definitely. I now understand: if you see signs everywhere, you see them nowhere. I’d be lying, though, if I didn’t say I miss finding connections in the most mundane things: cat toys, restaurant menus, furniture assembly directions. But manic and mixed episodes slowed me down artistically. I’d end up in the hospital for weeks, then get stuck doing full-time outpatient, then end up on meds that blunted my thinking for a good three or four months. I can’t write like that. On the right meds, I’ve found a balance. I can still make connections; however, they’re not debilitating.

  JT: Do you feel like The Glass Eye has finally given you closure for your father’s death? Do you think you’ll ever write a book for your mother, as you vow at one point in the memoir? What are you working on now?

  JV: I’m still sad about my dad’s death, but I’m more comfortable with the sadness. Last month, I visited his grave, and I felt okay. I cried, sure, but I didn’t feel like my life was ending. I think that’s because I kept my word; I wrote a book that shows how much I love him.

  I’d like to write a book for my mom. Right now, I’m playing with a few different projects. One of them is inspired by my friendship with someone I met in the hospital. I’m interested in how mental illness impacts friendships, though that’s only the triggering subject. What the true subject is, I don’t know yet. But that’s what I love about the writing process. The not-knowing.

  The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House Books, Trade Paperback, Nonfiction, $15.95, 9781941040775) On Sale Date: October 3, 2017.

  Learn more about the author at jeannievanasco.com.

  ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.

  Send by emailSend by email | Categories: IndieBoundIndies Introduce Interview

QUOTED: "a deceptively spare life story that sneaks up and surprises you with its sudden fecundity and power."

Print Marked Items
Vanasco, Jeannie: THE GLASS EYE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Vanasco, Jeannie THE GLASS EYE Tin House (Adult Nonfiction) $15.95 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-941040-77-5
A young women's grief-stricken meditation on the loss of her beloved father illuminates a lifelong battle
with crippling bipolar disorder and depression.In her debut memoir, Vanasco (English/Towson Univ.),
whose writing has appeared in the Believer, the Times Literary Supplement, and other journals, digs deep
into the kind of obsessional thinking that proves to be every bit as constricting as it is impenetrable. Within
its sad confines, however, there also exists rich, fertile lands filled with the possibility of lifesaving selfdiscovery,
which she explores in unadorned, sparse prose that builds in power as it accumulates. She recalls
mostly fond memories of her father: "I taped photographs from my childhood along the silver rails of the
bed: my dad reading a book to me despite the white patch over his eye; my dad pulling me in a wooden sled;
my dad clutching me on his lap and looking off somewhere as if he knew this was coming." What loomed
ahead for the author was a terribly long and lonely struggle beginning, at age 18, to come to terms with her
father's death--and to find meaning in the short life of a mysterious Jeanne, her half sister from her father's
previous marriage. Jeanne, who was killed in an automobile accident as a teenager, has cast a long shadow
over Vanasco's psyche, infecting her sense of self while also promising to bring her closer to her father. The
author's relentless introspection, which includes almost offhanded recollections of terrible self-harm and
institutionalization, manages to cast a spotlight on the art of memoir itself, as she valiantly struggles to find
the best medium possible to convey the true essence of a daughter's love for her father. A deceptively spare
life story that sneaks up and surprises you with its sudden fecundity and power.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Vanasco, Jeannie: THE GLASS EYE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192007/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e208adb1.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192007

QUOTED: "Vanasco's candor, curiosity, and commitment to human understanding
are not to be missed."

The Glass Eye
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p29+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
* The Glass Eye. By Jeannie Vanasco. Oct. 2017. 280p. Tin House, paper, $15.95 (97819410407751.818.
When Vanasco was born, her sixtysome thing father had already lost a child from a previous marriage, and
one of his eyes to a rare ocular disease. The author was actually named after her father's late daughter, who
was killed in a car accident at the age of 16. In this memoir, the living Jeannie Vanasco pieces together the
details of her father's life and her own gaping loss when he passed while she was in college. She writes
vividly of the exposed-nerve pain of losing a parent at such a tumultuous age. After her father's death,
Vanasco struggles with diagnoses, including schizoaffective, bipolar, and borderline personality disorders.
In writing the book, Vanasco examines whether her mental illness was caused by the loss of her father or the
circumstances surrounding her birth. The language cuts quick to the heart of Vanasco's hurt; readers will
immediately fall into the rhythm of her unrelenting inner dialogue. The greatest strength of this work is the
author's self-awareness; she admits that writing a memoir about her experience with grief might be further
contributing to her personal turmoil. Vanasco's candor, curiosity, and commitment to human understanding
are not to be missed.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "The Glass Eye." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 29+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161487/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e9390d26.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161487

QUOTED: "powerful and ruminative memoir."
"This is an illuminating manual for understanding grief and the strange places it leads."

The Glass Eye
Publishers Weekly.
264.33 (Aug. 14, 2017): p65.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Glass Eye
Jeannie Vanasco. Tin House, $15.95 trade paper (280p) ISBN 978-1941040-77-5
In this powerful and ruminative memoir, Vanasco explores the years following her father's death as her grief
transforms into an increasing obsession with her half-sister Jeanne, who died before Vanasco was born. Her
ownr distress is complicated by a mood disorder that causes her to hear voices and attempt suicide and that
she believes is caused by her unending misery. Though Vanasco never met her sister, she draws parallels
between her despair and the effect her sister's death had on her father. In one of the narrative's most striking
turns, she learns that she has inherited a burial plot purchased by her father next to Jeanne's grave. Vanasco
expertly weaves trenchant metaphors throughout the text, particularly with her father's glass eye, which
represents his mortality and the fragility of life. The narrative is framed with Vanasco's reflections on
writing as she attempts to fulfill the promise she made to her father the night before he died, that she would
write a book about him. Though her description of the actual event of her father's death is deeply moving,
Vanasco is less successful when describing her writing process, which can veer into overly affected
introspection ("I drew my childhood home and wrote 'Metaphor' on all the windows"). This is an
illuminating manual for understanding grief and the strange places it leads. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Glass Eye." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c73d3907.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717148

"Vanasco, Jeannie: THE GLASS EYE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192007/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018. Eathorne, Courtney. "The Glass Eye." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 29+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161487/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018. "The Glass Eye." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 20 May 2018.

• Entertainment Weekly
  http://ew.com/books/2017/10/09/jeannie-vanasco-the-glass-eye-review/
  Word count: 229

  QUOTED: "Jeannie Vanasco's The Glass Eye is a brilliant, obsessive memoir."

  BOOKS
  Jeannie Vanasco's The Glass Eye is a brilliant, obsessive memoir

  Tin House Books
  ISABELLA BIEDENHARN October 09, 2017 at 11:46 AM EDT
  The Glass Eye
  TYPEBookGENREMemoirPUBLISHERTin HousePAGES271PUBLICATION DATE10/03/17AUTHORJeannie VanascoWE GAVE IT AN
  A-
  Jeannie Vanasco’s father died when she was 18. He was elderly and had lost his left eye to a rare disease. Years before, he had also lost Jeanne — his daughter from a previous marriage — when she died in a fiery car crash.

  These are the central, oft-repeated facts upon which Vanasco builds this brilliant, obsessive memoir about grieving the father she loved ferociously and how that grief exacerbated her own mental illness during the decade after his death. “I promised him a book,” Vanasco writes, “but not this book.”

  Reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, The Glass Eye isn’t a straightforward memoir: Rather, it’s a self-aware chronicle of her struggles as she talks us through her process on the page (“I worry I’m too easily swayed by the sonic impact of a line”) or researches the sparse facts of her half sister’s death. As the pages fly by, we’re right by Vanasco, breathlessly experiencing her grief, mania, revelations, and — ultimately — her relief. A-

• Hippocampus Magazine
  https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2018/03/review-the-glass-eye-a-memoir-by-jeannie-vanasco/
  Word count: 903

  QUOTED: "Those who admire nonfiction about mental illness, family, and grief will likely enjoy this debut memoir."
  "Lovers of experimental nonfiction and the lyric essay ... will likely love The Glass Eye for being an absorbing and totally inventive new work of nonfiction.

  Review: The Glass Eye: A Memoir by Jeannie Vanasco
  March 1, 2018
  Reviewed by Melissa Oliveira

  cover of glass eye, collage of pictures inside circles that look like an eyeTowards the end of her debut memoir The Glass Eye (Tin House Books, October 2017), Jeannie Vanasco writes about a post-workshop conversation discussing an early draft of the manuscript. Her classmate urges her to do more scene-setting around the periods of psychosis and mania in the book. When Vanasco says that she doesn’t really remember much and expresses reservations about re-creating these scenes, the classmate cuts in: “‘The mental illness stuff,’ she said, ‘Is the most interesting. There definitely should be more scenes of you losing it.’”

  What struck me most about this statement was how it expresses a potential pitfall of writing a memoir that deals so candidly with issues of mental illness: that the memoirist might feel some pressure to play to type in order to satisfy a kind of voyeurism. The writer could simply make it more “interesting” by inventing a little more scenic detail here, ratcheting up the drama there and in doing so, I guess, edge quietly over into fiction.

  What Vanasco does in her book is way more compelling than filling in what she doesn’t know: she experiments with form by shattering the story into shards of poetic prose. Throughout the piece, she provides a meta-narrative about the process of writing the memoir we are reading. The resulting book is not only beautiful and complex, but also a great example of what is possible when a very skilled storyteller starts manipulating form in a way that allows her to go deeper into the subject, in part by commenting openly on all the things she might not remember. We don’t need more dramatic scenes in which the memoirist loses it; we have a form that allows us to experience the mind — whether psychotic or lucid, spinning or still — at work.

  And yet The Glass Eye isn’t solely a mental illness memoir; the book could also easily be categorized as a memoir about family, writing, or grief. It is also, interestingly, a gift: “The night before he died,” Vanasco writes, “I promised my dad I would write a book for him.” The figure of Vanasco’s father is rendered lovingly, allowing the reader to get a strong sense of this older, gentle man who is worried that his glass eye and gravelly voice would upset his little girl. Her father’s flaws come by way of a jealousy and overprotectiveness that could exert itself over his wife and daughter. The protective impulse over his daughter comes from his own grief after having lost a teenaged daughter in his previous marriage. The other daughter’s name was also Jeanne, pronounced the same way as the author’s but spelled without the I:“I tried not to hear her name when he said my own,” Vanasco writes, though she can’t resist the metaphor of this “sonic thesis” in her memoir. The other Jeanne seems to haunt both Vanasco’s childhood and this memoir, with the dead daughter’s goodness always ripe for comparison with Vanasco’s own behavior, imperfections, and a looming mental illness that finally overcomes her when her father dies.

  Vanasco’s book itself represents about a decade worth of effort: of research, writing, and workshopping; of periods of calm punctuated by harrowing spirals into psychosis. The psychotic breaks appear to coincide with any sustained work on the book and result in a series of stays in psychiatric hospitals where “any behavior can become a symptom” — including writing. Vanasco finds labels, medicines, and diagnoses in these places, but not always relief from her mania. She insists repeatedly that her diagnosis is merely a powerful kind of grief and that writing helps soothe her, yet she is met with the suggestion that she try not writing for awhile. Mental illness and the writing process, we come to understand, resemble each other in certain ways.

  So, how to render the experience of an unraveling mind in a way that doesn’t simply transform her into a helpless victim, a walking diagnosis, or a spectacle? Or, as Vanasco puts it, “How can I capture mania on the page and still make sense?” It’s a tricky thing, to be sure, but it is one that Vanasco pulls off by employing structural experimentation, shattering her narrative into short prose sections like “Dad,” “Mom,” “Jeanne,” and “Mental Illness.” She depends on sonic and associative connections to bring ideas together, to great effect.

  Those who admire nonfiction about mental illness, family, and grief will likely enjoy this debut memoir; I was reminded of work by Lauren Slater and Kay Jamison, though this is a more novel approach to the subject. Lovers of experimental nonfiction and the lyric essay— those who, like me, happily devour work by Maggie Nelson, Lia Purpura, Eula Biss, and others — will likely love The Glass Eye for being an absorbing and totally inventive new work of nonfiction.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-limits-of-metaphor-jeannie-vanascos-the-glass-eye/#!
  Word count: 1911

  The Limits of Metaphor: Jeannie Vanasco’s “The Glass Eye”
  By Andrew Schenker

  23 0 0

  OCTOBER 10, 2017

  1.

  TEN YEARS AGO, my now ex-wife began showing signs of a troubling paranoia. She would come home from her job as a financial analyst and hint at a conspiracy among her bosses to cause her some unspecified form of harm. As her condition got worse, the conspiracy widened: it came to include not only her supervisors, but also the president of the college where we’d met, all of Hollywood, and, at times, my family and me.

  Of these alleged perpetrators, the one that soon came to take pride of place in her fevered brain was the film industry. Every time she would see a movie, she would claim it was about her, which I soon came to understand she meant in a very literal sense. She felt the filmmakers were spying on her and then putting different versions of her life up on the screen. She would check the box office receipts religiously. When a movie she saw had risen to number one, she was both excited and alarmed: she had made it to the top, but it meant that the range of the conspiracy had widened.

  2.

  At the root of my ex-wife’s condition was a compulsion to see everything as connected. Her condition was pathological, but it was also representative of a larger human tendency: the search for a greater meaning in the events we experience on a daily basis. After all, if everything that happens to us is always and only what it literally is, drained of symbolic value, then our lives are empty. We can only stare down the void.

  3.

  There’s a very real sense, too, in which certain forms of mental illness mirror the very specific aims of the writer. As writers sift through layers of reality, they shape the raw material of life into something that has outline and meaning. Even in so-called nonfiction, real-life events are marshalled into a coherent narrative, significance is deduced from what may be a random series of occurrences, and metaphor is employed to yoke the ordinary to the inherently meaningful.

  4.

  Jeannie Vanasco explores this link between mental illness and the compulsion to write in her new memoir The Glass Eye. She traces the process that led her to undertake the book, the fulfillment of a promise she made to her dad shortly before he died when she was 18. Promise or no promise, though, we soon come to understand that she could not not write this book, since she’s long been obsessed with the memory of her father and since, she tells us early on, she’s been making various attempts at telling her father’s story for over a decade, “poems, essays, short stories, a novel, several versions of a memoir — all titled The Glass Eye.”

  The other strands of Vanasco’s book involve her bipolar disorder and her childhood discovery that her father had had a daughter with his first wife. This girl, whose name is spelled Jeanne but pronounced the same as the author’s — and after whom she was christened — died in a car accident two decades before she was born. Jeannie’s obsessive quest to fit her father’s and her half-sister’s life into some sort of coherent, meaningful narrative both provides the book with its exploratory thrust and, in its paranoid excesses, fuels her encroaching mental illness.

  5.

  Both Jeannie the narrator and Vanasco the memoirist share a technique: an obsessive employment of metaphor. The book’s central metaphor is the eponymous glass eye, which had replaced Jeannie’s father’s eye late in life. “Only after he died did [the glass eye] obsess me,” she writes. “Describing my dad through the metaphor of his eye comes easy; encapsulating him in plain language feels impossible.” Although the eye was actually made of plastic, the fact that it was called glass is significant for its symbolic potential. As Vanasco writes, “Glass implies the ability to be broken.”

  Later, one of Jeannie’s doctors will note that one of her symptoms is “clang associations,” a tendency to connect words by sound rather than meaning. Indeed, she dwells endlessly on the relationship between the words “eye,” “I,” and “i”; the latter of these is the letter added to her own name to differentiate her from her half sister, while the capital “I” represents herself. She even comes up with an equation “eye + i = I,” implying that her identity has been formed both by the memory of her father and the phantom presence of his deceased daughter. Jeannie, though, is quick to reject the idea that this equation is simply a question of sonic association. “To me, ‘eye’ and ‘i’ and ‘I’ are connected by meaning. Maybe I was experiencing mania. I know I was experiencing grief.”

  6.

  Vanasco is not really interested in answering the question of how much of Jeannie’s pain and thinking is caused by grief over her father’s loss (as she explains to all her doctors) and how much of it is caused by mental illness. She certainly makes it clear that her bipolar disorder is real and that her decades-long obsession with her dad’s death is unhealthy, but she refuses to draw an absolute divide between grief and illness.

  And yet, the author comes to understand the dangers of too much meaning. Late in the book, she describes a scene where Jeannie is overwhelmed with coincidences. In the hospital, she overhears a man mention the date March 2. Since that’s the date when Jeanne died, she thinks it’s a cosmic sign. As the scene progresses and Jeannie wanders out into the city, the signs and symbols pile up until the reader is led to understand — without any explicit authorial commentary — the extent of Jeannie’s pathology: “I’m in St. Patrick’s [cathedral] where Jeanne received her medal,” she writes in her journal, as she sums up the perceived connections.

  Everything is coming together: the third-floor fire — a sign to step back from my dad’s life; Genie — a sign that a name is simply a name but that Jeanne is the focus of my story; “the Elephant Whisperer,” like Jeanne, died on March 2 — a reminder that grieving is a ritual.

  7.

  Vanasco’s project, tracing the narrator’s fraught quest to find intrinsic meaning in the details of her life, is one shared by many other contemporary memoirists. These writers all seem to understand the same thing: that the basic narrative arc of virtually every subgenre of memoir is already incredibly well worn. And so they proceed with a healthy dose of self-consciousness, outlining their endless quest for significance while casting doubt on the essential nature of the memoirist’s art.

  Certainly this is the case with Angela Palm’s 2016 book Riverine. In telling the story of her upbringing on the floodplains of the Kankakee River in rural Indiana, Palm uses the specifics of the terrain to imply that geography is destiny. The harsh land, which is always subject to river overflow, is geographically separated from the rest of the town, and keeps its inhabitants poor and immobile. But then, in telling the divergent stories of her childhood neighbor, now a convicted murderer, and her own escape to Vermont to become a writer, she shows the limits of seeing the world as strictly metaphor. Humans are endowed with a will that can transcend both one’s upbringing and any figurative comparisons with landscape. But even after this acknowledgment, Palm reverts back to her natural inclination in a riverine burst of reflection. “People, especially young ones, are malleable. Like wet sediment. Guided by whatever kind of banks have lined their river, by what has held them,” she concludes.

  8.

  Similarly, in Grégoire Bouillier’s 2004 memoir L’invité mystère (The Mystery Guest, 2006), the author allows us access to a consciousness that can’t help but see everything as metaphorically connected. Walking a fine line between literary probing and madness, Bouillier tells the story of his being invited to a party by an ex-partner at the height of a depression/existential crisis. “How appropriate,” he thinks, reflecting on his ex’s decision to call him up:

  And on the exact same day Michel Leiris died was my next thought, and the coincidence struck me as so outlandish it was all I could do to keep from laughing. I felt as if I’d tapped in to the inner hilarity of things, or else brushed up against a truth so overwhelming only a fit of hysterics could keep it at bay; but maybe it wasn’t a coincidence at all.

  Soon the narrator’s sense of connection expands further to take on world historical events such as the then-recent reunification of Germany, which allows him to see his ex’s invite (and their potential reunification) as “part of the march of history.” But Bouillier’s insistence on viewing everything metaphorically has its limits as he, like Palm, reluctantly acknowledges:

  The death of Michel Leiris hadn’t unlocked anything inside [my ex.] […] It hadn’t inspired her to call me, the way I’d thought, and this meant I’d come up with the metaphor all by myself to lend depth and meaning to her call and find some echo, out there in the universe, of the repercussion Leiris had made in me.

  9.

  After trying unsuccessfully to find my ex-wife treatment, I felt completely incapable of helping her and called her father to come pick her up and take her back to her native Bulgaria. (In this, I fell far short of the loving attentions of Vanasco’s partner, Chris.) For years, I felt guilty about the way I handled the situation, and this feeling has resurfaced whenever I’ve thought about recounting it on the page, as I have here. When you write about someone else — whether it’s a father, a never-known half sister, or a mentally ill ex-wife — you are using someone else’s life for your own literary gain. There is great culpability in this use of someone else’s suffering.

  10.

  At the end of The Glass Eye, Jeannie has a startling realization that rearranges her perspective on everything she’s told us. “I used Jeanne as a metaphor,” she admits, echoing Bouillier and Palm before her, “as a means to understand my dad’s grief, as a means to understand who he was, as a means to understand how I should grieve. I don’t know how to grieve.” And then, in five quick words, Vanasco flips the assumptions underlying her entire project: “Jeanne was a real girl,” she writes, which is to say: not a symbol, not mere material. This is an essential realization, a way out of both madness and literary narcissism, and yet, no matter how real Jeanne was, the act of writing reduces her. Like my ex-wife, Jeanne may be “real,” but the second you put her on the page, she cannot help but become a metaphor. With this, every memoirist must reckon.

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