That’s probably why I felt viscerally enraged when a man recently suggested I join Twitter-because then readers could share their rape stories with me. But that’s hard to do when a reader details her trauma.

The men told us to keep replies short and to use a boilerplate message. Just last month, I was having drinks with some other writers, and the women and I got to talking about how we handle really personal emails from strangers about heavy subjects. For me, that’s the most soul-fatiguing part of releasing a book. Jeannie Vanasco: Nobody has asked me that before-about the author/social-worker conflation. About the double bind of writing about misogyny and releasing that writing into the capitalist patriarchal landscape of literary commerce. About you, ultimately now, being the face of your book and story. Talk to me about your biggest fears and greatest anxieties, post-production. Your trauma and sexuality for everyone to glean but also to digest and regurgitate back to you or question. And, finally, the scrutiny of reality hunger. The guilt and the anguish of not feeling like you can do enough. Expectations of us as authors and artists vs.

Sophia Shalmiyev: Jeannie, I wanted to speak with you about the unseen labor around writing and promoting a book that women might have to take on vs. “The author of Mother Winter, I sat down with Jeannie to talk about the memoir, and more.” Now, the narrator is sharing a sliver of that burden with the perpetrator, and they are both wearing it, or are about to, publicly: she as the author he, as a man with a pseudonym who has willingly submitted to being interviewed by the woman he wronged when she was a girl. The shape of violence lives invisibly inside of a woman. Arrests or convictions happen so rarely, it is staged as a crisis to be examined through the lens of justice, through a scarcity of justice model, but we still do not get the story, we do not get the understanding the victims and survivors need.

Jeannie Vanasco performs a lot of labor in this book to examine the male side of sexual assault, which usually escapes our purview and any responsibility, even if a man is arrested for assault. Sophia Shalmiyev writes, “Jeannie Vanasco’s second book, Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl, has a narrative structure and aim that is completely new, charged, activated.

The glass eye a memoir