The Annihilating Impact of a Mother’s Silence

“Are you teaching me how to live without you?” Jeannie Vanasco asks in A Silent Treatment, her new book about the silences her mother imposed when they shared a house together.  On certain days, only their smoke detectors were on speaking terms.  Some silences went on for a few hours, while others stretched for months at a time, adding up to a year and a half across a five-year period. The cause for the abrupt distancing usually appeared inexplicable or mundane, such as being left out of a household errand or chore, and often were only broken by a medical issue, such as her mother fearing she was having a heart attack before realizing it was actually a panic attack.  

In her third memoir, which began as an essay published in The New York Times, Vanasco tenderly, searchingly captures the intimate, often fraught connection with her mother—and implicitly invites the reader to do the same with their own loved ones. Vanasco nods to various research that has been done about silence and power in relationships, including a psychological study that indicates 75% of Americans have received the silent treatment.  She tenderly crafts a portrait of her mother, who was born into the Silent Generation during the McCarthy era, the daughter of an especially cruel and physically abusive woman. Vanasco’s mother, who wants everything for her daughter that she couldn’t have for herself, and who wanted most of all to be a mother, is an eager subject. She is perhaps as anxious as her daughter to understand why she does what she does. “She expects me to interpret,” writes Vanasco. “And I interpret. Every day.”  

Often reflective, sometimes poetic, the work echoes so much of the pacing we all do in our own heads when it comes to aging parents. A Silent Treatment reads as a plea to be heard—and a vow to listen with generosity.  

Jeannie and I spoke over Zoom about female rage, how silence can be both powerful and punishing, and how hard she worked to get Nicolas Cage into the book.

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Annie Liontas: Is silence annihilating? 

Jeannie Vanasco: So many of us say we want silence. Some people pay a lot of money for it. Silent retreats, quiet neighborhoods, special lounges in airports. It can be a luxury. But it can also be upsetting. There’s that anechoic chamber in Minneapolis. It’s supposed to be the quietest place on earth—so quiet people can hear themselves blink. They freak out. They don’t know how to orient themselves. When I first read about it, I thought, Well, that’s a nice metaphor for my mom’s silent treatment. Her silences were so disorienting I’d often get dizzy listing all the reasons she might be mad. So when silence is a punishment, and it’s from someone you love, and you don’t know why they’re doing it, “annihilating” is a good description. Because you reach a point—I did anyway—where you ruminate about all the ways you’ve failed that person. And the longer the silence lasts, the more ways you can imagine. I eventually questioned whether she really loved me, and I’d never done that before.

AL: You write, “Artists tend to put their fingers in the wounds, in the silences, and in the wounds in the silences.”  How do you understand loneliness and silence, and even suffering in isolation, after writing this book for you and your mother?

I eventually questioned whether she really loved me, and I’d never done that before.

JV: My mom isolated herself when she already felt lonely, and at first it seemed so counterproductive. She was hurt that I wasn’t spending more time with her, yet she was choosing not to spend time with me. But when you feel profound loneliness, self-isolation can make sense. You’re showing your pain. You don’t have to deal with words. If finding the right words were easy, I would have met my book’s original deadline. And I sure wouldn’t have obsessed over whether a comma belonged between “wounds” and “in.” But that’s what I often do when I’m stuck with writing: prioritize punctuation instead of confronting the subject matter. 

An inability to confront, though, makes for good narrative conflict. It’s often a character’s tragic flaw. If they would just do or say this one thing, the story would end. Had my mom and I confronted the situation sooner, the book would be very different. For the record, my lack of confrontation had nothing to do with preserving a narrative arc. (laughs) I told myself I was giving her space. Really, I was afraid. Her loneliness and suffering were hard to acknowledge, for both of us. And the longer the silence went on, the more I tried to avoid her. 

AL: Your mother goes quiet, even cold, when she is upset. When I’m upset, because I’m a hot-blooded Greek, I sometimes get too loud. What does it look like for you?  

JV: I used to say, “I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed.” Or, “I’m not angry. I’m just sad.” I want to talk through things. But if somebody is being unreasonable and won’t listen, I just apologize. Usually, I apologize. I’m probably afraid to confront the fact that I’m angry, or confront that somebody else is angry, because I want to make people happy. 

AL: In your experience or research, does it seem like the silent treatment is often employed by women working in a patriarchal framework that alienates them from their own expression of anger, disappointment, rage? Is there power in silence for someone like your mother?  

JV: Silence can be a really effective tool when people won’t listen to you. Psychologists say that women and men use the silent treatment equally, but I wonder if that percentage was different in, say, the 1940s, when my mom was born. Women of her generation—the Silent Generation, appropriately enough—had way fewer rights. So maybe they inflicted silence more, I don’t know. Research into social ostracism, as a formalized area of study, only started in the 1990s. 

Hindsight is very misleading. It often makes life seem far more organized than it really is.

I do think silence was my mom’s way to gain power and independence. She used it on my dad—more than I realized at the time. And after she moved in with me, she used it fairly regularly. She depended on me for a lot, and I know that bothered her. Later, she told me, “You know, I think I was on a power trip.” So there’s one reason of many. I know she had a hard time communicating her anger and sadness. I’m not saying her silent treatment was okay behavior, but context is important. She was in a really difficult situation. She’d retired, sold her house in Ohio, moved in with me—it was a lot at once. On a certain level, I admired how long she could go. She used the silent treatment for six months during the pandemic. This was pre-vaccines. I remember thinking, If anybody makes it out of this alive, it’s my mom. She is a pro at social distancing. 

But while silence can be a powerful tool, if you’re repeatedly using it to punish a loved one, you’re alienating them when you actually want a closer relationship.      

AL: You talk explicitly about your mother’s agreement—even enthusiasm—about this book, yet you also grapple with the responsibility of exposing her, not wanting to hurt her. I’m struck by how thoughtful and reflective you are in these conversations, and I’m wondering how this project feels genuinely collaborative for you both. Can you take us to those early conversations with her when you suggested the project?  

JV: My mom should be the patron saint of memoirists. From the very start, she said, “Write what you need to write. You don’t need my permission. If I were to tell you what to put in or to take out, then it wouldn’t be yours anymore.” When I told her that the silent treatment would be the narrative frame, she responded that [it] was a great idea. She said, “A book needs conflict.” I don’t think many parents would necessarily be that understanding. Still, I worried about her response to being written about. So I used my New York Times essay, which addressed her silent treatment, as a test, and I guess I passed. Her response was, “Seeing it in print, I realize it was kind of stupid what I did.” But then she did it again. (laughs) 

A lot of our collaborating has to do with her permissiveness and her openness to answering difficult questions, like, Why are you doing this to me? She said she didn’t know. I think we’re both a bit wary of clear answers, of any story that shows an easy cause and effect. She did write her story out—her life story—for me. And for a while I thought maybe I was going to reconstruct some of that. But then I risked implying: okay, she’s doing this because her mother abused her, or she’s doing this because…And I wanted to avoid reductive logic. Hindsight is very misleading. It often makes life seem far more organized than it really is. Conventional wisdom is, Wait to write about something until you’ve got enough distance. But I doubt we ever have perspective on our feelings, which is why I prefer to write from within an experience. My experience with my mom’s silent treatment is kind of like my experience with memoir writing. When it’s happening, I’m often miserable. When it’s over, I’ve forgotten how bad it felt. I’m just happy it’s done.

AL: Have you heard from other mothers and daughters after they read your essay in The New York Times? 

JV: I have, and that’s been wonderful. Readers have said it helped them feel less alone. But with the essay, I had maybe nine hundred words. With the book, I could address more of the nuances. Just the other day, a librarian emailed. She read an advance copy of A Silent Treatment and said she felt like she could give my book to her mom and it wouldn’t feel aggressive. She thought it came from a place of love. 

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AL: In addition to traditional methods, you often employ parentheticals to introduce your mother’s voice into the narrative, such as (Mom: you are such a disappointment.) How did you arrive at this structure and how does it function to create not only a longitude of your relationship with your mother, but also allow her voice to interject on the page when she has gone silent in real life?

JV: I remember being really bored by the manuscript. It read as this happened then this happened then this happened. And I had too much exposition. I forget when the parentheticals became a solution, but I remember feeling suddenly excited. Because they offered narrative momentum, texture, a means of transition. Whenever I needed to pivot or make a leap, I could interrupt a scene with something she said and see where it took me. And that was true to my experience. I’d remember her words at unexpected moments. They became intrusive thoughts. And because she wasn’t actually talking to me, parentheticals seemed like the right formal trick to bring in her voice. They could show how she was simultaneously absent and present in my life.

AL: You reference films and television and films, such as The Old Dark House and The Conjuring.  How do such texts help you understand or frame your own relationship to your mother, and perhaps other mother-daughter relationships?

I love the challenge of writing out of love.

JV: Watching possessed mothers felt cathartic. In The Conjuring, the mother gets possessed in the basement—my mom was living in the basement—and she becomes horrible to her children. You can’t really blame her. It’s the demon. So, from a child’s perspective, the possession allows for emotional distance. The mother isn’t herself anymore. And as soon as the possession is over, she’s hugging her kids, and they’re okay with it. Everybody’s acting like nothing happened. I was like, Yeah, that’s kind of how my mom wants to act when the silent treatment’s over. Like nothing has happened. Like we didn’t just live out this painful experience. Weirdly, Nicolas Cage helped me frame my mother-daughter relationship. I think he’s a brilliant actor. My mom disagrees. What do I care? We even got into a dumb argument about whether he was handsome. Including it offered some levity. And I think other daughters can connect with that—that urge to argue with your mother just because. 

AL: Seeing your mother as you do—in all her complexity, with all she’s lived through—seems like a great gift.  Are memoirs, perhaps at their highest existence, both for and about the people we love? 

JV: They can be. I love the challenge of writing out of love. It’s hard to do and make interesting. I also think it’s impossible to portray anybody accurately. My mom in the book is like my mom. It’s her and it’s not her. I selected the details. But I tried to write as honestly and lovingly as possible. I hope she sees the love. She hasn’t read it. She’s waiting until after it’s published. She’s the reader I most care about.

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