"Why Do Women Always Have to Come Out Clean?": A Conversation Between Sophia Shalmiyev and Jeannie Vanasco

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 book will leave people stunned. 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. 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. The shape of violence lives invisibly inside of a woman. 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 author of Mother Winter, I sat down with Jeannie to talk about the memoir, and more.”

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. their male counterparts. Expectations of us as authors and artists vs. social workers and helpers. The toll of promotion. The guilt and the anguish of not feeling like you can do enough. And, finally, the scrutiny of reality hunger. Your trauma and sexuality for everyone to glean but also to digest and regurgitate back to you or question. Talk to me about your biggest fears and greatest anxieties, post-production. About you, ultimately now, being the face of your book and story. About the double bind of writing about misogyny and releasing that writing into the capitalist patriarchal landscape of literary commerce. 

Jeannie Vanasco: ​Nobody has asked me that before—about the author/social-worker conflation. For me, that’s the most soul-fatiguing part of releasing a book. 

Jeannie Vanasco (photo credit: Dennis Drenner)

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. The men told us to keep replies short and to use a boilerplate message. But that’s hard to do when a reader details her trauma. 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. He explained it’d be a beautiful thing. An hour later, I was in my campus office, listening to a student describe being sexually assaulted in high school. 

I appreciate that students and readers feel comfortable talking to me. It’s one thing, though, to take in someone’s story in a meeting or in an email, and a whole other thing to open myself up to the internet. What becomes really overwhelming is when readers ask for manuscript evaluations or specific life advice. Every semester I teach sixty or so students and advise fifty others. I can barely keep up with their manuscripts and questions. And I am totally unequipped to offer life advice. I still haven’t filed my taxes. It’s September. 

So now I tell myself it’s okay to not reply to every message—especially the ones asking me to offer feedback on book manuscripts. Replying to them often backfires. Just one example: the retired psychologist who got nasty after I told him—in the nicest way possible—that I couldn’t read his memoir-in-progress. He then complained about me in some online review of my first book and said he felt bad for my “long suffering and saintly” boyfriend. I seriously plan to avoid the internet this time around. 

And now I sense myself transitioning into a simplistic claim about how the internet—social media, especially—has changed the terms of book consumption. So let me pass this back to you. Can you talk about your experience on tour—online and off—for ​Mother Winter​? Your book is so beautiful, I find myself opening it to random pages just to spend time with the sentences. My grad students and I marveled over this one for at least twenty minutes: “Sappho’s poems were once shredded and used as stuffing in mummified royal crocodile carcasses.” But did you ever get the allegation that you “used” your trauma to get published—as if no artistry was involved whatsoever? Asking this, I realize, risks implying accusation. I ask, though, because I definitely got that criticism while on tour for my first memoir, and it usually came shoddily camouflaged as a question, something like: “What would you say if someone said​ that you exploited yourself to write this book?” I get angry every time somebody implies memoirists are bleeding on the page, as if there is no craft/revision involved whatsoever. 

SS: I​ want to start at the latter issue and work my way over to the top (I still have not filed my taxes either), because figuring out what interdependence vs. codependency feels like is an oft-unexamined aspect of our inability to transition from mere survival to some kind of grace. 

Harming devices will be employed against woman memoirists, including the strategic plan to discredit your art if you are self-reflective and therefore actualized or attempting to be, without the “proper” sublimation into a creation the peanut gallery can handle. Men who write women do not so much create the female characters we need and want to emulate as evoke their own places of discharged anxiety, destroy their caretakers, and/or summon a fantasy of the ungettable nymph. Why would they want us using formal and narrative experiments to become the protagonists when they can keep sucking us dry and jockey for bookshelf real estate? The worst accusation they throw at us is having an excess of emotion, and that’s rich coming from a gender socialized to have no emotional intelligence without the aid of their girlfriends and wives. We are abundant in our ability to discuss what we think and feel and yet that is what we get charged with being egregious about at all times. Over-sharing. 

Sophia Shalmiyev

Both of your books are brilliant because you decided to braid men—complicated men, who are not off the hook—into a narrative that demands complicity. The hardest part of sorting through the bag of abuse is leaving your abuser with his mistakes to mend while you heal. It is a trick many women cannot figure out. The wisdom goes: you can’t set a boundary and take care of the person you draw that line in the sand with at the same time. On the flipside, if I tolerate a less than equal relationship I am to blame for staying with the wrong man. The wrong man isn’t dealt with for continuing to engage in a system of domination. And yet. And yet, I will attest to my own penchant for nurturing and teaching my unwilling-to-learn abuser while investigating the “truth.” 

Sometimes I am confused or in denial over what abuse really is. I—we—have been told to shut up, stop overreacting, and go home so many times. I need answers and I won’t ever be offered them. Many people who are not informed about trauma are puzzled by our survival mechanisms. I wonder if you want to speak to yours in the context of constructing TWDTWIWAG.​ This project was about you conceptualizing your own trial and witness stand—a recurring fantasy many women have. The dichotomy of Burden or Assertion is a red herring here. You came up with a literary device to stage a mourning. How will you handle this reality of being in the space of the matriarch, the prosecutor, the defendant, and the artist going forward in promoting the work? Are you resentful that we have to promote our art in mostly impossible ways? How measured did you have to be as the narrator and investigator in your book? Would you have been dismissed for treating your abuser unfairly the minute you had become heated or truly angry? Yes, you would. I have experienced complete dismissal, even when the man I speak of is in the wrong, if I describe my issues with him in a heightened tone. Discredited. Bitch. Shrew. Medusa. 

JV: ​Women are expected to tell their stories—whether in the courtroom or on the page—in mostly impossible ways, and I resent that. And I resent that we’re judged—as women and as artists—for how we satisfy narrative/storytelling norms formalized by men: Aristotle, Horace, Gustav Freytag, Joseph Campbell—not to mention the narrative formulas that lawyers shape and jurors expect. Until the 1980s (and, in some states, the 1990s), before every sexual assault trial, US jurors were given Lord Hale’s Jury Instruction, a sexist trap set by some eighteenth-century British chief justice: “a charge such as [rape] made against the defendant in this case is one which is easily made, and once made, difficult to defend against, even if the person accused is innocent. Therefore, the law requires that you examine the testimony of the female person named in the information with caution.” For no other criminal trials did judges specifically warn juries that an alleged victim might be a liar. Women get utterly destroyed by even trying to step forward with the truth—truth demolished or dismissed by men in power. Even when women distribute warnings among themselves, they get attacked. The whisper network gets shouted at. It’s as if we’re not supposed to share our stories at all. My resentment of this system really motivated my approach to this memoir. 

Part of the reason it proved hard to write: I was searching for some balance between artifice and authenticity, considering how believability ties into the memoir’s execution. For example, I worried about the prose style—if it seemed too polished, a reader might think that I was embellishing the truth. I also worried that if I got some small detail wrong, my entire story would be invalidated. Because I’ve faced allegations that I’m not reliable. That was my first experience with sexual assault: when a high school teacher abused me and yet the detectives treated me like I was guilty-until-proven-innocent. That messed me up, and it’s probably why I avoid constructing composite characters, bending chronology, or adjusting sensory details so as to fill out a scene or accommodate a narrative arc. I prefer to treat facts as formal constraints, which I know sounds stuffy to a lot of writers. 

If my first memoir hadn’t dealt with psychosis, and my second memoir hadn’t dealt with sexual assault, I wonder if I would have felt freer in how I approached the reconstruction of memory. Though I often wonder how gender figures into this ethical debate/discussion in creative nonfiction. I think a lot of men are used to being believed, to not having their authority questioned. I’m sure my frustration with male authority informs my approach to memoir writing. How much was believability on your mind while you worked on ​Mother Winter​? But if this is a topic that you’re sick of (as many writers understandably are), feel free to say ‘next question!’ 

SS: I am not sick of the questions around authority and authenticity because they play out in my personal relationships to a heightened degree and deplete me as a writer. Immediately, I want to ask you what you think you left out or couldn’t address in this memoir—what were your concrete reservations vs. what you can look back on and realize was blocked because of conditioning and fear?

In my book, I play with what we call a ​reliable narrator, ​though the term is bizarre as a literary device that folks think they are employing in fiction. No woman I know has ever felt like a reliable narrator when it comes to her body and private life, and this is partially why I lean towards exteriorizing my personal life, whether I’m writing about how hard it is to raise a boy without strong role models, or about going through the hormonal rollercoaster of an abortion at forty. I see no benefit in holding my narrative secret. It will fester and become something that owns me and holds me by the throat in isolation while other women who are hungry for this mirroring are hanging out to dry. 

This leads me to the specific kind of lack we are writing through and about; the void of a feminine culture. Your abuser and friend could have greatly benefited from access to that kind of energy en masse, rather than fetishizing you alone. A lone woman is a target at all times. This buzz is happening in almost every room I enter, in recent conversations I have with girlfriends who make art. It’s about us needing female-identifying and queer spaces, not to exclude men but to include ourselves and have a salon, a place to safely lose control, to experiment, to tinker, to trade experiences, to skill-share, to feel like we belong in our skin and that skin is not on guard or threatened or bullied or about to be interrupted by some male self-appointed expert, or by our desire to please,or, for straight women, by our penchant for mothering the men we wish to romance. 

If this is all right with you to discuss, I have this protective paranoid tap on the shoulder telling me that you may have, and/or will do, a lot of caretaking for the subject of your memoir. I feel like he’s so obviously a broken and lonely person in need of the whole of our society to make it ok for him to seek help that’s communal, not just purely therapeutic. He needs to bond in ways he doesn’t understand can exist. It should be seen as a national crisis that men disappear into themselves, and that when they emerge, it is usually to hurt women who trust them, before retreating again. Where is the progress? What do I say to my son about the “good guy,” when that guy can hold a secret and just go away into his video games? That article that went viral, ​Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden,​ is an angry yet clear-eyed and empathetic account of how we keep taking on the burden of teaching and holding and soothing the lost and confused. 

To piggyback off that private dilemma, in terms of the public self and the publicity machine, what are the traps you wish to avoid and how can you pivot your legitimate worry of exploitation, unbelievability, and exhausting your psyche and brain, in promoting your truth, to a possibility of joy and pleasure? I know that self-promotion and funding my book tour made my bones hurt and my stomach turn into an acid pit, but I can look back on that and remember that you and I had a blast having a life-sustaining conversation at a bookshop I revere, and Leni and I wrapped up a two-year epistolary project in the face of a deadline, and I met so many cool women I am still in touch with today. I see the light. And I want to shed that light on the dark side of having to sell our art, continuously, while holding down jobs and raising families and moving through new projects. It’s madness, no? Tell me what you look forward to and how you wish to be surprised and also please just dump out the messy drawer of the anxieties and realities of lit commerce for us so that other writers feel less alone if they have been there, while new writers can have that access to the means of production laid out for them as an offering. 

JV: ​I look forward to more of these nuanced and public conversations about art, feminism, activism, and the opaque financial forces operating within publishing. I’m glad you mention self-promotion. Too many writers sneer at other writers for it, label it “shameless,” as if advocating for one’s art delegitimizes it. Publishing a book does not end once that book exists as an object. And if we consider how academics and anthologists shaped the literary canon, why wouldn’t writers, especially marginalized ones, advocate for their work and for the work of others? I’m excited to talk up some phenomenal books I read this past summer: Madeleine Watts’s debut novel ​The Inland Sea​, forthcoming from Pushkin Press early next year, and Elise Levine’s latest story collection ​Wicked Tongue,​ which just came out from Biblioasis. I’ve been rereading Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s ​Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit​, published by 1913 Press in 2017, because I plan to teach it again. Advocating for others’ work as much as our own is so important. And after Mark “joked” that I just need to stay off the bestseller lists and book clubs—that way, he said, his mom wouldn’t hear about my memoir, which is another way of saying she wouldn’t learn that he’d sexually assaulted me—I want to promote my 360 pages as best I can. 

Unfortunately, a good deal of my tour costs go on credit cards. I mention this because I rarely hear writers talk about it, even though you and I both know writers who fund their national tours but pretend not to. We’re trained (I was anyway) that talking about money is “rude.” But why is it rude? Because some people are so obviously getting screwed, and to make that fact known would destroy the system. My publisher is a small independent press, so I do not expect them to cover all of my tour. And a lot of big publishers are hurting. I am incredibly, incredibly lucky to have a stable, tenure-track job at a university that can cover some of my travel costs. But most writers I know are freelancers filing a mess of 1099s, and/or they’re adjuncts, lecturers, visiting profs insecurely employed and underpaid by universities branded as progressive but ultimately very, very corporate, searching for any way to squeeze more out of their most vulnerable workforce (example: charging adjuncts for parking). For a lot of writers, social media is the most cost-effective means of promotion, which is why I refrain from judging anyone for tweeting about glowing book reviews or awards won. I avoid social media simply because stress easily triggers mania and/or psychosis for me, and I feel better not having all that noise in my brain. 

I want to circle back to what you said about how exteriorizing our personal lives can help “other women who are hungry for this mirroring.” It reminds me of what Chris Kraus writes toward the end of ​I Love Dick​: “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come out clean?” She then references the artist Hannah Wilke whose work addresses an essential point, summarized here by Kraus: “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” 

This brings me to one (of the many) elements I love about ​Mother Winter​. You texture it with references to other writers and artists, especially women whose reputations have been neglected, such as Dorothy Richardson. I love that you included a select bibliography after your acknowledgments. I’m suddenly reminded of an interview with a male writer I admire. He was asked about his influences and he talked around the question, ultimately naming no one. He also claimed that book acknowledgments “spoil the magic.” He does not want readers thinking about other books or writers—and especially not his editor—while or after reading his books. To give him the benefit of the doubt (though I am tired of giving men the benefit of the doubt), he writes fiction, and I guess there’s something to be said for keeping the reader focused on that fictional world. Some women I know also skip including acknowledgments. But writing is such a communal project. Mentioning our influences is a kindness not only to those influences but to readers. And I love how you contextualize your influences in your bibliography. You note Eileen Myles’s passages in ​Afterglow ​about a rapist’s demise for “breaking someone’s sacred ‘envelope’” and add: “You can and do heal, your position may even be that of a forgiver, if you so wish, while an abuser/predator/rapist, an envelope ripper, remains the thief of your mourned safety and innocence, which is a certain kind of death.” That sentence alone makes me feel less alone. 

Can we end our conversation with an acknowledgment of our editors? Masie Cochran edited both of my memoirs. I shared my second manuscript with her before showing it to my agent. I already knew I wanted to work with her again. And I know you have a great relationship with your editor, Zack Knoll. When we were in conversation at Politics and Prose about ​Mother Winter​, I asked you about your decision to contain the fragments—which cohere through poetic, associative leaps—within a four-part structure: Russia, America, Russia, America. You immediately credited Zack. I found your willingness to “spoil the magic” refreshing. 

SS:  I am all for bursting bubbles of magic in publishing. Here’s the deal. All of Our editors are highly overworked, underpaid, and mostly brilliant. They are not our little helpers and they deserve to have the spotlight and to be heard and seen. In fact, the whole machine does. I was telling Lacy M. Johnson how her Notes section in The Reckonings is my favorite part of her book. I love the stuff in the back, the endnotes, the after-thoughts, the almost-cut-aways, the margins. And so our editors are all of the meat allowing itself be wrapped in our dough and be this little dumpling. It’s a dyad. If not because of line edits or the vision, then because of the worry and awe they are able to make wings out of. They are our believers and we have a very different relationship to our material in a vacuum, unparented. Men never discuss their editors. It’s like the last two readings I went to and the male poets read what they deemed love poems for their partners. I listened carefully for any sign of their beloved and only heard them say how much they love being in love. They were in a zipped bag, happy, like maggots on stale ham.

I should send you a photo of me wearing a ratty old t-shirt I silkscreened almost twenty years ago that reads: “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?” That is quite psychic of you to extract that particular quote here in our writerly talk, because the idea that I am in trouble if I ever point fingers, that if I do I’ll have four more pointing back at me, was on my mind as a young woman. I’ve been blamed for every bad relationship I’ve been in. I allowed it. Even if you were passed out, you still allowed it. If I emotionally passed out to deal with being drowned out by a condescending man, I am at fault for that. 

What chance do any of us have? We are all spoiling men’s lives by running our mouths, then calling it art or literature or reportage after we basically asked for it. This narrative has never gone away. This year I have had more encounters with people most would consider to be well-informed who are skeptical at the fact that a mother can lose custody of her children while doing nothing to deserve it, or who accuse a drunk girl being a less-than credible interpreter of her night out with a predatory man, or who turn a blind eye to cultural institutions wishing to protect their own reputations over transparent checks and balances on men who’ve gobbled up and abused power, performed micro-aggressions, and demeaned their female co-workers. Women live in fear of being Anita Hill while looking up to Anita Hill. Now tell me I exist and can achieve my dreams after that conundrum shakes out. 

This is how deeply ​TWDTWIWAG ​cut into me. At that hinge of terror and agency. I experienced it watching the Senate hearings on Clarence Thomas while still learning English in 1991, and again while watching the Kavanaugh hearings this past year. A full circle of freedom-for-all hypocrisy. The only thing that’s changed is that there were a few powerful Senators asking that power-hungry sexual predator real questions. That is what you have done in your book. I wonder if your method of interviewing as simulation of staging correctives for these two hearings will be as evident to others who’ll read the work as it is to me.

JV: The book was my means of gaining control. Whoever controls the narrative holds the most power in any given situation. So I created my own system for understanding or talking about sexual assault, shifting the focus back on the abuser by interrogating him on my terms. The entire story is my story now. I claim it by telling it and telling it widely. And by presenting my story as a work of art, I also remove myself from it. It becomes something for others. Not a manual or manifesto, but simply an example of a side not often seen. I’m interested in the conversations that happen around this book.

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Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. She is an MFA graduate of Portland State University with a second master's degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts. Her memoir Mother Winter is equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of The Glass Eye: A Memoir and Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl. Her work has also 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.