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.”