The Glass Eye: A Memoir - Softcover

Jeannie Vanasco has crafted a book that will worm its way under your skin, a book that will not give you easy answers or heartwarming takeaways, much in the same way that life will not give you easy answers or heartwarming takeaways. Jeannie Vanasco has created a book that I cannot stop thinking about.--Emily Ballaine, Green Apple Books

An unfettered dive into a brilliant, unraveling mind. Vanasco's memoir is visceral, poignant, and ultimately an affirmation of the healing power of literature and the resilience of the human soul. Astounding.--Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore

A deceptively spare life story that sneaks up and surprises you with its sudden fecundity and power.--Kirkus

Powerful and ruminative . . . This is an illuminating manual for understanding grief and the strange places it leads.--Publishers Weekly

An absolutely beautiful exploration of family, grief, memory, and madness, this book is outstanding. . . . 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.--Jamie Thomas, Women & Children First

This is memoir at its best. The prose is powerful and often breathtaking--it'll make your heart break, it might make you cry, and you'll probably even laugh a few times. This is an elegy fierce and lyrical and raw, like none I've read before.--Sarah Malley, Newtonville Books

Wildly innovative.--New York Magazine

[A]n intense and unforgettable memoir, as fascinating for its artistry as for its subject matter. . . . Lyric, haunted, smart and tortured, this is an obsessive love letter to a dead father as well as a singular work of literature.--Shelf Awareness

Vanasco's candor, curiosity, and commitment to human understanding are not to be missed.--Booklist, Starred Review

Vanasco explores the intricacies of the human psyche with stunning poignancy.--Newsweek

For fans of Maggie Nelson and Meghan O’Rourke, Jeannie Vanasco emerges as a definitive new voice in this stunning portrait of a daughter's love for her father and her near-unraveling after his death.The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died.After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals—increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. Obsession turns to investigation as Jeannie plumbs her childhood awareness of her dead half sibling and hunts for clues into the mysterious circumstances of her death. It becomes a puzzle Jeannie feels she must solve to better understand herself and her father.Jeannie Vanasco pulls us into her unraveling with such intimacy that her insanity becomes palpable, even logical. A brilliant exploration of the human psyche, The Glass Eye deepens our definitions of love, sanity, grief, and recovery.