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A review by maureenstantonwriter
Things We Didn't Talk about When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco
3.0
An important story and brave endeavor to contact the man who sexually abused her in college, a man who'd been her close friend. The story is bogged down by excessive hand-writing and meta-narrative about the process of finding him, contemplating the contact, contacting him, and recording verbatim (often) their conversations (or email exchanges), then processing what just happened with friends, therapist, husband. At nearly 350 pages, some of this could have been cut, or exchanged for more and deeper reflection on how this affected the author.
The end is abrupt and I'm left with little sense of exactly how this project of confronting her rapist changed the author, or not. There's a missed opportunity her for more reflection (not about the lead-up, or a deconstruction of every conversation with him), but on the idea of confrontation, reconciliation, and restorative justice, which has lately come under criticism for being perhaps useful to the offender but maybe not so much for the victim.
The end is abrupt and I'm left with little sense of exactly how this project of confronting her rapist changed the author, or not. There's a missed opportunity her for more reflection (not about the lead-up, or a deconstruction of every conversation with him), but on the idea of confrontation, reconciliation, and restorative justice, which has lately come under criticism for being perhaps useful to the offender but maybe not so much for the victim.