I think that’s because I wanted to write something literary, and memoir isn’t usually perceived as inherently literary-not in the way that poetry, for example, so often is. Jeannie Vanasco: I hadn’t really thought about this until you asked, but initially, when I worked on The Glass Eye as poetry and then fiction, I didn’t feel pressured to find an unconventional structure. But as soon as I realized that The Glass Eye would be a memoir, that’s when I started to obsess over form. Did you set out to write a more chronological or straightforward narrative, or had you always wanted to push the boundaries of form?

The Rumpus: The Glass Eye is a remarkable book for, among other reasons, its unconventional structure. In December, we exchanged emails about unconventional narrative structures, if creation provides as much catharsis as we hope it will, and the joys of living without social media. The Glass Eye is heartbreaking and harrowing and at times painfully intimate, but it ends on a note of tentative closure: Vanasco has found a loving partner, moved to the Baltimore area to teach writing, and fulfilled her promise to her father, splendidly. Thankfully, in this case, we can have both the art and the life. That quest becomes so obsessive, and at times appears to exacerbate the symptoms of her bipolar disorder so severely, that readers might wonder if she will emerge intact from the process.Īlberto Giacometti famously proclaimed that in a fire, he’d save a cat before a Rembrandt.

On the surface, it appears to be about grief, but its plot is actually composed of many strands that curl around and into themselves like a sailor’s knot: the investigation into the life and premature death of Vanasco’s half-sister, with whom she shares a name her devotion to her father (the titular glass eye is his) and her protracted grief over his death the development of her mental illness and her quest to write the book itself, which she promised her father on his deathbed she would do.

Though I am a voracious consumer of memoir––a genre in which a reader can find no shortage of authorial struggles––I’m not sure I’ve ever read a memoir in which the writer had to endure so much for the final product as The Glass Eye, by Jeannie Vanasco.

The glass eye by jeannie vanasco