I feel strange and untethered, like I might close my eyes and flicker from reality. I prefer “crazy” to “mentally ill.” The latter sounds so clinical, and I never feel clinical when I am in the trenches of my post-traumatic stress. The entire time, I wondered, “Does everyone know that I am like Jeannie? That I, too, am crazy?” When we split into small groups, I let the words of my partners wash over me. The students around me animatedly discussed “The Glass Eye” with my professor. In one of our Essays & Memoirs class discussions a few weeks ago, I sat very still and did not say a word. “The night before he died, I promised my dad I would write a book for him.Warning: This edition of By the Book contains graphic content relating to sexual assault that some readers may not be comfortable with. Over the next ten years, Jeannie Vanasco attempted to fulfill that promise: numerous attempts to write about her father, all called The Glass Eye, followed this powerful book is the culmination of that project. It is, foremost, a memoir, documenting the life and death of Jeannie’s beloved father through the lens of Jeannie herself. How does she grieve over this tremendous loss? How does she encompass his life story (and hers) in a book? Vanasco acutely and poignantly maps her struggle with the process of writing the book as well as the struggles which make up its content. “Describing my dad through the metaphor of his eye comes easy encapsulating him in plain language feels impossible.” The title alludes to her father’s “glass” eye, which she only fixated on after he died.

The book isn’t plot driven it doesn’t try to create a single, simple, chronological narrative. Vanasco obsesses over details, events, conversations-are they remembered correctly? Do they help demonstrate who her father was? What emerges in her attempts to answer these questions is not only a rich portrait of a flawed man who meant the world to his youngest daughter, but a rich portrait of her own humanity.

The memoir is formatted in fragments, or excerpts: memories, conversations, and events which add up to a cohesive (and largely chronological) whole.

The glass eye by jeannie vanasco