The Glass Eye

“Jeannie Vanasco's The Glass Eye is memoir as it ought to be, but so rarely is: beautiful and painfully raw, but also restrained and lyrical. Vanasco is brilliant, and this book proves it.” - Darin Strauss, author of HALF A LIFE

“Every memoir is a reckoning with the past, but only the most skilled and courageous memoirist can simultaneously inhabit the story that haunts her and the story of her reckoning with equal urgency. In The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco shows us why rules should be broken: because an elegy that pulses with immediacy, a fragment that is inextricable from a whole, a book that comments on its own writing can smash what you think you know into pieces, and expose a piece of truth so bright it might be your own broken heart, handed back to you.” - Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART & ABANDON ME

“One month after going away to college, Jeannie Vanasco learned that her father had died, and with him his unconditional and sometimes all-consuming love for her. In The Glass Eye the writer asks, in prose that mesmerizes with geometric precision, how we can orient ourselves to the world when our only compass is grief. What begins as an experience of profound loss becomes an obsession, the fierce intensity of which propels readers through this breathtaking book.” - Lacy Johnson, author of THE OTHER SIDE

“With The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco has produced a debut of incisive vision. In prose as vivid as a novel and as chiseled as poetry, Vanasco shows the reader that memoir can entail an unexpected, ultimately liberating reckoning. Delving into her family''s traumatic and moving history, Vanasco unearths the true story of her late namesake Jeanne, her father''s enduring sorrows, and how both have informed her own often difficult personal journey.” - John Keene, author of COUNTERNARRATIVES