...[a] brilliant, obsessive memoir about grieving ... Reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, The Glass Eye isn’t a straightforward memoir: Rather, it’s a self-aware chronicle of her struggles as she talks us through her process on the page ('I worry I’m too easily swayed by the sonic impact of a line') or researches the sparse facts of her half sister’s death. As the pages fly by, we’re right by Vanasco, breathlessly experiencing her grief, mania, revelations, and — ultimately — her relief.
She writes vividly of the exposed-nerve pain of losing a parent at such a tumultuous age ... The language cuts quick to the heart of Vanasco’s hurt; readers will immediately fall into the rhythm of her unrelenting inner dialogue. The greatest strength of this work is the author’s self-awareness; she admits that writing a memoir about her experience with grief might be further contributing to her personal turmoil. Vanasco’s candor, curiosity, and commitment to human understanding are not to be missed.
Jeannie’s obsessive quest to fit her father’s and her half-sister’s life into some sort of coherent, meaningful narrative both provides the book with its exploratory thrust and, in its paranoid excesses, fuels her encroaching mental illness ... At the end of The Glass Eye, Jeannie has a startling realization that rearranges her perspective on everything she’s told us. 'I used Jeanne as a metaphor,' she admits, echoing Bouillier and Palm before her, 'as a means to understand my dad’s grief, as a means to understand who he was, as a means to understand how I should grieve. I don’t know how to grieve.' And then, in five quick words, Vanasco flips the assumptions underlying her entire project: 'Jeanne was a real girl,' she writes, which is to say: not a symbol, not mere material. This is an essential realization, a way out of both madness and literary narcissism, and yet, no matter how real Jeanne was, the act of writing reduces her. Jeanne may be 'real,' but the second you put her on the page, she cannot help but become a metaphor. With this, every memoirist must reckon.
[Vanasco] digs deep into the kind of obsessional thinking that proves to be every bit as constricting as it is impenetrable. Within its sad confines, however, there also exists rich, fertile lands filled with the possibility of lifesaving self-discovery, which she explores in unadorned, sparse prose that builds in power as it accumulates ... The author’s relentless introspection, which includes almost offhanded recollections of terrible self-harm and institutionalization, manages to cast a spotlight on the art of memoir itself, as she valiantly struggles to find the best medium possible to convey the true essence of a daughter’s love for her father. A deceptively spare life story that sneaks up and surprises you with its sudden fecundity and power.
...[a] powerful and ruminative memoir ... Vanasco expertly weaves trenchant metaphors throughout the text, particularly with her father’s glass eye, which represents his mortality and the fragility of life. The narrative is framed with Vanasco’s reflections on writing as she attempts to fulfill the promise she made to her father the night before he died, that she would write a book about him. Though her description of the actual event of her father’s death is deeply moving, Vanasco is less successful when describing her writing process, which can veer into overly affected introspection. This is an illuminating manual for understanding grief and the strange places it leads.
