Melissa Fraterrigo is the executive director of the Lafayette Writer’s Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, and teaches at Purdue University. She is the author of the novel Glory Days (Nebraska, 2017) and a collection of short fiction, The Longest Pregnancy: Stories. Her latest memoir in essays, The Perils of Girlhood (Nebraska Press), was published September 1st, 2025, and was named a Literary Hub Notable Small Press Book of 2025. The title essay was originally published in The Offing. This interview was conducted by Kristen Patterson.

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Kristen Patterson: Congratulations on the publication of this really powerful memoir in essays. The Perils of Girlhood officially launched on September 1st, last year. How has it been post-release for you? 

Melissa Fraterrigo: I signed the contract for the book in January of 2023, and I would say with every iteration of the arrival of September 1st, 2025, my anxieties skyrocketed. There are stories in the book that I’d never shared with anyone, and anybody at the grocery store could ask me what it was like, in terms of my husband’s cancer diagnosis, or my miscarriages, or what happened with my 8th grade swim coach. And so I just really turned myself into knots, thinking about the way in which people would respond to this book.

I’ve loved the conversations that have been taking place around it. You think, oh, The Perils of Girlhood, this is going to be a book that’s simply going to resonate with women maybe of a certain age group, and that has not been the case at all. The book has resonated with all sorts of people from those in their 80s to middle-aged men and college students. It’s been a delight to hear how the book has spoken to readers.

KP: The titular essay in the collection was originally published in The Offing in April 2024, so it sounds like you were already working on this memoir at the time. Did you have a sense of the shape it was going to take? Were all the essays in the collection written especially for this memoir? 

MF: The memoir in essays–although it’s mainly chronological, starts with adolescence and moves into young adulthood, and then into motherhood–was not written in that chronological order. And yet, when you read the book in the way it’s organized, it kind of gives that same sense of a life–of a memoir.

There are a lot of essays that did not make it into the book, and that’s simply because my initial genesis for this project shifted so much. “The Perils of Girlhood,” the essay that appeared in The Offing, is a braided essay that brings together three strands: the true story of the murder of two girls in Delphi, Indiana in 2017, my experience in growing up in the 80s and the fear culture that existed after Adam Walsh was abducted, as well as my more current experience as a mom of twin daughters, and my fears of the traumas that might come to them because of some of what I’ve experienced. So, even in that first essay, we’ve got this current event story, with Abby and Liberty. And I’ve got the other elements of popular culture from the 80s, such as when they started to print missing children on the sides of milk cartons.

The element of pop culture became really, really important to me as I was working on each of the essays. I noticed how the book itself wasn’t just about my experiences, but they were also about more of a cultural moment, in terms of the way that we use pop culture to serve as a kind of a mirror to model ourselves after. So I used everything from song lyrics, to movies, to TV shows, to better illustrate for readers the universality of these perils.

KP: The structure of the book worked really well for me, especially this feature where, as you transition from your own childhood to parenthood, there’s this sort of recursive element of revisiting your childhood as a parent reflecting on your relationship to your kids.

MF: Yeah, and I think that that’s just kind of how memory works. Our minds are not linear. And going into this book process, I promised myself I wouldn’t look at any reviews, and I’ve totally, like, lied. Somebody left a review on Goodreads that was like, “Oh my god, I thought this was gonna be more like an edgier version of the Barbie movie. Instead, she kept bopping around in time. What was the point?”

The bopping around is part of the point. The point is that all of us have moments in our lives that are touchstones that we return back to all the time. Sometimes those are centering things, sometimes those are things that force us to move outside of our body in a negative way, but that’s how memory works. It can force a visceral reaction, and that’s what I had hoped might elicit a response from the reader. 

KP: The book opens with a description of a disclosure that seems to misfire, and that it is not initially understood the way you expected or ideally hoped. You tell a friend about the swim coach who pressed himself against you, and she reacts, “that’s exciting,” rather than, “that’s terrible.” That interaction really shadows the rest of the book, and made me feel very conscious of my perspective as the reader. How did you decide to start the collection there? 

MF: That scene didn’t arrive until later in the book’s process. I did so much moving around, like a DJ working on a mixer table. Even the ending of the book was chopped off from an essay that was maybe three-quarters of the way through. Once I had a full draft I was able to get a better sense of what I was working with. I used different colored sticky notes to mark particular threads and where they were appearing, and then where I might have them appear again as a sort of echo. So I was working on creating a story map for the reader, and that each time something occurs–or recurs, rather–the reader begins to feel a deeper sense of investment. They are beginning to understand the book as something that’s living within their own experience. 

KP: One of the aspects of this memoir that I definitely felt myself getting more invested in as I went along was the feeling you convey at various points of really just wanting your parents to like you. That was really real to me. It feels like a dynamic in parent-child relationships that is maybe underrepresented, or under-emphasized, as opposed to the tension that arises from kids wanting independence and parents wanting authority. And it felt like a big revelation for me, like, “Oh, wanting love is a big driver of conflict, too.”

Can you say a little bit about that, reflecting back on being both the child and the parent on either side of that equation?

MF: That’s a great question. It’s a big question, because it makes me wonder: if we get everything that we need from our parents, who will we end up being? I was very aware of the ways that I didn’t meet my parents’ expectations. I did not excel at school, and I did not excel in volleyball or on the swim team. I was just a middle-of-the-road kid. I felt  invisible, and I think I even say in one of the essays how people would routinely call me my sister’s name. 

And I would wonder, well, do they want me to be her? My sister, the ballet star, and a very academically talented person, whom I love and adore now. But at the time, when you’re a kid and so much is out of your control, you can’t help but feel like, “Oh, well, she’s the cause of this disdain. It’s not my parents.” I didn’t take that disappointment I felt from them and put it back on them, I put it on my sister. It was much easier to do that. But I do wonder sometimes, about this idea of love. I still struggle with loving myself, or thinking that I’m worthwhile, and now as a parent, I don’t know that I do it any better. 

KP: A major theme of the memoir is also, obviously, the perils of girlhood, both your own experiences as adolescence and then as a mother of two young girls, which really got me thinking about the long-standing tension in feminist discourse between wanting to discuss the vulnerability that women experience and not wanting to characterize women as innately vulnerable. How do you see this project as fitting into that wider conversation?

MF: Well, first of all, I think it’s a conversation. I think of my very first women’s studies classes, and how even the way that the rooms were often set up; we always sat in a circle, people were sharing their thoughts about readings, and there was always more than one way to interpret a text or theory. And so, in terms of how this book fits in with that ideology, I think that it encourages conversation and doesn’t necessarily offer strict answers.

I had somebody at a reading a couple weeks ago [who] stood up. She was so angry, she said, “I’m so angry that women are still held responsible when other people harm them, when other people show violence toward their bodies. Women are still victimized, they’re still being held responsible.” And I stood there. Other than listening to her, I didn’t really know what to say. 

The book is not offering  suggestions for how to live. I think the power is in any reader looking back on their own life and considering, well, what are some things that have happened to me that I might share with somebody else that might help them in some way? What are some things that the book is bringing up? And how can I, in my own life, move the needle a little bit on this conversation? 

KP: That really aligns with another thing I noticed about the way you write and really appreciate as a reader, which is this sort of immediate quality to the way you write about the experiences you relate in the book. I think it can be tempting when talking or writing about past experiences to see them through the lens of the interpretation that you did later, which maybe detracts from being able to capture the experience as it felt in the moment. Does that resonate with your own sense of what you wanted to do with this book, and can you talk a little bit about the stylistic ambitions you had when you decided to write a memoir?

MF: Sue William Silverman talks about the voice of innocence and experience, and when we’re writing a memoir, we’re bringing two voices to the table. That innocent voice is the one that’s simply relaying the events. They’re simply describing things as they were. It’s that voice of experience that comes back and looks at that situation with a deep curiosity and idea to interpret, or consider, or really contemplate what’s the meaning behind this. So I was really conscious of using scenes. That’s my background as a fiction writer, using scenes and sensory details to bring a reader to a moment so that they could feel like they were right then and there. And by slanting some of the details to fit with a particular mood, I could say more with fewer words.

With that background in fiction, it is easier for me to paint a scene. This is my first memoir. I had to learn to do more of that exploration, more of that inquiry, because it isn’t something that comes natural to me. 

So I was really trying to do more thinking, and I realized, once I had a draft, that the book also really needed some moments of levity, because the book itself has some darkness to it. The essay “Peach Pit,” which is about my partner feeding our really sweet dog, Cooper, a bite of his peach, and then our dog swallowing the whole peach, is my attempt to do just that. I had to do some of the mental calculus to consider how I was directing readers and giving that sense, not just of some moments as they evolved in the present, but this idea of how such experiences would go on to impact me later. 

KP: I love that dichotomy of the innocent versus experienced perspective. It almost seems to parallel the parent-child structure you have going on. Except, of course, what you’re also exploring is that the parent is also one of the innocents.

MF: Yeah, for sure. And I think that, going back to your earlier question about parents and love, the other thing that I had to do with this book, and I think that all writers of memoir have to do, is they have to give themselves grace. You’re going back, and you’re looking at moments from your life from the present, and you bring with you an evolved understanding. For instance, the first essay in the book that you mentioned, Coach Matt, my 8th grade swim coach, knew I had a crush on him. He waited until the last swim meet of the season, and that’s when he took advantage of me.

Why did I not tell anybody? I didn’t tell my parents, I didn’t tell my friends. I was so confused, I thought that meant that he liked me. In going back to these moments, it’s easy to criticize yourself. And even my parents, when it was obvious that maybe I was struggling, or maybe I could have used a little extra attention, or something like that, instead of looking at them or myself in a harsh fashion, I can say, hey, you know what? They were doing the best that they could with what they had at that time.  

KP: So as you’re saying, you obviously revisit a lot of experiences in this memoir that were either directly physically violent or otherwise really emotionally intense. On the non-writing side of the practice of writing, do you have any advice on taking care of yourself while writing about something intense, be it fiction or nonfiction?

MF: Writing isn’t therapy. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have an emotional reaction when you are writing something that’s emotionally challenging.

I did a couple different things when I had to revisit the whole manuscript again this past spring. It was my last time with the manuscript after working with a copy editor, and I had to go back over everything. I remember I’d get up from my desk, and I would honestly feel like I had just gone for a ten-mile run. I was just exhausted. So I tried to limit my time at the desk when working on certain pieces.

I’ve got a really cute dog. He’s not nice to other people, but he’s really sweet toward members of our family. He’s got very soft ears. So I would get up and pet the dog, or I’d go for a walk, or I’d go for a swim.

KP: Water is a recurring image across these essays in an interesting way. There’s a lot of the experiences you relate that take place at or in a lake or a pool. But the pattern only really jumped out to me in the essay “Lock Me,” where you deploy this metaphor of the mother crocodile that needs to carry her offspring to the water. How did you arrive at the crocodile as your avatar in that piece?

MF: Water is my element, and it’s something I think about even metaphorically, so I love that you picked up on that. “Lock Me!” is a segmented essay, so we’ve got four different strands there. I don’t really consider it a braid, because so many of the pieces themselves are so short–

KP: Yeah, it was sort of staccato, almost.

MF: Exactly! And so the four strands: we’ve got the crocodiles, we have a sexual predator that moved in down our street, the history of Mace with the Litmans, and then also my own experience with Mace when I was in college. 

The crocodiles arrived in the most bizarre place. When you use research in a piece, it’s another way to bring in the element of universality. If I had just written about my experience with Mace, it would have been a really boring essay, but by being aware of what was going on, and what other threads presented themselves when I was sitting down at my desk, the essay becomes a lot more dynamic.

I started with my personal story, what happened to me when I was a sophomore in college with Mace, and I started doing some research into Mace itself, and how long has it been around, and how did it come to be? And I learned about Alan Lee Lipman, who was the inventor, when I happened upon a newsletter from the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy that had a picture of Alan Litman’s wife with a crocodile, and she was holding the crocodile at its chin, as if to give it a kiss. Underneath, it mentioned that Ernst, the Littman’s crocodile, was now at the Smithsonian, and I was like, Oh, wow, that’s wild! Who has a crocodile for a pet? So just for the heck of it, I started to do a little research into that crocodile.

KP: All the way down the rabbit hole at this point.

MF: That’s what I love about writing, just letting yourself go wherever the story is taking you.

KP: Your friendships are also a constant presence throughout this memoir, but don’t really take center stage until the final essay, which focuses on your relationship with your friend Emily, and it’s kind of a perfect capstone to the memoir. It brings full circle your girlhood with your adult life, and it weaves back in these recurring themes of bodily vulnerability and chronic illness. Can you tell us about choosing to end the memoir with that essay, and on this note of friendship?

MF: I think because I was aware of the fact that there’s a fair bit of trauma or darkness in the book, I wanted it to end on a note of hope or delight that even though we go through hard times, we’ve got these loved ones, and my female friends have been everything to me, and they still are. 

That’s another essay that is juggling two time periods: the friendship that Emily and I had when we were in high school and then lifeguards, trying to still make sense of our bodies and gender; and also the two of us now, as moms, trying to squeeze in a conversation, a walk, a connection, while also tending to caregiving for these loved ones. I wanted to bring the book full circle, [starting] with another friend, that prologue of her not believing my story about Coach Matt, but the prologue ends with me getting in my car starting to ruminate a little on that conversation. And so then the book ends, Emily and I have lunch, we’ve revisited our lives, I’ve also shared a little bit about my relationship with her, and then I get back in my car to return to my present-day family. So the car is this symbol or metaphor for being alone with myself, with my thoughts. I wanted to return to that place of honesty.

KP: Do you have any new projects in the works, and are there any other works of art that you’re obsessed with lately that you’d like to share?

MF: Oh, wow. I just continue to work on essays. Some of them take quite some time. Now, especially, I’m trying to grapple with things that I haven’t quite figured out, so I sit down, I read them, I think I get a little bit closer, but I’m just still not there. I’m working on an essay about swimming pools.

In terms of art that I’m interested in right now, I just love documentaries. I’m planning on watching the Brooke Shields documentary [Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields]. I’m also really loving Kelly Sundberg’s memoir, The Answer Is in the Wound.

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