Growing up as a girl can be a journey of dodging obstacles and dangers: unwanted male attention, body image disorders, handling the anger of a parent, and more. In her memoir-in-essays, The Perils of Girlhood (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), Melissa Fraterrigo looks back on her growing up years initially as a way to share her memories with her twin daughters but then finding also acceptance of herself and her experiences.
“That’s the power of memoir—it’s both the power and the potential downfall in that looking at your past, looking at your life through your current lens and your present skills,” says Fraterrigo. “It’s hard not to consider, why did I not tell anyone [about the abuse] that happened with my swim coach? Why did I not tell my mom or scream in that moment? It’s pretty hard not to chastise yourself for some of those moments.”
In writing about those sometimes-difficult memories, Fraterrigo discovered that she needed to step away from time to time for self-care, whether walking her dog or some other activity to distract herself. And yet, she says, over time, she found an acceptance in the writing. She did her best at the time.
In sharing her work with her daughters, Fraterrigo says, “I felt the best support I could offer them as they entered adolescence was to share with them a little about my experience. Not so much as a means of warning them or trying to incite fear but rather as a way of sharing my experience as a woman and as a mother.”
Fraterrigo is also the author of the novel, Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press), and the story collection, The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press). She teaches creative writing at Purdue University, in the Butler University MFA in Creative Writing program, and is the founder of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana.
Fraterrigo will be reading along with authors Dawn Burns and Bonnie Jo Campbell for RUINING THE NARRATIVE: Women as Witness and Agents of Story, on Thursday, March 26, at 6:30 p.m. at this is a bookstore/Bookbug. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.
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