The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #150: Melissa Fraterrigo
"I wanted to explore my life as a way to better understand my daughters and girlhood in general."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 150th installment, featuring Melissa Fraterrigo, author most recently of The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Melissa Fraterrigo’s memoir, The Perils of Girlhood was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2025. She 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. Please visit melissafraterrigo.com
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 52 years old and have been writing in earnest since my first year teaching high school English in central Illinois. On the first day of class when I asked the students to take out their literature books, one irate freshman told me to fuck off, and I realized that education—the major I’d chosen to please my science-oriented parents—would not be enough. I began taking fiction writing classes at night and during the summers. I joined a writing group and tried to learn everything I could about stories.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
The Perils of Girlhood, September 1, 2025
Like many girls growing up in the 80s and 90s, I leaned on popular culture to transition from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Judy Blume told stories about girls embracing their imperfections; Madonna encouraged bold moves. But my experiences with dating and attempts to refashion my body through diet and exercise left me feeling far from empowered. It wasn’t until I became a mother to twin daughters and they began their own self-criticisms that I questioned how I might help them navigate their own girlhoods.
What number book is this for you?
Three.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
Memoir-in-essays, which even writing it now, has a certain beauty to it. I love the idea of a memoir-in-essays living in a sort of liminal space—not just essays and not just memoir, but a hybrid of both. I am a fiction writer by trade, but after being unable to find a publisher for my YA novel, I lost all interest in fiction. This was during the pandemic and my daughters were attending school on Zoom, all my classes were online, and I found myself drawn to memoir. I loved how with memoir, I often felt invited into an experience through specificity of details and the richness of voice.
In The Perils of Girlhood, each essay stands alone and yet the book is primarily chronological, which allowed me to weave in and out of time through flashbacks as a girl and adolescent, to stories as a young adult and mother. This offered “leaps” and epiphanies similar to memory’s pulse.
During the pandemic everything felt so fraught and I was thinking so much about the past. Memories were bubbling up from all over the place—junior high, summer swim team, when I was first teaching creative writing in Utah—and I became obsessed with these moments. I wanted to sit with them and turn them in every direction like a kaleidoscope. I wanted to explore my life as a way to better understand my daughters and girlhood in general.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
Like many girls growing up in the 80s and 90s, I leaned on popular culture to transition from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Judy Blume told stories about girls embracing their imperfections; Madonna encouraged bold moves. But my experiences with dating and attempts to refashion my body through diet and exercise left me feeling far from empowered. It wasn’t until I became a mother to twin daughters and they began their own self-criticisms that I questioned how I might help them navigate their own girlhoods.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
I’ve wanted to be a writer since Mrs. Pepkowski’s first grade class when I wrote “The Littlest Punkin” (sic) on ivory construction paper. I remember how it felt to carry my words in a stapled book and later to watch my mom’s face expand with delight as she read my story. My parents were both children of the Great Depression and they were fixated on making sure my siblings and I would do well in school and get jobs that would allow us to support ourselves. This meant that science and math were prized above all other subjects and even now I can feel a twinge of sadness for how much I felt like an outsider in my Catholic high school and in my home.
I ended up at the University of Iowa and through some great fortune, my second-semester rhetoric teacher was Jo Ann Beard who would later publish The Boys of My Youth. She was working toward her own MFA in the Nonfiction Writing Program and one day she asked me to stay after class and asked: “Have you ever thought about becoming a writer?” It was just the impetus I needed.
I studied English Education and taught high school and junior high English for three years while learning all I could about fiction writing before attending Bowling Green State University where I studied with Bonnie Jo Campbell and Wendell Mayo. My first two books were fiction—The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press, 2006) and Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), but then my desire to write fiction vanished. I attribute this somewhat to the fact I could not find a home for my YA novel, which in hindsight, built upon the complex relationship I had with my dad and how as a child I felt responsible for his emotions.
None of my other books of fiction included any veil of reality, but the YA book did—and I felt closer to it as a result. So, when I could not sell it, I doubted myself, yes, but it also lit a fire in me to look at the underexplained stories of my own life. Mary Oliver asks in “Summer Day”: Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life? and I knew I wanted to spend it trying to make sense of actual lived experiences.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
In order to write this book, I had to return to emotionally charged material and I had to stay with that material and explore it from every angle. This meant returning to sexual violence, miscarriages, my daughters’ and husband’s chronic illnesses. I had to be open to interrogating the choices I made during trying times and with the tools I had at that moment, while also reflecting from my present vantage. I’ve always been a morning writer, squirreling myself away at my desk with a mug of nearly lethal coffee and writing before the rest of my family wakes. But for The Perils of Girlhood, I learned to excavate my very self through various iterations. I would draft a scene long-handed—feel exhausted—then later transfer it into a Word doc, print it up, and the next morning, these would be the first words I read. I asked myself, Why did I do what I did? What was I thinking? How did I come to believe what I did?
In terms of publishing, I’ve always doubted myself. You know those sweatshirts with a last name on the back? Mine would say insecure in all caps. And yet with writing, we must go out alone and face the demons of our very selves. Even once I felt I had a pretty good manuscript, I kept putting it in the hands of readers and asking them their thoughts. I learned to use their feedback to deepen my own beliefs about the book.
In The Perils of Girlhood, each essay stands alone and yet the book is primarily chronological, which allowed me to weave in and out of time through flashbacks as a girl and adolescent, to stories as a young adult and mother. This offered “leaps” and epiphanies similar to memory’s pulse.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I changed some details and gave the manuscript to those who were featured and asked if they were okay with it or if I had included any details that did not feel true. I made clear that the book is a testament to my memories and that I am not capable of remembering everything that occurred, but that the emotions and events included were true to my story. Once I signed a contract with the University of Nebraska Press, I shared the manuscript with my parents and asked them to read it. They could not get through it—I don’t blame them for skipping over some pages! But now my mom will tell me she’s mentioned the book to her friends and I’ve said, “Mom—maybe you should read it first.”
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
I loved the lyricism of The Part That Burns by Jeannine Ouellette and Jeannie Vanasco’s drive to understand her high school rapist in Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl as well as how the narrator in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee refrains from judging his younger self harshly. I have also been reading The Sun since I was in high school. I read every issue cover to cover. Once I open to Reader’s Write, I have to stop whatever I am doing. The voices take me hostage every time.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
Just because you are afraid does not mean you should let it stop you from publishing your book. Find a community of writers and readers who are kind and generous and bright, and who see you for who you are. Read comparable titles, create a file of essays and stories and books that do exactly what frightens you or breaks the rules in a way that you admire. Collect that which allows you to move forward: inspirational quotes, nice pens, blank books of creamy paper—whatever will help you take your work seriously.
What do you love about writing?
Sometimes it’s the place where I feel most myself. I adore the process of tunneling deep into the senses of memory.
What frustrates you about writing?
You must separate the work of writing—the actual process of making something from selling it. Sometimes these two seem connected, but they aren’t. One has to do with the writer at her desk—the other offers external validation. None of us have any control over what is popular when. The only thing you can control is what you do at your desk and how you choose to define yourself.
What about writing surprises you?
I never know where I’ll go. I try to pay attention to what I’m drawn to and see that questions are part of the process. By tapping into my senses, I can return to a moment and discover so much more than what exists on the surface. I think Andre Aciman gets this really well in Best American Essays 2020 when he says: “Sometimes writing is not so much an escape from society as it is a secret passageway that leads back into the very society they needed to flee, either by bringing them glory from those they’ve allegedly shunned or by immersing themselves so deeply in what they are writing that they manage to populate on paper a surrogate society that rivals the one they’ve fled.”
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
In an ideal world, I’d take my coffee and sit down at my desk for several hours, interrupted by segments of reading and walking my dog, and then I’d break in the early afternoon for a swim and a late lunch. But I have twin 16-year-old daughters and I teach creative writing at Purdue and in the Butler University MFA Program in Creative Writing. There is always student work to respond to and emails to answer, milk to buy! I try to give myself grace. I tell students that they do not have to write every day, but that they can work on their essays just as easily when chopping carrots or washing a dish as long as they are mulling over their work and trying to get closer to it and what it is all about.
I ended up at the University of Iowa and through some great fortune, my second-semester rhetoric teacher was Jo Ann Beard who would later publish The Boys of My Youth. She was working toward her own MFA in the Nonfiction Writing Program and one day she asked me to stay after class and asked: “Have you ever thought about becoming a writer?” It was just the impetus I needed.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
Swimming! I’ve been a competitive swimmer since I was 5 and while I no longer compete, I consider swimming very much a part of my writing process. The act of moving through water is meditative and oftentimes, if I hit it just right, I can stop my work at a place of uncertainty or in a moment when the writing simply isn’t as clean as it needs to be, and while getting in my laps, I’ll problem solve and figure out a new approach. Of course, when I come up with actual lines, I have to repeat them over and again so my middle-aged brain does not forget them!
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I’m working on individual essays that may evolve into a book. We are still in the get-to-know-you process, and it’s terribly exciting.
Beautiful, interesting and inspiring!