The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays

“With Perils of Girlhood, Melissa Fraterrigo delivers an unflinching collection of personal essays about what it means to grow up female. As much as this book lives up to its title, it’s also infused with hearty resilience. Even as threats haunt the edges of life for girls and women, the author rescues a tenacity for life from the fear of living it.”―Patricia Martin, River Teeth

“With her searing honesty and emotional candor, Fraterrigo offers a resounding rallying cry that stays with readers long after we have finished the book: to protect girls and honor women. Like the doll on the cover, all of us who heed that call look upwards through adversity with a hope and strength that refuses to be dashed.”―Anne Sawyier, Another Chicago Magazine

“Recounted in frenzied flights, Fraterrigo describes a time of her life marked by scissor-kicks and Tupperware containers filled with lettuce leaves. . . . In this becoming, Fraterrigo grows . . . into someone more expansive, someone living for more than just beauty and order and acclaim, but for the life of another.”—Anna Rollins, Mom Egg Review

“This gorgeous, shattering, hopeful, sorrowful, soulful book is about the perils (and glories) of girlhood, yes, but also of motherhood and daughterhood, womanhood, life. I dare anyone to read it without a frequent—maybe constant—shiver of oh yes, me too. Whether Melissa Fraterrigo is writing about the excruciations of adolescence, the highs and lows of love and marriage, self-image, friendship, extreme dieting, or the daily just-below-the-surface drumbeat of worry that’s so often baked into motherhood (not an inclusive list!), she is writing from the heart, beautifully and heartbreakingly and oh-so-smartly.”—Michelle Herman, author of If You Say So

“In this striking collection, Melissa Fraterrigo offers intimate essays examining her youthful fears and desires and the complex challenges facing her now as she parents twin girls. The Perils of Girlhood is an essential meditation on how we raise our daughters, in a voice that is clear, honest, and wise.”—Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

“The Perils of Girlhood will generate conversation that parents of daughters and sons find challenging. Melissa Fraterrigo’s wisdom, painfully achieved, is important to pass on to the next generation, to strengthen the way we honor ourselves, both in how we are treated and the way we treat others.”—Abigail Thomas, author of Safekeeping, A Three Dog Life, and Still Life at Eighty

“Through a crystalline rendering of an eighties girlhood (bran cereal and the Barbie Style Head, Judy Blume and Jean M. Auel, aerosol hairspray and Zinka, Judd Nelson and Rob Lowe, too much exercise and too little food) and onward into a writing career and motherhood, the essays in Melissa Fraterrigo’s The Perils of Girlhood navigate the complexity of a life lived in a female body with the kind of clarity and empathy that both brings me back—I mean, Fraterrigo gets me—and helps me to see a way forward.”—Jill Christman, author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

“This collection is a subtle subversion of the conservative political narrative that women’s lives are inconsequential, and somehow interchangeable. These compelling essays about sexuality, home life, coming of age, and the interior life are not always in-your-face, but they are always in-your-soul.”—Sue William Silverman, author of Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul

“The Perils of Girlhood is a reckoning with self and world, with girlhood as well as womanhood—and motherhood—and the violence that hovers at all times around the periphery and occasionally breaks through. Marked by their raw honesty and precision, these essays transcend the purely personal and speak to the complexities and challenges of being a woman in our current cultural moment.”—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry