Reading Melissa Fraterrigo’s wonderful essay collection, The Perils of Girlhood was an almost uncanny experience for me. Like Fraterrigo, I’m a GenX white woman who grew up in the Midwest. I too have been a young female high school English teacher miserable in her job. I’ve been a college writing professor made to feel uncomfortable by male student writers who sexualize and describe scenes of violence against their female characters, as Devers does in “The Elements of Fiction.” I’ve been worried about my daughter’s encounters with a “creepy guy.” What Fraterrigo does so powerfully is catalogue and bring to light these experiences that many of us learn to write off as just another one of the many “perils of girlhood.”
One of the perils is how we falsely romanticize girlhood and our own pasts. Because I share so many experiences that Fraterrigo writes about, many of the essays triggered a deep feeling of nostalgia: watching 90210 on Thursday nights, asking a boy to a “turnabout” dance, shopping for discount clothes at TJ Maxx. But a most striking aspect of the collection is how Fraterrigo does not let us look away from the complicated realities that can get obscured by nostalgia, resulting in a powerful feeling of dissonance. For example, when I read about Coach Matt arriving at the high school pool in his hatchback, wearing Umbro shorts and listening to The Police, I am transported back to 1987. But as soon as I start thinking, ahhh yes, the good old days of sports practice and cassette tapes, the handsome college student who has become Fraterrigo’s coach is inappropriately pressing his body against hers in the pool. Her thoughts become jumbled: “Chlorine, tanning oil laughter Madonna sunlight sky cannonballs swim coach.” The dissonance is jarring; the dissonance is the point.
Another of the perils of girlhood is the way girls are trained for womanhood, motherhood, and wifehood, and for the often overwhelming demands of caretaking. In Fraterrigo’s case, that includes caring for her daughters, her sick husband, a diabetic friend, and her aging parents. The essays suggest the physical toll of women’s labor, but also the mental and emotional toll: so much worry, so much fear.
One of the most sinister perils of girlhood is silence. So many of the experiences Fraterrigo writes about in her essays—sexual assault, eating disorders, miscarriages—are the ones we don’t talk about, even with our own mothers and daughters. (Her daughters are “at an age where they don’t tell me much.”) In a poignant scene in “Vinegar,” Fraterrigo’s mother helps her with an injection of progesterone during a pregnancy to avoid a(nother) miscarriage. Looking back at the moment, Fraterrigo wonders what her mother might have been thinking: “I wonder if she thought of her own unborn children, the two miscarriages she endured. It isn’t something we’ve ever discussed.”
By sharing her experiences, Fraterrigo breaks that perilous silence—beautifully and powerfully.
