How to Write About Trauma Without Traumatizing Your Reader with Melissa Fraterrigo

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:00]
Well, hello, Melissa. Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so excited to talk today with you about your book, The Perils of Girlhood. I’m holding it up right now so people can see it, because O-M-G—I loved this book.

Melissa Fraterrigo [0:16]
Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here with you, Lisa.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [0:20]
Well, it’s my pleasure, because, as I said before I hit the record button, what I really love about your writing is your attention to detail. You always immerse me in the experience itself, but you also take me on an emotional journey that leaves me thinking about your story long after it’s over. You always give me something to chew on, and we’re going to talk about how you did that as part of this podcast episode.

But before we do, I want to give you the first chance to tell us about your book. What would you like us to know about The Perils of Girlhood?

Melissa Fraterrigo [0:55]
Well, thank you again. The Perils of Girlhood is a memoir in essays about the personal and emotional toll of being female. It’s my third book, but it’s my first book of creative nonfiction. I consider myself a fiction writer—that’s what I had written before—but during the pandemic, I found that I just wasn’t drawn to stories or novels in the same way.

That shift coincided with the fact that my daughters were growing up. They were in late middle school, and because of the pandemic, I had a little more time with them—time to see them in their daily lives. I began to hear comments and self-criticisms about themselves that were both troubling and deeply familiar. I was struck by how many things they said or did reminded me of myself at that age.

I remember going to campus one day and still mulling over the five or seven minutes I’d spent with my daughter while she cried about the way her legs looked in her pants. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. When I was a kid and complained to my mom, she might not say anything, or she might say, “Quit complaining.” When someone shares something like that with you, it’s hard to know what kind of response to offer.

So, I fixated on the idea that maybe the best thing I could do was to go back and look at my own life and my experiences with girlhood. How did those beliefs come to be? And how might I use that understanding to help them going forward?

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:59]
Yeah, and as you were talking about that, I was vividly imagining a scene you created in your book about the lengths the narrator went to in order to shape her legs—those nightly exercises. It was such a powerful moment. It said so much about not just the pressures girls experience from images and messages—both explicit and implicit—about what we’re supposed to look like, who we are, or who we’re supposed to be for everyone else, but also the pressures we put on ourselves in response to that.

Melissa Fraterrigo [3:46]
Yeah. And you know, it’s 2026, and you would think some things would have changed. Part of it is being human, but another part of it really is just being female—the complexity of wanting to excel and be valued for your mind or your ideas, while also looking at a screen or watching something on Netflix and realizing it ultimately just comes down to the shape of your body or something like that.

I explored that complexity in the first essay, “Coach Matt.” That essay—actually the second one I wrote for the book—centers on an experience when I was fourteen and had a huge crush on my swim coach, who ultimately took advantage of me. I carried that experience with me for a long time, believing I had done something wrong, that I had somehow invited his inappropriate touch.

It wasn’t until I wrote that essay that I was able to get to the bottom of the experience and realize I had done nothing wrong—while also acknowledging how confusing adolescence can be for a girl.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:30]
Oh my gosh. There is not an amount of money you could pay me to go back to that time. And thank goodness I went through it as a Gen Xer, when there was no social media. Yes, we had all these messages and images to contend with, but it feels like it’s on steroids now. It’s inescapable.

And it’s other women—people who are supposed to be “real”—influencers doing all these things. It’s not an airbrushed model in Cosmo anymore. It’s someone who feels much more like me, and I’m thinking, why don’t I look like that?

Melissa Fraterrigo [6:17]
Yeah. And I think we’re all so much in the thick of it. If you think about it, we’ve really only been living this way for maybe twenty years. We didn’t grow up with the internet. We’re not of that generation.

It’s going to be fascinating in a couple of decades to explore how this has changed our brains.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:49]
Absolutely. We could have an entire conversation just about social media and its impact on the brain. It’s huge. And I think in five to ten years, we’ll have a much clearer sense of what’s happened.

But let’s bring this back to your book and how we distill these messages from our experiences. Before we hit record, we were talking about the difference between how you approach an essay versus a memoir in essays. So, I’m going to ask you a two-part question.

First, what is your definition of a memoir in essays, and how is it different from a traditional memoir or a straight essay collection? Then we’ll talk about how that difference shaped the way you approached this book.

Melissa Fraterrigo [7:53]
I see memoir in essays as a form that’s less linear. It encourages leaps. It’s more associative, and I think it reflects memory and the way our minds actually work.

In The Perils of Girlhood, there are moments I return to throughout the book—almost like image patterning or a map—that serve as touchstones for the reader and create a sense of a whole life. Even though there are leaps in time between chapters and between appearances of certain characters, the book should still feel cohesive.

I also think the beginnings and endings of chapters matter more in this form. You’re paying close attention to how they touch one another—almost like Legos fitting together. With a strict memoir, I think of something more chronological. There might be braiding, but there’s often a clearer sense of direction and ending.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [9:31]
Yes—I know exactly what you mean. To quote Dinty Moore, the magnetic river of the story is much clearer in a traditional memoir. Metaphorically, I think of a traditional memoir as an actual river—we’re always in the same water.

Memoir in essays feels more like hopping from rock to rock in a creek. There’s water flowing around us, so we’re still moving in one direction, but we’re on the rocks rather than floating.

Melissa Fraterrigo [10:12]
And that’s the fun of it. When you’re jumping from one rock to another, you could slip and fall. That risk is the joy of it. As the author, you’re making sense of your life on the page. You’re exploring as you go, rather than always sailing in the same water toward the same destination.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [10:46]
And the level of linking between chapters is different. One thing I noticed on the back of your book is that some of these essays were written quite a while ago. You brought them together over time.

So how long did it take you to write this book, and when did you know, oh—this is a book, this is a collection and a real project for me?

Melissa Fraterrigo [11:10]
Yeah, the book itself probably took about five years—meaning that was the period when I was actively working on it. But ultimately, it kind of took a lifetime, because, as you said, some of the pieces are much older.

That’s part of the glory of writing. You might write something ten years ago, but it still lives with you. You create it, bring it into being, and then it continues to move around inside you—jostling in your brain or your heart, or wherever you believe your work resides.

The memoir-in-essays form gives you a chance to draw connections between disparate moments in your life.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [12:03]
Yeah, and I love how you added those touchstones. If this were a more traditional memoir and you included the same content at different points, I might think, Oh, that’s repetition. Why are you telling me this again? I already know it.

But the way you do it—through association—when those details reappear in a slightly different form in a later essay, I think, oh, this is how this links to that. I can see the connections between these essays and understand them as a whole project.

Melissa Fraterrigo [12:46]
Yeah, I think that’s something I learned from fiction—stories and novels—how to trust your reader. You invite them along on a journey. And imagery and concrete detail are everything.

You can say fruit, or you can say apple. If you’re specific, your reader forms a clear image, and that allows them to invest themselves in the piece, because they’re right there with you. That’s something I really tried to do in The Perils of Girlhood.

I can’t tell you how much I’m bothered by books that don’t consider my intelligence or my ability to put pieces together as a reader.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:43]
Yeah, and I really want all listeners who are writing memoir to hear this: so much of this is about trusting the reader and allowing them to fill in the blanks. You don’t have to spell every single thing out.

Do you need to make enough connections so it makes sense? Absolutely. But you want the reader to chew on the work afterward—to leave with questions rather than certainty—because that’s how they bring themselves into the story.

Melissa Fraterrigo [14:19]
Absolutely. I love that idea of chewing on something. The first essay I wrote for The Perils of Girlhood was actually “More Like Dad,” which appears as the fifth essay in the book. It deals with my dad’s turbulent anger when I was a child, how I tried to placate it, and how I later realized I sometimes had a temper with my own daughters.

There’s a scene where my dad bought a boat, and we took it out for the day. When it was time to pull the boat out of the water, the dock was crowded, and my dad was furious because we didn’t know the proper way to do it. He was already anxious.

Instead of just stating, my dad was angry, I took time to create the scene. I describe how our feet were chalked white from the gravel parking lot as we scrambled to catch up with him. That detail carries a negative connotation and helps set the mood.

Later, as we’re driving home, he doesn’t speak to us until we’re ascending a hill, and that’s when he says that no matter what—if he dies the next day—we need to know how to get the boat out of the water. Suddenly, I’m thinking, oh my God, my dad is dying.

I also pause to describe what I see out the window: rusted scooters and tricycles in the yards we pass. Those moments allow the reader not just to see what’s happening, but to feel the emotional tone. I could have focused only on what my dad said, but there are other ways to invite the reader into the moment.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [16:29]
Yeah, and one of the things we talked about before I hit record was how you enter an essay—the difference between memoir in essays and a more traditional essay. Specifically, entering with memory versus entering with an idea. Can you say more about that?

Melissa Fraterrigo [16:50]
Yeah. I’ve always heard that an essayist is someone who explores and speculates—someone wrestling with an idea. They begin with a question they’re pursuing.

I start with a memory. That memory serves as a portal into the essay. That doesn’t mean I’m not still exploring or speculating; it just gives me a different avenue for entry.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [17:31]
Right—the memory is the portal to story. It’s the portal to understanding the ideas behind our experiences or the beliefs that shape them.

As you entered these memories—some of which are challenging—this book isn’t relentlessly dark. There’s light, deep love with your daughters, friendships, and beauty. But you also bring us into difficult terrain: the male gaze, sexual assault, body image, eating disorders. It’s visceral without being overwhelming.

That’s a fine line for writers. How did you decide what to include and what to hold back so you weren’t traumatizing the reader?

Melissa Fraterrigo [18:58]
I think it comes back to trusting the reader and offering action, dialogue, and description—letting images speak for themselves.

When a reader encounters an image, like the scene with my dad, they can decide what to take from it. They might think, I remember my dad’s temper. There’s something very different about showing versus telling someone, this is how it is. Period. End of sentence.

I don’t want to pretend I know everything. I tried to signal that uncertainty throughout the book. Some readers have found that frustrating. At one of my first readings, someone stood up during the Q&A and talked about how angry she was that women still have to deal with the male gaze—and that it hasn’t changed since she was in high school.

I didn’t know what to say. It was a reading, for one thing. And for another, who am I to say how something should be? I wrote the book so readers could reflect on their own experiences—to chew on it—rather than offering a heavy-handed analysis or prescribing next steps.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:55]
What I hear—and what I experienced in the book—is a commitment to writing as nonjudgmentally as possible. You present the situation without editorializing it, without saying, let me point out here that my dad is being a jerk.

Melissa Fraterrigo [21:16]
That’s funny—and you raise an important point. How do you write nonjudgmentally? Maybe it really does come back to trusting the reader to take what they need from the moment.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [21:34]
Yes. And that lets us off the hook as writers. We don’t have to provide everything. We can allow the reader to contribute part of the meaning.

I’d love to dive deeper into your book by talking about a specific essay. I asked you to prepare an excerpt—would you be willing to read so listeners can hear your beautiful language?

Melissa Fraterrigo [22:01]
Thank you. I’m going to read from the opening page and a half of “The Perils of Girlhood,” the title essay, which appears about three-quarters of the way through the book.

“The bodies of Liberty German and Abigail Williams were found in a wooded area about fifty feet north of Deer Creek in Delphi, Indiana. They were not far from the old Monon Trail, where Liberty’s older sister dropped off the middle schoolers to go hiking on an unseasonably warm day on February 13, 2017.

Liberty excelled in math and science. In newspaper photos, the eighth grader’s broad face grinned wide with confidence. Her corn-silk-colored hair hung in loose waves, maybe unbrushed, maybe just indifferent. Liberty was also the one who carried a cell phone that day. She loved softball, and that year Abigail had promised to join her team.

At thirteen, Abigail was a year younger. In the photo printed in the newspaper, she wore a sundress with an oversized sunhat. A two-inch band of fabric at the crown matched her dress. Her front teeth were nubs, not yet fully grown.

Everything I learned about them came from newspaper articles I read and reread. That was four years ago, when my twin daughters were eight and years away from being teenagers. Now they are twelve—just one year younger than Abigail—and I have become a crucible of fear.

When a TV show featured a special on Liberty and Abigail in April 2020, I didn’t let the girls watch it, but I did, riveted to the screen. I tried to make sense of the murders.

We lived twenty miles from Delphi in West Lafayette, Indiana. We moved there in 2010 after living in Philadelphia while my husband finished school and I worked as a freelance writer. In between time at my desk, I took care of our girls. In the mornings, I pushed them in a double stroller to Fairmount Park, which we nicknamed Tree Park because it was hidden beneath a towering mass of craggy oaks.

During afternoon strolls, we bumped along cobblestone streets southeast of our apartment, past million-dollar flats to Schuylkill Park. There were only two baby swings, so I placed the girls in one swing, back-to-back, like some chubby, two-sided mammal.

Then, in December, at thirteen months old, Eva had her first seizure. Despite subsequent testing, doctors could never provide a reason for her initial life-threatening seizure, one that left her intubated, a respirator tunneling up and down, breathing for her.

All of this alerted me to my daughter’s mortality. One of the reasons we moved to Indiana was because we believed it would be a safe place to raise our girls. They were eight when Liberty and Abigail were murdered.”

Lisa Cooper Ellison [24:58]
I just love this essay. So, what do you want us to know about it? And I’m curious why it appears so far into the book, even though it shares the book’s title.

Melissa Fraterrigo [25:13]
Yeah, so “The Perils of Girlhood”—that essay is a braided essay. I bring in three different threads: the murder of these two eighth graders in a town not far from us; the stranger danger of growing up in the ’80s; and how my daughters are growing up now, along with my fears for them and how I carry those fears into my mothering.

The essay itself is braided, meaning there are three strands that take turns being front and center, even if they’re not equal in proportion. A braided essay is also sometimes referred to as a lyric essay, which is more focused on how something is put together rather than simply what is being stated.

I think a lyric form like that is especially helpful when you’re trying to puzzle through something and don’t want to come at it head-on. If the essay had simply been about the murder of Liberty and Abigail, it would have been too much. And, going back to what we discussed earlier, I would have felt compelled to come to some kind of conclusion about the murder.

Instead, the essay tries to get at what it means to experience fear or violence—whether as a younger person or just as a human being—and how that follows you into your relationships with the people you love.

That essay appears about three-quarters of the way through the book. You asked why it’s placed there, and part of the reason is that The Perils of Girlhood is mostly chronological. At that point in my life, I have daughters, and I’m more fully exploring what it means to be a mother of daughters as someone who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. I also feel like that’s the moment in the book when many of the threads I’ve been braiding throughout finally start to come together.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [27:55]
Yeah, that makes sense. I felt like I really knew the main players before I got there. And what I love about the braided form is that it allows these girls to haunt the book. Rather than making a single point and moving on, they return. You reference them again later, and that repetition feels purposeful.

I wanted to compare that to another essay in the book that uses a completely different structure—The Elements of Fiction. That piece feels more lyrical and literary, rather than straightforward. Can you tell us about that essay?

Melissa Fraterrigo [28:42]
Yeah. “The Elements of Fiction” is also a lyric essay. Some might even call it a hermit crab essay, because I use the elements of fiction as the organizing structure.

It centers on a student I had during my first year teaching college in Utah—someone who went out of his way to minimize me, drawing attention to the fact that I was young and female. It eventually turned into a situation that bordered on sexual harassment.

That essay took me a long time to get right. Initially, I wrote it in a straightforward chronological way, simply recounting what happened. It wasn’t until I realized—while teaching a fiction writing class—that I could use the elements of fiction as a framework that the essay really opened up.

The section breaks focus on things like setting, characterization, and climax. I move through the experience chronologically, but it’s shaped by those fictional elements, each defined and then shown playing out in real time with the student.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [30:26]
Yeah, it feels like you could use that essay to teach both the elements of fiction and the elements of storytelling. It magnifies what’s happening because we look at each element and then apply it to the lived experience.

One thing that really stuck with me is the gaze—how the student looks at the narrator—and how that connects to the photograph Liberty took on her cell phone of the man who was clearly watching them and was likely the perpetrator. Can you talk about that connection and how we’re constantly navigating that gaze?

Melissa Fraterrigo [31:13]
Yeah, and I think we probably navigate it on a subconscious level as well. Writing gives us an invitation to reflect on and consider all the things we’re often burying within ourselves.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [31:35]
You do such a powerful job of making the unconscious conscious. I would love for both women and men to read this book so they can better understand what it’s like to live in this world as a female or female-identifying person.

We’ve talked about vulnerability in nonfiction and the strategies you use to write difficult material effectively. You’re also a teacher, and you came to this book as a fiction writer. What has writing this taught you about teaching writing?

Melissa Fraterrigo [32:28]
I think it’s funny how writing, in so many ways, feels like being human. Writing has made me a better human because I carry into every interaction with students the understanding that I only know as much as they’re willing to share.

There’s always so much more beneath the surface, and you have to respect what isn’t being said. I also try to honor the fact that every student has a different writing process. There are many ways to work, and sometimes the most important thing is giving them permission to experiment—whether that’s experimenting with form, like the essays we’ve been discussing, or realizing that maybe a strict memoir isn’t the right container and a memoir in essays is.

It’s about giving students the tools to check in with themselves. Even this morning, I had students working in small groups, and afterward I asked them to journal privately about their work. You write at your desk, you share with trusted readers, and then it comes back to you. What do you envision? What do you want the piece to be? Ultimately, that decision belongs to the writer.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [34:38]
I love that. I tell people all the time that there are many ways to be right—the key is figuring out which one works for you. Giving yourself permission to explore all the possibilities and then choosing what truly fits.

This has been such an exciting and fun conversation. Is there anything else you’d like us to know about The Perils of Girlhood or about writing more broadly?

Melissa Fraterrigo [35:11]
I just appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. I appreciate readers who are willing to visit places in their own lives—stories they may have kept to themselves.

Just as I revisited my own experiences of girlhood in hopes of supporting my daughters, I’d encourage anyone listening: if you’re holding something that could help someone else, take the time to write it down. It’s a gift—not just to you, but to everyone who reads it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [35:59]
Absolutely. You never know who needs your story or how it might help the world.

If people want to buy The Perils of Girlhood—which I truly believe does help the world—and connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Melissa Fraterrigo [36:17]
I’m on Instagram as Melissa Fraterrigo—people will probably want to check the show notes for the spelling. I’m also on Facebook, and I have a Substack called Between the Lines.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:31]
All of that will be in the show notes. Listeners, please head there to connect with Melissa. And thank you again for being on the podcast—this has been such a wonderful conversation.

Melissa Fraterrigo [36:45]
It’s been a pure delight. Thank you so much, Lisa. I really appreciate it.