Book review: “The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays” by Melissa Fraterrigo

Growing up and living female in America is a perilous endeavor. There is the gropy swimming coach, the miscarriages, the catcalls as you ride your bike, the malicious male colleague, the self-imposed teenage diet, the creepy guy at the park, the boss who suggests you’d be attractive if you lost five pounds, the insistently physical date, the feelings of worthlessness, the serial killers in the news, the harassment by one of your college students, and the anxiety over the safety of daughters.

All of this and more is detailed in Melissa Fraterrigo’s raw and courageous exploration of her own life, the lives of her friends and family, and the lives of her two now-teen daughters, The Perils of Girlhood.

Sometimes the fear feels like a river rolling through my chest. Other times it’s like a smoldering fire that when fanned, erupts into a blaze. But no amount of practice prepares you when the fire, in a gust of wind, catches on, and engulfs the entire forest.

Fraterrigo writes this in a chapter about her daughter running home afraid because of a man watching the girls at the park. But the words echo the feelings she describes throughout the book when facing so much of what girls and women in America encounter.

In her chapter titled “The Perils of Girlhood,” she talks to her husband about how the murders of two middle-school girls in a nearby Indiana town in 2017 still haunt her. She asks how they can keep their daughters safe when the killer may live nearby, and he says gently that they can’t live that way. “And I thought: but we will, we do. All women at some point fear.”

 

A question of worthiness

And fear isn’t just about an attack. It also has to do with a question of worthiness.

I never feel secure in my own skin. I can’t walk by a mirror without looking at it, curious about what everyone else sees. It is as if I am waiting for a glitzy, glamorous fairy godmother, someone to gently take my face in her hands and complete me.

Fraterrigo writes about her friendship with Emily that started in high school and has continued ever since. Emily, who found joy easily, attracted a crowd around her locker. Not Fraterrigo.

On more than one occasion I would be shopping with Mom or running an errand and a stranger—a man I did not know—might say, Hey! It’s not that bad! Smile! And then I’d grin widely, self-consciously berating myself…I needed to work harder at happiness.

Although some women may wear their femaleness easily, it’s been much harder for Fraterrigo. “Just as I could not save my father from his fears, my daughters cannot save me from the black muck inside that still says I’m not good enough.”

 

“I just don’t like myself”

Or keep that feeling of inadequacy from invading her girls.

One of the most poignant moments in The Perils of Girlhood comes in a chapter titled “My Body, My Shame.” Fraterrigo reports that, deep in the pandemic, she would find her daughter Eva in her room with the blinds drawn, sobbing for hours. What’s wrong?

After what seemed like days, she spoke, “I just don’t like myself.”

How to let her know I had sometimes felt this way at twelve and twenty-two and now, in my late forties?

The anxieties and dreads that Fraterrigo describes in The Perils of Girlhood aren’t solely rooted in her life as an American female.

She was a dorm student at the University of Iowa on November 1, 1991, when a former graduate student fatally shoots three members of the physics and astronomy faculty, an associate vice president of academic affairs and a fellow student before killing himself. Her father was emotionally scarred by the death his father at fourteen. Her husband Pete battles leukemia. Eva suffers from seizures, her sister Jolie from uveitis, an inflammation of the middle portion of the eyes.

 

Always being judged

Yet, much of what she discusses in the book has to do with maneuvering in a world where men are physically larger and potentially dangerous and often emotionally oppressive, even abusive. Where girls and women are always being judged.

Fraterrigo writes that she was excessive in her eighth-grade dieting but never to the point of anorexia.

My parents never threatened me at mealtimes. I ate a normal dinner, just less, and once I realized I’d never have breasts until I gained weight, I reversed course, packing on the pounds.

On the night of a major high school dance, her date, a basketball starter, slices her lips with his braces when he drunkenly kisses her in a hotel room and then pinions her on the bed, ripping a portion of her dress, only to be interrupted by someone coming into the room.

 

“Who was I?”

Her first kisses, however, came from a boy three years older than she was during a car ride between summer homes, and she writes that she was astonished when his hand tightened around the outside of her bra.

My face flamed. Sara and Tonya were right there. I want to push Brandon away. To hit reverse. But who was I to interrupt his longings?

“Who was I to interrupt his longings?”  Another poignant moment in The Perils of Girlhood.

 

Girlhood

Fraterrigo’s book covers her life from grade school to the time her daughters are in high school, from being a young girl to a mature woman. She, however, doesn’t see that her younger self must end so her older self can grow. That is why the book is called The Perils of Girlhood.

Her maturing daughters don’t need to turn their backs on their younger selves, and Fraterrigo writes:

I imagine that many mothers mourn this transition, this giving up and giving away. How many of them, like me, discover echoes of their own childhoods as their daughters grow up?

And she goes on to wonder “if perhaps girlhood is something we still carry with us, like the Russian nesting dolls I keep on my bedroom dresser, and that without it, we cannot become women.”

The cover of Fraterrigo’s book features a close-up of the disturbingly garish face of a doll. It seems a metaphor of the perils of being a girl.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.24.25

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 8.27.25.