The Southern Indiana Reading Series and Liberal Arts Center was proud to host the Melissa Fraterrigo Reading at the Griffith Center Wednesday, April 8. This event included a reading and signing of Fraterrigo’s latest book, The Perils of Girlhood.
Fraterrigo is a limited-term English lecturer at Purdue University. She is also the executive director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana. She holds the title of author for several books.
The first book she wrote was The Longest Pregnancy, a 2006 short-story collection consisting of realistic stories about family connections and heartache. The most memorable story in this collection was the title story, The Longest Pregnancy, which centered around a woman who has been pregnant for an abnormally long time. Her second book, Glory Days, from 2017, is a collection of short stories focusing on a fictional town named Ingleside, Nebraska.
In these stories, the town is an allegory for small-town America, reflecting the struggles and problems that occur when the industriousness of rural America disrupts the peace of the small American countryside.
The third and latest book by Melissa Fraterrigo is The Perils of Girlhood: A Memoir in Essays, a 2025 collection of short stories discussing the hardships that women endure. These stories are mainly nonfiction, combining the memories of the author’s childhood with her experience as a mother.
Before she began reading from her book, she clarified that her memoir’s focus was on answering not only questions about herself but about the universal elements as well.
The stories composed in Fraterrigo’s most recent novel have a loosely connected timeline; the stories follow her life over the years.
In the first short story she read, More Like Dad, she described how she noticed more similarities between her and her Dad as she matured from childhood. In the second story, Coach Matt explained her awareness of guys looking at her figure during her adolescence. In the last story, Perils of Girlhood, she proclaims the fear she has of her two daughters getting abducted and/or harmed during her motherhood.
After the reading, a Q&A was held for Fraterrigo to resolve any unanswered questions.
The first question she had was about her writing process. The listener wondered if she had a plan to turn the stories into a large body of work or if she just made it as she went, to which Fraterrigo responded, “I didn’t plan to write a full story, at first– [I] just wrote. Initially, I was just following this interest I had at looking through the past. I just let those memories lead me. The theme made itself apparent.”
Another question about her writing style was asked.
It brought up how many of her essays had a sort of “fragmented” or braided organization, and the listener wished to know if that was something she finds herself gravitating to. For this question, Fraterrigo replied, “When writing something challenging, sometimes writing it at a different structure and angle can make it easier. You can use the form itself to add onto that content. A fragmented sense creates more of a sense of participation among the reader.”