The Glory of Writing Memoir, with Author Melissa Fraterrigo

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the novel Glory Days, as well as the story collection The Longest Pregnancy. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies from Story South and Shenandoah to Indiana Review and The Millions. She teaches fiction writing at Purdue University and is the founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers Studio, where she offers online classes on the art and craft of writing. Her new book is The Perils of Girlhood, just out from the University of Nebraska Press. Listen in and read along and she and I discuss the glory of writing memoir, and so much more.

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Marion: Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Marion: Well, it’s a joy to have you here because your new book is gorgeous. It’s a collection of essays. You open the collection with a short introduction that starts to turn for home with these lines. “They are 14 and in eighth grade with hair that swings down their backs, laughter like spun candy. Now my husband and I stand outside their closed bedroom doors, asked to be let in. Once they were little girls.”

And I want to ask you about that, about shooting from there. Where we are shooting from is a huge decision when writing memoir. I teach memoir, and I talk to students all the time about this. But I want to hear about you, and how and when you made this decision to write from there and then. We can actually see you and your husband standing in the hall. Maybe about to ask permission to enter your daughter’s room? You were right there. Why did you choose that spot?

Melissa: Thank you so much for that question. I am quite smitten with that prelude, even though it did not come to me until I was pretty far into the manuscript. But as you mentioned, I am a fiction writer by trade, and something that stories and novels have taught me is how we really have to activate the image in a reader’s mind. And with that opening prelude, it’s just a little over a page, I wanted to give readers a sense of of where the book was going to be heading. I wanted to kind of telescope into the future as a way to signal that this is something I would be doing throughout the book. I would be in a present moment. I would also be looking back and then I would go back and continue with the present.

Marion: It’s a wonderful thing to do. It’s a dangerous thing to do. It’s a difficult thing to do. It’s a complicated thing to do, and it works every time here. And my audience is writers, making you the perfect podcast guest since you are both a well-published writer as well as a generous teacher, both on the university level and in the writer’s studio you founded. So I’ve read that you became a mother to twin daughters and that as they began that inevitable journey to self-criticism, you questioned how you might help them navigate their own girlhoods. So was that the motivation for the collection? We’ve talked about where you were shooting from, but talk to me about that. That’s personal, that’s public, that’s what? Was that how you motivated yourself to write these essays?

Melissa: I mean, I think it was a combination of factors. Certainly as a writer, I’m always looking out at the world to try and figure out what it wants from me, what it wants me to understand. I don’t consider myself like the smartest person, but I do believe in paying attention. And I believe by paying attention to the world around me and the people that I interact with, and the situations that I experience, I can find my way to, you know, the next place I am supposed to be or find a way forward, basically.

So I did start working on essays during the pandemic. That’s when my daughters were first kind of hinging on these episodes where it was very obvious that they were kind of struggling with adolescence, with criticizing themselves, their bodies, as well as their minds. So I was aware of that. And at the same time, you know, our world was topsy-turvy. And I just wasn’t that drawn to fiction. I wasn’t that drawn to imaginary worlds. But I was quite interested in true narratives and these places where I was learning from the narrator. I was learning about their life as I turned the page. So I really think it was a confluence of those two things. It was these experiences I was having with my daughters where I really just didn’t know what to do. You know, I’d kind of put my hands up. I mean, somebody’s standing in front of you crying and, you know, she’s slapping her thighs and saying, “I just look so ugly.” And you just really don’t know what to say. And those things, they might have been, you know, seven, ten minute long conversations, but they would haunt me for the rest of the day. I would take them with me to work. I would take them with me during my interactions with students and emails that I might answer. And I think I also probably took them with me both while I was reading and then later writing.

Marion: Yeah. And they haunted you in a way, I think, that at least for this reader, seems to me gave you access back into yourself. It’s a fascinating thing that you do. And you mentioned not writing fiction during the odd time of the pandemic. I just feel that this is book for right now. The world of American women feels to me like we’ve been hurled back into the back seat of the station wagon of my youth with drunken uncles driving the car. No seat belt, no clearly discerned goals for what’s best for us or who’s best for us. And then along comes this collection. And I was actually so grateful. I said, Oh, this is the book for now. So talk to me about writing into the time in which we live. You’ve just talked about you were writing during the pandemic, but let’s talk more specifically about publishing into the time in which you live and what you owe to that.

Melissa: Well, thank you for that very generous introduction to the book. I’m truly grateful for the time that you spent with the book. I think we’re obligated to tell our stories. In many ways, I feel like we’re obligated to help one another tell those stories. Both you and I teach writing and we There’s a certain generosity of spirit that I think other writers hold because they understand the important work that takes place when you give yourself over to the page, when you let yourself explore moments that maybe you don’t quite understand. So you’re really bringing that to the page a sense of inquiry. And I don’t know that we owe anything to a particular moment in time. Again, there’s a certain amount of serendipity that takes place, I think, when you are paying attention and you’re really present during the writing process. And so, during the drafting of The Perils of Girlhood, I wasn’t aware necessarily of others. I wasn’t thinking about how my parents might react, what my daughters would think if they were to read some of these essays. I simply had to initially write the stories that I needed to draft. And anything that happened after that was obviously just glorious.

Marion: How writerly. I love that. “I simply was going to write the stories that needed to be written.” Yeah, I get that. Absolutely. And to put aside what my parents might think, what my daughters might think, it’s the only way to go.

And The Perils of Girlhood is a collection that includes 20 essays. It begins with one called Coach Matt that made me actually wonder if you had gotten into my head or my pink teenage diary, despite its lock and key. It’s not just that I too swam competitively like you at 14. And let’s just agree that, yeah, the role of coach was a place of deep confusion and churning. And it’s not our physical similarities. It’s that in your fine piece, you examine how we cannot yet be ready for what we think we desire. Oooof. That idea just sat me right down in the good seats and I had so much to consider and I remembered so much.

So set this up for the listeners. This story’s predominant characters are you and your swim coach so that what came first is what I wanna talk about. The memory of the swim coach or the concept of exploring that electric moment in life on the edge of adulthood and sexuality with all the buzzes in there and not being quite ready for what comes. Was it the knowledge, the wisdom that that’s what it was about or did you just start with the coach, you swimming, whatever, and then get to that.

Melissa: Yeah. I think you’ve probably heard the phrase that fiction writers are either plotters or they’re pansters. And even as a nonfiction writer, I’m a panster. So I never know where I’m going. But what I do know is how I feel. And I know about the memory. And I kind of like to take it out and almost kind of palpate it, turn it around. I did not necessarily have the deeper wisdom when I started drafting Coach Matt. The writer Sue William Silverman talks about there being two voices in nonfiction. There’s a voice of innocence. This is you just kind of retelling the events. And then there’s a voice of experience where you’re kind of going back and you’re reflecting and you, you know, you’re really trying to make meaning. You’re trying to figure something out. And so at first blush, I never know about that voice of experience, whatever that might be. Initially, I’m just following the memory. And that’s what I’m doing there. As you mentioned, it was the summer before my freshman year of high school, and I was swimming competitively. And our local swim team had hired a college student to be our summer coach. And I just had a huge crush on him.

Marion: Oh, yeah.

Melissa: Yeah, and he kind of took advantage of that. And that was something that I carried with me for a long time and something I felt responsible for and also confused by.

Marion: Well, you shoot it from a perfect place, being not quite ready for what we desire. It’s just the way you said it, the way you stated it, the way you captured that moment exactly. That’s 14. That’s it. That’s absolutely, positively 14 to me. And in your second story, On the Verge of Being, you take it back a year to being 13. And in fact, you write about the relief of not knowing, of not quite understanding the intimate scenes in Judy Blume’s book, Forever, and that while you know physically where these body parts are, you’re still behind the safe wall of not understanding how they fit together, in this case, male to female.

And I marveled at that in the shift in the point of view, just one story to the next. And while you were once 13 and then 14, I want you to help the memoir writers listening in with some tips on how to discern those almost secondhand differences in the years of our lives, specifically in terms of what we know and what still makes us squirm at one age that a year later, or two years later doesn’t do so. So sometimes I tell writers to study the developmental scales like that of Piaget to get the right cognitive things we can and cannot know at different ages.

What about you? Did you do research? Did you simply observe your own twin daughters? Did you sit down and meditate? Getting this right is essential because a reader, when a reader meets something that they know someone cannot cognitively know at that age, they call out that writer and put down that book. So what do you do to differentiate the accuracy in what you knew in these fine pieces?

Melissa: Sure. I have so much to say about this. I’m not quite sure where I want to begin.

I think at first blush, certainly revision is everything. As writers, we are our own worst critics. And so by giving ourselves the freedom of a messy draft, by giving ourselves the freedom of just getting those initial ideas down, we can then come back to those pages and flesh out sensory details. Those are things that are going to not just help your reader fixate on this moment in time, but it actually also helps the writer. The more iterations, the more times that you return and you really look around you, you use that sense of smell, you use that sense of touch and what you can see, the more that will ultimately come to you.

I tell my students so many different ways to approach this. First of all, there is no one right way to do it. What worked for me might not work for somebody else. But really, for me, it was continuing to go back into the manuscript, printing out hard copies of that manuscript. And I was fortunate to have a couple short writing residencies where I could really sink myself into these stories and look at how the essays spoke to one another. But I think some things that I also encourage my students to do are to look at photographs, or even to create a timeline of a particular period of their lives.

There’s a lot of ways that even using crafts can help us get closer to a story. Just the other day, one of my students was struggling with structure, and I encouraged him to just simply cut up his essay with actual scissors and then tape it up together in a way that made sense to him. You know, sometimes we get really stuck on that first draft, but the joy of memoir is also in playing and in giving ourselves the opportunity to really have fun as we go back in time, as we try and make sense of our lives.

Marion: I love that. No one has ever advised me to get out a pair of scissors. I totally get it. I come from a generation at the newspaper world where they used to literally cut and paste stories into the newspaper. I love that. It works for me. I get it. And I say to people all the time, paragraphs are just furniture. Just move them around.

So you made this into a living room. Now let’s make it into a dining room. It’s that much work. It’s really let’s just redecorate this in some way, move them around. But I love that, to literally cut it up.

And I want to stick with this story for a minute because in this story, you write about being felt up for the first time in a way that left me breathless. Not because I’ve never read or talked about or not been felt up, or that I was shocked, but because of the bullseye you hit when you want to push his hand away. And instead you ask, who was I to interrupt his longings?

Oh, God, and I just doubled over.

I bowed my head to that question, to its familiarity, its accuracy, because that’s the question at 13 or 14. That tiny moment illustrates so much about what we do not bring ourselves to say. And it’s a topic we never seem to conclude as we demand from women on the witness stand, why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you tell anyone? And so small to big, you take this, not that it wasn’t a big moment in your life, but it’s a small moment in history, let’s agree. So talk to me about illuminating the biggest topics in the smallest moments.

Melissa: I think that that’s really all that you can do. Because if you kind of hit a moment head on, sometimes it will kind of knock you off balance. It’s not just what happened, but it’s how you think of it now. And the best way to get at the now is by using those sensory details that are going to signal to the reader this is familiar to you as well. I think that if a memoirist is doing their job, the stories that the reader is experiencing remind them of their own lives and feelings. And so I think the other thing that that allows is a certain sense of kind of micro characterization of not just that narrator, but also that moment in time. You just mentioned the fact that, you know, we still have these overwhelmingly biased expectations about women and about sexuality. And yet I feel like a good deal of the book is also pointing its finger at what it was like growing up as a girl in the 80s and 90s. And yet the fact that, as you say, some things simply have not changed.

Marion: Yeah, absolutely. Some things have just stayed constant on the timeline of womanhood. Yeah, many people I speak to who want to write memoirs say to me, “Oh, but I don’t remember anything.” And I say, “Well, yeah, you do.” It might not be everything, but it’s enough. If you think about moments of transcendent change, when you went from this to that, that you want to bring along on a timeline of development, whether it be of your sexuality or your comfort with the world. or both of those things acting in tandem. And I wonder about you. Obviously, you were not taking notes when you were an adolescent. So give some tips to those writers listening in about how to harvest what you do have on you. Did you call your sister? Did you look in yearbooks? Did you read your diaries? How did you go there?

Melissa: I did not read my diaries, but I have lots of them. And I think the process of writing throughout life has kind of instilled some of those memories deep within me. So then the job was really to just kind of dig a little bit deeper into them. Another way that I did that was by researching elements of popular culture. I think especially in terms of girlhood, so much about what we believe about ourselves, and what it means to be a girl, goes back to the media that we consume. And so I brought in everything from, you mentioned Forever by Judy Blume, to the dads from “One Day at a Time” and “Who’s the Boss?” and even the relationship between Laura and her father on “Little House on the Prairie,” and all of those things work to also bring me back to kind of this story memory. And so even if writers do not feel like they have easy access, a good sense of what they experienced or what they went through, as you said, you can certainly call up other loved ones, but you can also signal throughout a manuscript what it is you do remember.

So throughout The Perils of Girlhood, there were certain kind of like signposts or touchstones that I came back to multiple times as a way to kind of remind the reader of that we were part of kind of these multiple selves. This was an entire story that was being told. And just like the way our memories work and our minds move around, the story itself kind of tried to replicate that as well. So readers certainly can use things like talking to other loved ones and doing some research into a time period and stories. All of those things can certainly help deepen one’s memory.

Marion: I think they’re great suggestions. I think the TV shows and the media that we consumed in certain ages really does have a framing aspect to it to which we react.

Melissa: Yes.

Marion: Yeah, that’s very generous and I appreciate that. And in another brilliant piece of writing, you explore how we get caught between the stories we want to hear and what actually happened.

I just love this: a boy, a dance, a ripped dress, and not telling anyone what took place when you were alone with that boy. I’ve always thought that one day I should make a simple list called “The things I did not tell my mother.” And then, except for I think it would go on forever. But if I did, it would speak to itself as to why we do not in fact tell our mothers the things we don’t tell them when we’re girls. And I might make that list. But it’s a little daunting. But I’m talking to you and I’m interested in that reality that none of us really knows how we feel about anything until we write it down. And you touched on that earlier. So just here’s a good specific. So tell me if writing that piece gave you any insight into why we didn’t tell our mothers those things. And it’s usually those things they specifically asked us to tell them about. If you have any questions about your body, if you have any questions about menstruation, if a boy does something you don’t want. I remember my mother dropping me off at a party saying, “There could be kissing games.” I was like 13. And I had never heard of such a thing. And I just went wide-eyed. And what happened at that party in a kissing game was traumatic. When I got back in the car that night, I said, “Nope, nothing, no kissing games. Nope, it’s fine.” So I wonder if you came away with any knowledge for the rest of us on why we don’t, in fact, tell our mothers those things.

Melissa: I think that’s why we’re here now, because it just, I mean, it just takes a lifetime to process. It really, really does. I mean, the idea that I’m still thinking about girlhood now might seem ludicrous to some, but I still feel like, all those multiple selves are jostling around inside me. Certainly it wasn’t until I sat down and returned to those moments with the wisdom that I have and still the questions of the present that I was able to, I think, get a little closer, not just to that moment, but also closer to forgiveness. Because I think the real danger in memoir, or the reason why a lot of writers maybe veer away from it, or think, oh, I can’t tell that story is because we’re coming at it from a place where we’re judging ourselves. We’re thinking, “You know, well, you know, why didn’t I tell my mom or why didn’t I tell my friends?” And yet, oftentimes in the process of thinking back and doing that work as we draft, you can discover a certain kind of softness for your younger self. And that allows us to bring that forward in our dealings with other people.

Marion: I love the idea of a certain softness for our former selves. And I do believe that’s that thing about it. I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down. There are so many side dishes to that meal, you know, and remarkably.

So many people believe that to write memoir, the writer must first have everything figured out. Have the crisis under control, or the trauma understood and abated. My preference is not those stories. It’s for those who are still in the process of cooking, which is absolutely the place from which you write about womanhood, motherhood, marriage, to name a few of the roles from which you write. And in many of these pieces, you’re deliberately writing from when you don’t yet know something. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have it figured out now, writing from here. So we talked about this a little bit. You are provoking us to consider those totemic moments of life, of course. But I just would like you to talk to the writers listening in about not having, I just, I think it’s okay for me to assume that you don’t think of yourself as someone who has it all figured out.

Melissa:  Oh my goodness, no. Yeah, good.

Marion: Thank you so much. So I’d really like you to just address that because this is maybe the number one thing I hear from people. Oh, I haven’t got it figured out yet. And I think right from here, right now.

Melissa: The glory of writing memoir is letting yourself make a mess, letting yourself figure things out as you go, and letting yourself really discover. You know, you’re not coming to the page with everything figured out because, if you have already figured everything out and you bring that to the page, I can promise you that readers are gonna find it a little bit less than dynamic because we’re not part of that process alongside you of figuring things out, of understanding, of deepening our grasp of this time. So you have to really, I guess, trust yourself and trust the story that belongs to you and realize that there’s a reason why it keeps waking you up in the middle of the night. Or there’s a reason why every time you’re waiting in line for that cup of coffee, it’s the one scene that you see. Or there’s a reason why you do sit down and journal. You keep writing about this one thing rather than continuing to push it aside because you feel like you haven’t dealt with it yet. Deal with it as you sit down and draft.

Marion: Great answer. And I’m going to leave it there, but not without saying thank you so much. Thank you for this collection. Thank you for the teaching you bring. And thank you for this lovely conversation. It’s just been a joy to talk to you, Melissa.

Melissa:  I’ve loved every minute of it. Thank you so much for inviting me, Marion.

Marion: You’re absolutely welcome. I hope you sell a billion copies of this book, but we’ll get realistic. Let’s say a million. I think that would be far within your reach. It’s that good. The author is Melissa Fraterrigo. See more on her at melissafraterrigo dot com and on Instagram at melissafraterrigo. The book is The Perils of Girlhood, just out from the University of Nebraska Press. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.