The Perils Of Girlhood – Melissa Fraterrigo

The Perils Of Girlhood is a collection of twenty essays that describes the unfortunately routine traumas that come with existing in a female body. University of Nebraska Press were kind enough to send me a copy for review.

Melissa Fraterrigo mines her own experiences as both a daughter and a mother to interrogate the ways in which girls are molded into Women by the patriarchy. It struck me again and again, as I read The Perils Of Girlhood, how each of the experiences she describes are both traumatic and mundane – each is damaging, and yet each happens every day to the women and girls we know.

An uncomfortable encounter with a swim coach as an awkward teenager, a violent outburst by a fellow student, a miscarriage, a loved one’s cancer diagnosis – each calamitous in our own lives, as they are in Fraterrigo’s, but each as ordinary as blades of grass in the grand scheme of things.

Naturally, this means reading The Perils Of Girlhood should be accompanied with a series of trigger warnings: for sexual assault, disordered eating, fertility issues, and cancer.

For me, Lock Me! was the most powerful of the essays. In it, Fraterrigo weaves together her own anxieties for her own and her daughters’ bodily safety with a history of the development of Mace, and in so doing reassured me that my own fears are not isolated or unreasonable.