In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Melissa Fraterrigo’s memoir-in-essays The Perils of Girlhood moves from an ’80s childhood to motherhood with both intimacy and a precision of language that makes the book hard to put down.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Intimate, raw, and relatable, Fraterrigo’s narrative of navigating life’s challenges vibrates with individual choices and reassures with universal truths. Yes, there are dangers in being a girl and becoming a woman, but Fraterrigo assures there are delights, too.”
In her own words, here is Melissa Fraterrigo’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Perils of Girlhood:
The opening prelude to my recently published memoir, The Perils of Girlhood, begins: “In my forties, buzzy from a second glass of wine with a high school friend I haven’t seen for years, I confide that the summer before freshman year my swim coach pulled me into the pool and pressed himself against me.” The friend expresses delight, surprising me, and we move on from there but the thought lingers, and I get in my car. When “a song from the ’80s comes on the radio and I tap to the beat, a long-ago rhythm of memory alive in my body.” So begins The Perils of Girlhood, a memoir-in-essay where music and pop culture recreate the atmosphere of the 80s and 90s in the Chicago suburbs, while also interrogating the personal and emotional toll of being female. There are some heavy stories in the book–sexual violence, disordered eating, and chronic illness, and when there are such charged stories, pop cultural elements add to themes while revealing more about the narrator’s inner life. The thread that runs throughout the book is what inspired it–how I saw my preteen daughters begin to struggle with their self-image and their bodies and how from the specter of middle age, I began to wonder how I might help them navigate their own girlhoods.
“Mayonaise,” Smashing Pumpkins (2011 remastered). The opening salvo to this song is surly, somber, and sort of announces itself without fanfare. So many of the songs from Siamese Dream had this confidence and allure that is unlike anything else from Billy Corgan. While I didn’t listen to music while drafting The Perils of Girlhood, this song is the perfect entry point. I tend to write really sloppy first drafts and then I am relentless in revision. Part of the revision process occurs away from my desk when I am swimming or running or walking my dog and that’s where music comes in, helping me dive deeper into setting. The Perils of Girlhood opens in 1987, the summer before freshman year of high school when I was crushed out on my swim coach and he took advantage of me.
“Borderline,” Madonna
With early Madonna, I had this sense that anything was possible and this was somehow connected to my developing body. From the essay “Coach Matt”: “Something else was happening, though. My body felt different than it used to, even while moving through the water. My breasts were coming in–little mounded nubs. I’d begun to shave using my mother’s razor on my nonexistent leg hairs. I kept this a secret until she noticed the row of bandages on my shins.” Say what you want about Madonna, but in the late 80s she gave girls like me permission to use their sexuality, only this also confused me. I felt the need to be good but also twisted myself into becoming whatever I thought men wanted.
“Doll Parts,” Courtney Love
Music then and now offers a chance to try on a persona, but it would be years until I understood the larger harm of doing so. Still, I wanted to be liked, so when Courtney Love sings “And someday you will ache like I ache,” in “Doll Parts,” I feel high school all over again. I tell my daughters and their friends that high school is likely the hardest time in their lives. There’s so much that is beyond your control, and that extends to families as well. My brother was the athlete in our family and my sister aced every test. Meanwhile, everything I did was average at best. And so my relationships with friends became everything. Around them I didn’t feel judged and music became this backdrop to our conversations, our laughter and stories.
“Just Like Heaven,” The Cure
This is one of the songs I danced to with my friends in that unself-conscious way. It’s a song that to this day, no matter what mood I’m in, it will force me to throw up my hands and spin around my kitchen. In the essay “Diabetic Vernacular,” I move between two periods of time with my friend Emily–the past when we were sixteen and lifeguards and in the present–the two of us now moms with aging parents and adolescent kids. “Emily and I are only able to see each other a few times a year. We meet halfway between our homes at the Panera on US-30, then jump into her Prius and drive to a trail beside a winding road dotted with condos. I don’t even know the name of the street and I love this about our gatherings: that the streets here have no names.”
“Coming Home,” Leon Bridges
As awkward as I felt at times, I knew that I wanted to be a writer but it wasn’t until a college professor asked if I’d ever thought about a career in writing that I began to consider my own wants. Leon Bridges speaks to this sort of homecoming with oneself in “Coming Home.”
“Angeles,” Elliott Smith
After graduate school, I moved to a small town in Utah to teach creative writing, and I walked around with this huge grin on my face. I was thrilled with the opportunity to share my love for literature! One of my students questioned everything I did in class and this bled over to other areas of life. This song by Elliott Smith depicts the mood and sentiment of that time when perhaps on some level I thought all my struggles (getting into graduate school, finding employment, publishing) were behind me. Smith struggled with depression, but when he sings, it’s like aural honey. He’s in his element. While he’s no longer with us, he’s left us with so many great tracks. Some singers are like that–you can just hear in their songs how they are called to do their art. Yet listening to that inner compass can be such a challenge.
“Save Me,” Amiee Mann
Come on and save me/ Why don’t you save me?/If you could save me from “Save Me” brings up this sort of questioning I experienced when I became a mother. I thought that through motherhood I could right every wrong that had been done to me, but if it’s one thing I’ve learned, parenthood is not simply a redo. It forces you to examine who you are and why you do what you do all while navigating this experience with a partner, someone who has their own hangups. It’s a bit of a mess.
“Help Me Mary,” Liz Phair
Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair was the soundtrack to my college years and these are still songs that bring me back to how time once felt endless. During challenging times–my husband’s leukemia diagnosis, my miscarriages, a college friend’s suicide attempt, I’ve relied on the support of my friends to remind me of the way forward.
As The Perils of Girlhood progresses, I begin to make more connections between my experiences with girlhood and my daughters’ lives. This causes me to think more about the larger idea of girlhood. “Many cultures believe that girlhood is something that must end in order to get to the next stage….I 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.”
“Drive Somewhere,” The Vulgar Boatman
The book ends with how it began–in my car. The car is also the place where I’ve written some of the book with my grocery list crumpled on my lap. When you are a woman and a mother in particular, space is seldom your own and our cars become our workplaces and therapist’s office, coffee shop, and so much more. “Drive Somewhere” is playing: We’re gonna drive somewhere/And the world gets small/Right outside your door/Almost halfway there. Music has this uncanny ability to connect us–and literature offers this same resonance. If I had one hope for this book it is that readers discover something of themselves and their experiences in these pages, and like a good song, it continues to play in their minds as they go about their days.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Melissa Fraterrigo’s playlist for her story collection Glory Days
Melissa Fraterrigo is the executive director of the Lafayette Writer’s Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, and teaches at Purdue University. She is the author of the novel Glory Days (Nebraska, 2017) and a collection of short fiction, The Longest Pregnancy: Stories.