Author and journalist, Melissa Petro, fell in love with Peekskill when she discovered the Bruised Apple Bookstore and everyone’s favorite place, The Peekskill Coffee House. When she and her husband bought a home here five years ago, she knew it was the place she wanted to raise her children.
If you follow Petro on Instagram, you can meet them, the adorable and charming Oscar and Molly. Today, this seemingly typical “suburban stay-at-home mom” is also a successful freelance journalist and writing instructor. Her work has appeared in many major media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and New York Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and was a finalist for the PEN/Fusion Emerging Writer’s Prize.
This month brings the debut of Petro’s first book, SHAME ON YOU: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, a thorough analysis into how patriarchal shame scapegoats women who go against traditional norms and disrupt the status quo. No matter what you do, even when you think you are doing it right and are “the perfect stay-at-home suburban mom”, there is no escaping being judged.
In 2010, Petro found herself the center of a media firestorm when the New York Post revealed she was “a prostitute turned public school teacher” after she wrote an op-ed in the Huffington Post using her personal experience to challenge the idea that all sex workers are under the control of others. Instead, she suggests that the reasons people engage in sex work are complex and not something to be criminalized. She faced public ridicule and ultimately felt compelled to resign from her teaching job. Her story became a warning to all women, “Don’t step out of line…Or else.”
In Part 1 of the book, Petro delves into how shame becomes weaponized, infused into the culture, why it disproportionately targets women, and how it interferes with women’s goals and aspirations.
In Part 2 of the book, now that we know how to identify it, she shows what one can do to overcome it. The author blends investigative reporting, science, literature and hundreds of personal stories including her own painful account of public humiliation to not only understand and transform her own experience of shame but to show the rest of us how to transform ours and despite it, become the powerful women we are meant to become.
While Petro always wanted to be a writer, it did not feel realistic, which led her to the “day jobs” of social services and then elementary school teaching. After she lost her teaching job, she had few options besides freelancing. Writing has now become her “real job”, that in itself revealing how she has transformed the loss of her livelihood and her own experience of shame into something she embraced, surrendered to, studied, and listened to in a way that allowed her to re-write her own story on her own terms. In the process she inspires us to do the same. While she is currently directing her energy towards book promotion, Petro answers reflexively when asked about the topic of her next book: she quickly responds, LOVE. Somehow that seems to be the perfect sequel to SHAME ON YOU.
The launch of SHAME ON YOU is today, September 10, at Barnes and Noble, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. You can order a copy at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736321/shame-on-you-by-melissa-petro/
Follow Melissa on Instagram, @melissa. petro for more updates about events, including on November 2 at 7 p.m. when Melissa, Sari Botton, and I will be having a full-on discussion of shame across the lifespan at The Spotty Dog in Hudson!
