The Author: Melissa Petro
The Book: Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: A hard look at how shame is weaponized against women to keep them from knowing their worth and achieving their goals; uses science and literature alongside 150+ women’s stories—including the author’s—to strategize solutions for finding respite from the culture of shame.
Special Note from The Rumpus: A few times a year, we learn that one of our contributors has a book coming out that began its journey at The Rumpus——whether through an essay, a short story, several poems, or another form of writing. Championing writers who are getting one of their first publishing credits is central to our mission. We hope that their work will begin to find its readers and lead to new opportunities in the writing community. It’s also part of our mission to celebrate those authors once a major milestone is realized.
Melissa Petro is one of those authors, and this First Book interview with her is particularly special to us: Her debut memoir, Shame on You (out this week from G.P. Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Random House), has its roots in two essays she published with The Rumpus back in 2010 and 2011.
This is the start of a broader, ongoing effort to highlight authors whose books began here—books with Rumpus roots.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
As a former sex worker and survivor of mass media humiliation, I’d experienced more than my fair share with shame and shaming. But the idea for the book really came about after I had kids and became a mother. In our culture, motherhood is presumably sanctified, and I thought I’d experience social acceptance beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Instead, I felt under constant surveillance and yet utterly invisible, frequently shamed and, consequentially, ashamed—just as I had felt when I sold sex. That’s when I understood just what women were up against.
Rumpus: In 2010, you published your first Rumpus essay “Not Safe for Work.” The publication ended up leading to you losing your day job as a teacher, which you also wrote about for the magazine. Reflecting back over a decade later, how do you think this affected your path to publishing your first book?
Melissa Petro: I didn’t mention the fact that I was a teacher in my op-ed on the Huffington Post, but a reporter from the New York Post put it together from the essay on the Rumpus, and that is ultimately how I lost my career. That essay, “Not Safe for Work,” was one of my first pieces of published writing, and dare I say that I was very proud at the time—so it was confusing that it was part of what tipped off such a relentless shaming. Had I not published that particular essay, and had I somehow continued on as an elementary school teacher, I probably wouldn’t have become a published author. Not to “all’s well that ends well,” mind you, because I could just as easily have ended up dead, but it forced me to own my beliefs and my identity as a writer. It also compelled me to freelance, because I was unemployable.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Petro: We sold the book on proposal, and I don’t remember hearing a lot of no’s before we started setting up phone calls with editors, probably because my lovely agent protected me from them. But before this, I queried agents with a memoir proposal for nearly twenty years, and I was rejected by everyone. I probably queried fifty different agents. There were some agents who I queried multiple times, and everyone was always very nice and sometimes helpful but for various reasons it was always a no. There were many times
Rumpus: Which authors or writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Petro: Betsy Lerner was one of those kind agents who read my work multiple times over the years but ultimately always said no, and so it’s absolutely surreal that our books recently appeared on a list together. There’s a long list of writers, and they’re all in the acknowledgements, who have encouraged me throughout the years. Melissa Febos has been exceptionally responsive. Rebecca Traister is another writer who has always responded to me. These are both writers I’ve reached out to multiple times over the decades, and they are phenomenal thinkers and talents, and so just the fact that they took me seriously gave me courage and strength to keep going.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Petro: I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life. No exaggeration—I was maybe twenty something years old when it was a memoir about my experiences in the sex industry. Then it was a memoir about leaving the sex industry to become a teacher and the great effort that took. Then it was a memoir about losing my elementary school teaching career on account of the New York Post. Then it was—you guessed it, a memoir—about becoming a mother and how selling sex had prepared me for that. The project only finally became what it is after I found my agent, Laura Mazer. Laura read my query and set up a call and said pretty quickly, “I don’t sell memoir, but if you’re open to the idea of making it something else, let’s talk.” At that point I was open to anything, and I was so desperate to get this book out of me. Laura held my hand for another two years as I tried to figure out my thesis.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where was your writing published? Do you recall your experiences working with The Rumpus to bring some of your earlier essays to life?
Petro: I’ve been published in many different places because I’m a total byline whore and this was the game for me for a while, while I looked for an agent. I just published piece after piece in every publication that would have me until I’d amassed an enormous collection of clips. I’ve worked with so many different editors over the decades, but my years writing for The Rumpus were so special—and I think it’s some of my best work. Vulnerability makes for great writing, and I was able to get incredibly vulnerable in my work for The Rumpus because I felt safe writing for editors Isaac Fitzgerald and Roxane Gay, among other writers I respected and trusted at the time. That feeling of safety was naive, I learned—because our writing can be taken out of one context and used against us in other contexts. I can never be so uninhibited again—but I’m grateful I had that start.
Rumpus: What is the best (or worst) advice someone gave you about publishing?
Petro: I heard from a couple agents along the way that I shouldn’t write about sex work. They said to write about anything else. One agent I had a call with suggested I write a book about Girl Scouts. I remember, after the call, I went for a run in Central Park and I thought the whole time “OK, you can do this,” I was actually psyching myself up to write a book about Girl Scouts. By the end of the run, I knew that there was just no way. This was the story I was put on this Earth to tell, and I had to tell it. Not writing about sex work, or trying to write something other than a memoir, was the worst advice. But it was also the best advice, because my current agent, Laura, also insisted in a way that the book not be about sex work—or mothering. Of course it would be about those things, but it had to be about something else also, something bigger—and that bigger idea needed to be front and center. When I wrote the proposal, she insisted that I not lead with my personal story. I had to talk about the subject matter and my thesis for the first seven or so pages before I was allowed to mention my personal stakes. It was a challenge, I’m still kind of in awe that I did it. And I’m very grateful to Laura because she was right. It’s a better book.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Petro: I’ve never written with a target audience in mind. I write mostly for myself, to make sense of myself and my experience, and I’m always surprised when someone tells me that they read my work and that it resonated—but I’ve heard it enough times that I assume it to be true, that there is an audience that relates to my work.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Petro: After more than twenty years of hunting for an agent, and another two-plus years working on the proposal, I didn’t expect the process would move so quickly once the book was sold. I sold the book in November, signed a contract by January, and turned in the first draft by the start of that fall. I had been working on this book in one form or another for over two decades, and the final copyedited version was approved in less than a year.
Rumpus: What are you looking forward to once the book is published—an upcoming event, next project(s), time off, or . . . ?
Petro: I spent my entire adult life trying to tell this story, so it feels very strange now that it’s out. After I turned in the first draft, I went through a period of grief. I had to let go of the fantasy that I’d feel entirely validated, that I would be somehow magically healed by its publication. Of course, that didn’t happen, but in other ways it’s been very freeing to have the story out of me. For so long, this was my only goal—to write and sell this book. Now that it’s done, I can do anything. Now that I know how to write a book, I can write another one, and it can be about anything. It can be low stakes. I can write that book about Girl Scouts.
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Author photograph by Roya Zarrehparvar
