Writing as Redemption

JULIA FIERRO is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer, published in June by St. Martin’s Press, and Cutting Teeth (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Glamour, the Millions, Time Out New York, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in 2002 she founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop home to more than four thousand creative writers. Her website is juliafierro.com.

I HAVE a small pink-white scar at the base of my thumb. It curls at the end like a question mark I may have drawn to remind myself of something. It is an important reminder. And it’s proof—of an event I had forced myself to forget as a child and, now, cannot forget. I am compelled to rewrite that real-life scene again and again in my fiction, as if memory, and even the past itself, can be revised.

There is a chapter toward the end of my new novel, , in which one of the main characters, Maddie, is beaten by her father. He hits her with a broom. The metal broom head cracks apart and cuts her hand, and she is left with a scar in the shape of a question mark. Like Maddie, I, too, was a sixteen-year-old girl living on an islet off the East Coast in 1992. What the reader cannot know is that this scene