Skid Dogs

Skid Dogs is a raw and riveting debut memoir about coming of age during the casual oppression of ‘90s rape culture and the passionate tumult of teenage friendships.

“I can’t remember the last time I read a book so brave. Maybe never.” —Ani DiFranco

"I fell hard for the scrappy, funny, honest, resilient young heroine of Skid Dogs, and the wise narrator who mediates her story—an essential tale of girlhood survival." —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Everyone knows, a girl has to be killed before she’s taken seriously; anything less is just called growing up.”

In 1991, Emelia Symington-Fedy stumbled upon a tight-knit group of girls hanging out on the secluded railroad tracks intersecting her small rural town—and became “best friends” with them overnight in the way only fifteen-year-olds can. Unsupervised and wild, the girls navigated teenage friendship dynamics, toyed with adult vices, and explored their growing sexuality.

Two decades later an eighteen-year-old girl is murdered on Halloween on the same tracks, and Symington-Fedy returns to her hometown to stay with her mother, who is fearful of a murderer at large. The victim was simply taking a shortcut to her friend’s house—just like Emelia’s gang had done so many times in their day. While the media fixates on why the girl dared to be alone on the tracks, Symington-Fedy slowly comes to terms with the mistreatment of her own teenage body and the twenty years of silence between her former friends. 

Combining the intimacy of memoir with the gripping narrative of true crime, Symington-Fedy offers a bold and often darkly humorous first-hand account of nineties rape culture, the sexual coercion that still permeates girlhood, and the subtle ways that misogyny shows up daily.