Margaux Fragoso


Margaux Artemia Fragoso was an American author, best known for the memoir Tiger, Tiger.

Early life

Fragoso was born to a working-class family and grew up in Union City, New Jersey. Her father was a Puerto Rican jeweler who had a bad temper and drank heavily, while her mother suffered from severe mental illness, necessitating several hospitalizations. From the age of seven, Fragoso was groomed and sexually abused by a neighbor, given the pseudonym "Peter Curran" in her memoir.

Career

Fragoso attended New Jersey City University and then Binghamton University, earning a Ph.D. in 2009. In 2011, she published Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir, which became a bestseller. In The Guardian, Jenny Diski criticized it, saying "With all its explicit sex, melodramatic conversations and dogged chronological detail, Tiger, Tiger is as dreary a read as soft porn. It will titillate paedophiles and fantasists, but for most people, reading it will have the dismal, lowering effect either of reality TV or of a very bad novel." Others praised it, Kate Elizabeth Russell citing it as an influence on her book My Dark Vanessa. Dan Kois wrote on NPR's website, calling it "clinical" and "searing", but added "though Fragoso can write with terrible beauty, often her memoir is hampered by awkward sentences, sloppy storytelling and the kind of unbelievably detailed description and dialogue that makes you distrust a memoir's voice."

Personal life and death

Fragoso was married twice, to Steve McGowan, with whom she had a daughter, and in 2010 married Tom O'Connor. She died of ovarian cancer in 2017, aged 38.