Montesanti’s new memoir is an emotional, but ultimately joyful, story set on and off the derby track.

When Gabe Montesanti came to St. Louis to join a Washington University MFA program, she found not only a place to call home, but a family and community among the joy and queerness of the local roller derby scene. In her new memoir, Brace for Impact, out today from Dial Press, Montesanti tracks her first year with Arch Rival Roller Derby. Practices, bouts, and trials are captured alongside memories from Montesanti’s adolescence that put into focus just how much this loving, accepting found family means. 

We caught up with Montesanti in-between her move back to St. Louis and her book launch to talk roller derby, crafting her memoir, and loving her adopted home.

When did you know that your experiences with roller derby were going to be a book?

When I started skating for St. Louis Arch Rival Roller Derby, I was also enrolled in graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, and a lot of nonfiction is writing about your life. So roller derby slowly made its way into my essays and my memoir snippets pretty early, and within about six months, I knew that I wanted to do my thesis project on roller derby. My advisors were on board, I had the support of the department, and I really started taking derby seriously and going to every single event, just experiencing it as much as I could and doing research. I knew coming into Wash. U. that I had to write a thesis, but I had no idea what that would be until I started playing the sport and realized how many intersections there were between my childhood, my adolescence, coming out, and the sport itself. 

Tell me about transforming this from a series of essays to a cohesive memoir.

I've heard this as something that happens to a lot of nonfiction writers. They start out with standalone pieces and then, when they figure out the form of the book, things kind of come together, and that's what happened for me. I turned in my thesis, which was standalone essays. And then after graduate school, I was awarded a writing residency called the Kimmel Harding Nelson in Nebraska. So I spent two weeks in Nebraska, working, looking at my manuscript, and trying to figure out the trajectory. I had about 300 pages at that point. So I decided at that residency that I was going to rewrite the story as a chronological, straightforward, traditional narrative. And I spent about two weeks working on the first chapter, which would become “Recruit Night.”

I had all my notes from my thesis defense and stacks and stacks of feedback from my cohort. I was using all that information to sort of figure out what the future of the project looked like. And I remember utilizing the walls of the residency. I had sticky notes and whiteboards, and it looked like some sort of murder scene or something. I was writing down just everything I could think of and doing timeline work and just mapping it out visually. So really I can credit that writing residency for giving me the time and space to realize that Brace for Impact was actually a memoir, not a collection of essays.

This story is chronological, and it’s about your experience with derby, but there’s so much looking back as well. What was it like going back over some of those memories and choosing what would be a part of this story?

I really wanted the first half of the book to be toggling back and forth between childhood and the main thread, which was finding the support in the community at Arch Rival and playing roller derby for my first year. I remember having a list of all the pillars of the sport that I would introduce, like fresh meat and the minimum skills test that we have to take to become cleared, and then draft night where we get drafted onto teams. So I had all those benchmarks laid out, and then I started realizing how many childhood memories were associated with each of those benchmarks in the book. So I again used the walls of my bedroom and my office and really sticky noted and posted index cards, taped everything to the walls and noted all the associative memories that I had.

It was pretty true to what was actually happening in my life. I was becoming inundated with these memories that were sort of intrusive and coming back at the most inopportune times. So it really was like my past life and the struggles that I've been through were sort of informing the way I was interacting in the world and really just living as a human in the first year of my roller derby experience. So I knew that I wanted the intersection of childhood and adolescence to be at the core of the project. I knew it wasn't going to be just a straightforward roller derby memoir. There needed to be some scaffolding with past experiences that would really give context and backstory to the main character, to the narrator, and her growth.

In doing that, we get a look at your family, but we also get to meet this beautiful chosen family that you've constructed in St. Louis. They’re wonderful characters, but obviously they’re also real people. What has it been like working on this with people you’re still very close to.

One thing that we talk a lot about in non-fiction, especially at the MFA at Wash. U. is that the person that you render on the page is not actually you. The persona and all the characteristics that you put into crafting yourself into a character, that's all separate from the person you are. And the same goes for all the characters that I rendered. Readers sometimes think that they know me in a very intimate way because I've published a sliver of my story, but it's really so much more than that. So I had some sort of ground rules that I was working with in writing about real people, which was that I wanted to tell my story, and anytime that their story sort of intersected with mine, I would have to make sure that it was okay that with them that I was giving some of those details. 

There's a big thread in the book about my roller derby mom, Taryn, who was going through an awful breakup at the same time that I was learning all these skills, and we were supporting each other in completely different ways. I had her read the material very early, and she came to all of my readings at Wash. U. and in the community. She's been so supportive from the very beginning. But I did get her approval and green light before I published anything about her. But for a lot of my teammates, most of them have read excerpts, but a lot of them are reading the book for the first time. I got my shipment of books last week and it was such a joyful moment opening the box of books on the porch with my derby mom and my wife and holding it for the first time, just the accumulation of years and years of work.

What have the responses been like from your teammates so far?

I've been giving copies to the people who are the biggest characters in the book. One of the main characters, Soup Beans, who's the head of recruitment at Arch Rival, just finished her copy. She was updating me as she read and sending me all her thoughts and pictures of the text and pictures of her on the couch reading the book, and she was saying what an emotional journey it was that I put her through in 24 hours. She read it very, very quickly, and she said, “I don't even remember the last time I've read a full book, let alone a book of this magnitude.” So it was really a surreal moment. The characters in the book are meeting their real-life counterparts, right now in real time, and so far the response has been just overwhelmingly loving and joyful. Bricktator, who is the captain of the All Stars and has been voted the heart of the team for the past like four years, read an advanced digital copy and has been one of the biggest voices highlighting and championing the book in the derby community. That has felt so good, and so wonderful. I'm not under the delusion that I got everything perfect or that I'm the best voice to speak for the derby community. But so far the response has been really lovely.

Is there anything that didn't fit or that just didn't quite work with the story that you loved but didn’t make it into the final book?

Yeah, so I had several chapters that got cut. Like I said, it started out as standalone essays, so some of those standalone essays didn't fit within the arc of the project. One of the chapters that I really loved that got cut was kind of depicting my wife and I visiting Chicago for roller derby’s 82nd birthday. And the event showcased skaters who were skating as if it was the early 1930s. There was elbowing, and the rules were different. The starts were different. The sort of boundaries with contact were different. And it was really exciting. I used that chapter to really discuss the roots of roller derby's history and how it started out as sort of a traveling circus and just how it evolved so much. It was revived in the early 2000s in Texas, and I really wanted the history to be in the book, but it just didn't fit. It didn't fit with the main character's growth and her journey. But I really wanted to showcase that bout that I witnessed in Chicago. So that was sort of a sad cutting-room floor moment, but I'm really happy with how the book turned out. I couldn't have asked for a better editor, and I'm so glad that she helps me make all these ruthless decisions about what to keep in and what to cut.

You’ve just returned to St. Louis, just in time for the book launch. How is it being back? It’s so clear from the book that you really love living here.

I was given a one-year visiting assistant professorship at the University of North Texas, so about a year ago, my wife and I moved down to Denton, Texas, which is 10 hours from St. Louis. It was a really good experience, and I learned a lot in terms of teaching and in terms of my own writing and my own growth, but it feels so natural to come home. And I think that my wife, Kelly, and I both realized when we were down there that we created the perfect community and chosen family. And we value that. I think we had a chance to really figure out our values and what we want to prioritize. And for now, that’s really our chosen family and being with our people. We made a couple great friends in Texas, and some of them are even coming to the book launch, but for the most part, we just feel so at home here. I think I realized within a few months of living here that this was where I was meant to be. We moved here in 2016, and I have such a distinct memory of turning off of the freeway onto Skinker and passing Forest Park and seeing Wash. U. for the first time and just thinking, I understand this place. And I feel like I belong in this place. That really proved to be absolutely true for the five years that we have lived here.

I've lived in the Midwest my whole life, and I have such a complicated relationship with the idea of flyover states. I really resent when people from the coast call Missouri or St. Louis or anywhere I've lived in the Midwest “flyover territory,” because there's so much to value here. Growing up, I think I had this idea that, to be successful, you needed to leave the Midwest and live on one of the coasts. I studied in New York City for a semester in college, and it was such a wonderful experience. And I thought that I would be back right after college. But there've been so many opportunities in the Midwest for me, and I feel like it's really where I belong at this point in my life.

In addition to your love for St. Louis, the other thing that comes through is obviously your love for derby and this community. For people who read this book want to be a part of that, where should they start?

For everyone who lives in St. Louis, I highly recommend looking up Arch Rival. We have a website, and we're a nonprofit. We practice in South City at the Skatium, and we play games at Queeny Park. There will be a game every month this summer, and the next one is June 11th. There's four of them planned for this summer. But we're really just trying as a community to rebuild in this new world that we live in. We didn't play for two years. We did a lot of outdoor activities and we hosted small skating space practices over Zoom in our kitchens and driveways. I've only been skating outside for the past two years, but I came back to practice [May 19] and it was truly wonderful. I mean, just the greeting that I had, all the hugs. My wife came with me, and I felt like a celebrity. So that was really a beautiful moment. So look up Arch Rival. There's always recruitment classes that are getting started. Usually those start twice or three times a year officially. And we're always open to transfer skaters or people who know how to skate but want to learn the basics of roller derby. Then, for anyone outside St. Louis, there truly is roller derby everywhere. Find your nearest league or team and see how you can get involved.

What do you most want people to know about Brace for Impact?

Although the book does describe some traumatic material and some challenging moments in my life, I think what I aimed to highlight the most was joy and finding those spaces, creating those spaces for yourself, in whatever community you find yourself in, and just truly realizing that you're not alone. It sounds so cliche, but there are so many periods in my life when I felt like such a freak. I felt like the only person of my type in a space. But there really are kindred spirits everywhere, and you just have to find them. I'm so lucky that I found my people. So that's what I hope people will take away.

Jackson is managing editor of St. Louis Magazine. Like this story? Want to share other feedback? Send Jackson an email at cjackson@stlmag.com.

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