Mother & storyteller — writing autopathography, memoir, & short stories
Memoir
Little Flames Under My Skin – Rebuilding a Life, One Neuron at a Time
One ordinary morning at age thirty-five, Mel collapsed without warning, resulting in the abrupt severing of the identities tied to her able-bodied self—a dream career, her self-determination as an athlete, and the version of motherhood she had envisioned. What followed was not a single tragedy, but a cascade of hardship that demanded a level of courage she never expected she would have to summon.
Little Flames Under My Skin is a harrowing, unyielding lyrical memoir that explores the forging of a new existence when the foundations of family, belonging, and physical autonomy are stripped away. It is a story of illness, yes—but also of the invisible communities that hold us up, the ones we expect to show up and the ones that surprise us, and the slow, aching heartbreak of those who disappear when life becomes complicated. In the face of physical limitation and social erasure, Mel fights to reclaim her voice, her motherhood, her worth.
By the end of Little Flames Under My Skin, Mel has not “overcome” her illness, nor does she offer false redemption. Instead, she offers something far more powerful: an honest, complex, and beautiful rendering of what it means to live inside a body that falters, a society that misunderstands, and a spirit that refuses to surrender.
Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative NonFiction (runner-up 2025)
With astonishing intimacy, honesty, and insight, [Mel] writes about the fearsome vulnerability of being a patient on the brink of death, about the long and painful process of recovering the most basic bodily functions, about grieving the life altered and the career, home, and marriage that were lost due to her illness... I’ll never forget this powerfully illuminating memoir.
Cheryl Strayed
Little Flames Under My Skin is an unflinching look at what happens when disability puts one’s life on a wholly new trajectory. Mel Williams has written a book that manages to be both difficult and hopeful, stark and yet warm—a testament to the ways in which we seek to keep on going even as our worlds change beyond what we’ve imagined.
Amanda Leduc
Melissa Williams is objective and clear-eyed in this memoir of debilitating illness and the eventual breakdown of her marriage. Never self-pitying, fiercely strong, often wry and humorous, Mel makes herself vulnerable both physically and emotionally. In particular, I admire her ability to write so well about disability, a subject about which we should be reading more of in the literary world.
David Bergen
Published work
Mel is a writer who makes her home near the beach in east Toronto with her two sons. Her work moves along the fault lines of illness and healing, isolation and belonging—tracing how even the most fractured places can give rise to autonomy, connection, and quiet resilience.
Currently: drafting a historical fiction novel.