In her books Melissa merges the intimacy of personal storytelling with the breadth and depth of journalistic reportage to illuminate dimensions of girls and women's lives. She tackles societal topics by writing about her own – and her daughter's – experiences and then turning her wide-angled lens on exploring how similar issues play out in the lives of people who share aspects of these journeys. Her copious reading of news stories and commentary provides a sturdy foundation on which she constructs her books' personal narratives to illuminate a variety of contemporary issues – from unmarried motherhood in the 1990s to the lives of girls and women in rural China during that country's one-child policy era. Now in a social narrative history, she has returned to the mid-1970s to write about her life in the national spotlight when as a 26-year-old woman baseball reporter her federal legal case, Ludtke v. Kuhn, changed sports media by challenging baseball’s gender discrimination and demanding equal treatment.