Blow your house down : a story of family, feminism, and treason

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Title:

Blow your house down : a story of family, feminism, and treason

Author:

Frangello, Gina, author.

ISBN:

9781640093164

Physical Description:

320 pages ; 24 cm.

Personal Subject:

Frangello, Gina.

Subject Term:

Authors, American -- 21st century -- Biography.

Authors, American -- 21st century -- Family relationships.

Marriage -- United States.

Adultery -- United States.

Cancer -- Patients -- United States.

Genre:

Autobiographies

Summary:

Gina Frangello is a long-married fortysomething devoted mom when her life is turned upside down by the sudden death of her closest friend. Worn down from years of caregiving both her elderly parents and three kids, Gina starts to interrogate her own mortality and what she once longed for as a younger woman : a kind of sexual, romantic and artistic intensity radically at odds with her comfortable but emotionally stagnant marriage. Falling into a passionate affair with a writer/musician, Gina begins living a shocking double life while continuing to outwardly project the image of having a "perfect family." As her parallel worlds begin to dangerously intersect, she makes the risky choice to leave her marriage and security in order to take a chance at finally becoming fully herself, midlife. However, when only months into her separation, Gina is diagnosed with breast cancer, her father dies, her divorce grows increasingly contentious and menacing, and her lover falls into a deep clinical depression, an inevitable breaking point approaches, revealing the irrevocable stakes of giving up everything for love, as well as what it means to be a woman in the contemporary American landscape. --

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Lake Elmo Library	921 FRANGELLO	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove)	921 FRANGELLO	Searching... Unknown
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury)	921 FRANGELLO	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	813.6 FRA	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Good Morning America Recommended Book * A LitReactor Best Book of the Year * A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year * A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year * A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year * A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month

"A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." --Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game

Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness.

Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Author Notes

GINA FRANGELLO is the author of Every Kind of Wanting , A Life in Men , Slut Lullabies , and My Sister's Continent . Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in Ploughshares , The Boston Globe , Chicago Tribune , HuffPost , Fence , Five Chapters , Prairie Schooner , Chicago Reader , and many other publications. She lives with her family in the Chicago area.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this searing memoir, novelist Frangello (Every Kind of Wanting) charts the spectacular highs and devastating lows of her midlife with extraordinary candor. Frangello was married for years to her husband, a reliable but quick-tempered man with whom she shared three kids, when she fell "madly in love" and began an affair with a married writer. Frangello celebrated rediscovering her sexuality, but things took a devastating turn after her daughters read her text messages and discovered she was cheating on her husband. Feeling like a "monster," she confessed to her husband. The marriage quickly disintegrated, and seven months after their separation, Frangello was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then the divorce turned ugly; Frangello's husband, she writes, "turned off all the utilities in the home I lived in with our three children" and "drained our joint bank account to zero" shortly after she began chemotherapy. Meanwhile, she was taking care of her aging parents as they deteriorated and eventually died. Frangello describes this bold and tumultuous period of her life in intimate and remarkable detail, and despite the tumult celebrates her own resilience. This unapologetic account both moves and fascinates. (Apr.)

Kirkus Review

In a debut memoir, a novelist presents her life-altering affair in unsparing detail. Addressing her readers as "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," Frangello invites us to join her in a meticulous examination of the background of--and possible justifications for--a midlife infidelity. Her best friend's death was the immediate cause of her emotional disorientation, but there were also the issues of her husband's temper, her coming-of-age in a neighborhood where girls and women were routinely mistreated, her absorption of more secondhand trauma in her job as a counselor, and her anxiety about reliving her mother's sexless marriage. Frangello pulls apart these and other rationalizations even as she presents them, including the suggestion "that my internalized fear of men was extreme enough to make me…confuse a man whose heart I shattered…with O.J. Simpson, with the weekly predators on Law and Order and Criminal Minds, with the men of my old neighborhood." Before her first weekend with her lover, the author "had never burned a man before…never clipped a wrist cuff to a thigh cuff…never known intimacy so beyond the domain of ego or language." As she explains, it was precisely this intimacy that caused her to "question everything I ever understood regarding how to be Normal, how to be Good." When her twin 12-year-old daughters learned about her affair from reading texts on her phone, she had them keep it from their father for three years. Her husband's life, she writes, "forged on, now with three members of his family holding knowledge to which he had no access." Later in the narrative, referring to a gag order she refused to sign at the time of her divorce, Frangello writes, "perhaps you empathize with my husband's desire that I should be silenced." Though the author hopes her candor will be helpful to other women--and it may be--reader sympathy may be hard to come by. A furious expiation that takes every risk it can find. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

In this raw, red-hot memoir, novelist and editor Frangello's (Every Kind of Wanting, 2016) in-your-face starting point is the fact that she has committed adultery. She both indicts and defends herself, giving readers--her "ladies and gentlemen of the jury"--an intimate view of her first marriage and the all-encompassing affair that ends it and leads to her second. But Frangello's deeper aim is to address the steep price women pay in a patriarchal society in terms of biased stigma and impaired health and well-being whether they abide by or transgress its rules. Her evidence includes the sad story of her deeply loved parents' dysfunctional marriage and often-harrowing details of relationships she observed growing up in a low-income Chicago neighborhood. She shares her experiences as a wife, mother, parental caregiver, literary professional, and medical patient, of a woman who paints within the lines, until she vividly, wildly doesn't. How fulfilled is a woman allowed to be? In this gutsy, dramatic feminist manifesto, Frangello recounts the cost of eschewing security to choose the utter necessity of love, of being more tomorrow than she is today.

Library Journal Review

"What happens when the very thing that once taught you how to survive--how to escape--suddenly stands between you and your life?" Novelist and essayist Frangello (A Life in Men) answers this question in her latest work, which tells the story of the profoundly life-changing events that stemmed from Frangello's intense extramarital affair with a longtime acquaintance. While sifting through the ruins of her marriage, Frangello examines her roles as mother, wife, daughter, and friend, and illustrates how often women must submit to escape and self-erasure in order to maintain what society expects of them. Searingly honest and compulsively readable, this memoir serves as a post-#MeToo feminist dictum about the deeply complex and multilayered emotional and sexual lives of women. With humor and a no-holds-barred self-inspection, the author illuminates these layers and reminds us that "the clean reduction of a woman to any prime number is always a lie." VERDICT Uncompromisingly fearless in its candor, this memoir / feminist manifesto is a powerful account of a woman's self-acceptance that deserves a place among the best literary memoirs of the last decade. Frangello's groundbreaking testimony sets itself apart.--Megan Duffy, Glen Ridge P.L., NJ

Author's Note	p. vii
Aperture
The Story of A	p. 3
Affair
Death's Monkeysphere	p. 15
Substitute Beauty	p. 38
The Counterevidence of Love	p. 74
Embers	p. 104
What Women Do	p. 113
Aftermath
Blow Your House Down	p. 139
Big Blonde	p. 154
The Summer of Light and Dark	p. 165
A Short Dictionary of Mutually Understood Words	p. 187
Blood Moon	p. 199
Affliction
Two Ophelias	p. 227
The Cartographers: Fifty Meditations	p. 241
Acknowledgments	p. 317

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

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