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Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason
"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, 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 save your own life.
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, 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 save your own life.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published April 6, 2021
About the author
Gina Frangello
20 books195 followersGina Frangello is the author of the collection Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010) and the novel My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus 2006), which was selected as one of the top 10 books of that year by Las Vegas City Life and was a "Read This!" finalist for Spring 2006. For more than a decade, Gina edited the award-winning fiction literary magazine Other Voices, and in 2004 co-launched its book imprint, Other Voices Books. She is currently the Executive Editor of Other Voices Books' Chicago office. Gina is also the Fiction Editor of The Nervous Breakdown (www.thenervousbreakdown.com) and her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, recently including StoryQuarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, Prairie Schooner, Fence, and Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader. She has been a freelance journalist and book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Reader.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 299 reviews
May 15, 2021
I love Gina Frangello for writing this book. Reading it felt like I'm Wallace Shawn in "My Dinner With Andre." Only, female. Reading it felt like I'm sitting down over a long dinner with Frangello. I wouldn't interrupt. Not even to ask questions. I'd just sit there and listen. A little stunned. Ok, maybe I'd ask her why she is so hard on herself. I might say, at some point, that she need not feel quite as guilty as she does about sleeping with another man, when the man she's married to breathes in his sleep in a way that makes Frangello feel like clawing paint from the walls. I can't decide if I'm allowed to laugh at some of these sentences and some of these sentiments. This book isn't funny on the same level as Gilda Radner's famously funny yet hard-hitting memoir, "It's Always Something." It's more bitter. It has a much more vicious bite. It has more righteous rage all around than Radner's book. And yet I did laugh, because Frangello made me face the truth over and over again of just how absurd these lives of ours are on this earth. All of us. All of our lives. I think Frangello would forgive me for laughing.
March 22, 2021
I devoured this book as if it were written just for me. The incisive, fiery intelligence of Frangello's research-infused prose took my breath away as she disassembled, one brick at a time, the ways in which systemic misogyny informs women's experiences not only within marriage and motherhood, but also within their own bodies as we navigate what it means to want and why we're not allowed to. The story itself is gorgeously told with a narrator who is so fully human, so transparent and generous, that it's impossible not to trust her completely. It was also impossible for this reader not to sympathize with her deeply. I was ready to follow her anywwhere. As far as structure, what Frangello has done is, in a word, breathtaking. The complexity and ingenuity of her use of direct address, hermit crab form, and braiding coalesce to create a narrative that becomes the best thing a story can really be, which is more than the sum of its parts. Beautiful, unforgettable, and revolutionary. Brava!
April 6, 2021
Absolutely brilliant.
April 24, 2021
This book is like the car crash that you can't stop yourself from gawking at. It made me feel a little dirty or contaminated for knowing so much about another person's messy, messed up, and contradictory life. It made me think too much more than I cared to think about such things as how do kids of parents who divulge too much, feel about that and about themselves? How much honesty is too much and how much honesty is just ego driven puffery? As Frangello says herself, it's no fun participating in others' too much emotional or physical pain. It's no fun.
June 8, 2021
I don't know. I am reasonably intelligent, reasonably both aware of and interested in cultural messages, very much a feminist and proud of it. I have been married twice and have personal experience with adultery and divorce. I walked with my parents through their older years and their deaths. This book should have resonated so much with me. What happened?
I had a hard time with the first third or so of the book . The author had some great sentences but they were plugged into what was, for me, a messy text. The writing felt staccato like. There were so many thoughts being tossed out all at once that I couldn't follow the train. I was going to drop the book off at the next station and call it a day but I decided to check reviews on Goodreads. Whoa! This book had a 4.13 rating and the reviews were almost all positive so I decided to keep going. For awhile, it got better. By that I mean, I could follow the author's narrative. I could actually connect with her in the middle section of the book because the text made sense to me. The final section was again confusing and too random for me.
I should have liked this book. I could relate to many parts of the author's story. I also admired a number of individual well written sentences. They just didn't roll together into a cohesive read for me. But that doesn't meant it won't work for you. Try it for yourself.
I had a hard time with the first third or so of the book . The author had some great sentences but they were plugged into what was, for me, a messy text. The writing felt staccato like. There were so many thoughts being tossed out all at once that I couldn't follow the train. I was going to drop the book off at the next station and call it a day but I decided to check reviews on Goodreads. Whoa! This book had a 4.13 rating and the reviews were almost all positive so I decided to keep going. For awhile, it got better. By that I mean, I could follow the author's narrative. I could actually connect with her in the middle section of the book because the text made sense to me. The final section was again confusing and too random for me.
I should have liked this book. I could relate to many parts of the author's story. I also admired a number of individual well written sentences. They just didn't roll together into a cohesive read for me. But that doesn't meant it won't work for you. Try it for yourself.
June 24, 2021
I bought this book after learning about it in an online webinar for/about women writing memoir. The instructors talked about how Frangello received a lot of flack for this because she's "too angry." They talked about all the ways the publishing world and society in general attempt to silence women, to stop them from telling their stories. So I read this book through that lens, of knowing there are a lot of people who believe this book shouldn't have even been written, let alone published.
At the core of this memoir is the extramarital affair the author had with a married man. While I've never had that experience and I'm not a mother, I still related to her on a deep level. I appreciate her brutal honesty, which borders on vulgar sometimes yet is absolutely necessary.
To me, this book is about what it means to not only to "be a woman" but to live in a woman's body. To have organs that are susceptible to very specific diseases. To be shamed for seeking pleasure from/in your body. To be a victim simply because you were born female. It's about all the stages of life a woman lives through and how she's viewed by men through each, how that changes the experiences she has and of course, why that is horrific and needs to change.
The writing is strong and emotional, and a little dense at times. Yes, she's angry. At times she's angry. At other times she's joyful, fearful, grieving, regretful, hopeful. In other words, she's fully living the human experience. She is unapologetically honest about that. I think that's where the "problem" lies for some people, and it's what made me appreciate the book so much!
At the core of this memoir is the extramarital affair the author had with a married man. While I've never had that experience and I'm not a mother, I still related to her on a deep level. I appreciate her brutal honesty, which borders on vulgar sometimes yet is absolutely necessary.
To me, this book is about what it means to not only to "be a woman" but to live in a woman's body. To have organs that are susceptible to very specific diseases. To be shamed for seeking pleasure from/in your body. To be a victim simply because you were born female. It's about all the stages of life a woman lives through and how she's viewed by men through each, how that changes the experiences she has and of course, why that is horrific and needs to change.
The writing is strong and emotional, and a little dense at times. Yes, she's angry. At times she's angry. At other times she's joyful, fearful, grieving, regretful, hopeful. In other words, she's fully living the human experience. She is unapologetically honest about that. I think that's where the "problem" lies for some people, and it's what made me appreciate the book so much!
June 29, 2021
Schopenhauer posited that “the wish fulfilled is a known delusion.” In Blow Your House Down, Gina Frangello makes cases both for and against this assertion. What if the childhood friend whose life you longed to inhabit felt the same way about yours? What if you realized too late that the friend who leaned so heavily on you provided unacknowledged but sorely needed ballast herself? What if the lover over whom you agonized and whom you heaved your life into new forms to accommodate didn’t deliver on his promises? What if he did, and now he is yours? Does a happy ending exist, and to what extent does it depend upon where the story begins, where it ends and how and by whom it’s told? To find out, Frangello’s turbulent, deeply personal memoir to reflect upon the ways that “every single one of your heroines drives off a cliff” and that all time is ultimately borrowed time.
May 10, 2021
This memoir is unique in its style, its blunt anger, and something a little less tangible that I can’t quite put my finger on. Like many memoirs, it definitely falls into the oversharing category and I found myself feeling a bit sorry for, angry for, and / or ashamed for people who would recognize themselves in this narrative. There’s a lot to stomach here, from infidelity to foreign adoptions, violence against women to mental illness, divorce to cancer. It’s so raw that at times left me feeling a bit chafed.
July 10, 2021
I cannot remember the last time I read a memoir that was so outrageously and furiously alive. It is scandalous and unflinching and I cannot wait to read it again because I know I missed a lot because I read it so fast.
May 30, 2021
“Who is a woman so easily permitted to be, under the auspices of a man, vs. who is she permitted to be alone?”
May 9, 2021
I did not resonate with the story two very broken people who try to take a shortcut to healing through a long-term affair that shreds both their families.
I very much resonated with the unflinching analysis of how the sexism-imbued world we live in damages women’s hearts and bodies and makes truly equal relationships between men and women almost impossible.
In the end, an admirable exercise in brutal truth-telling and extreme perspective-sharing.
I very much resonated with the unflinching analysis of how the sexism-imbued world we live in damages women’s hearts and bodies and makes truly equal relationships between men and women almost impossible.
In the end, an admirable exercise in brutal truth-telling and extreme perspective-sharing.
February 12, 2022
2.5 Stars
There are several unwritten and unpublished versions of this review that are almost as bitter as the book itself, but I've sat on them for a few days and I think I've settled. The longer I work on this, the more I realize that my experience of this book was likely a problem of expectations vs reality, but...it almost ruined my love of reading. For most of the book, I couldn't help but think, this is what fiction is for.
I took the the thesis of this book to be the fact that women can be more than one thing: based on the French feminists that Frangello read as a student, she bookends the...book...with mentions of this, and the pages in between are filled with examples (kind of). This book, too, is many things: namely, each chapter is written with a different stylistic approach. I actually thought while reading that it could have worked well as a collection of essays, because she covers many distinct topics.
The second half of the last chapter added a half a star to my rating. It's the first time that Frangello demonstrated any real self-awareness to me, often seeming to transcend her earlier reflections. I guess self-awareness isn't necessary in a memoir, but it certainly helps the character development/arc of the narrator/author in the eyes of the reader (or at least, in the eyes of me).
While this books is many things, one thing it's not (in my opinion) is a feminist manifesto, as some blurbs would tell you. There are no public aims or policy here. It's more like...a text by a feminist–even about feminism, or "a story of...feminism", like the subtitle says. But just like the French feminists who she read when she was younger, all of the ideas in this book are at least 30 years old, and have all been written down and read before. It's more like a woman's reckoning of her own feminism throughout her life, but her (admittedly) unresolved trauma has her seeming to believe that the state of her internal world is an accurate portrayal of the external world. The main example of this is her real, present fear that her husband is going to first tell her that he's happy she has cancer and hopes she dies, and then that he is actively going to murder her. For this to be a feminist text, I would expect there to be some analysis of this fear and violence, but all we get (which is powerful nonetheless) is a recounting of the horrors that are visited on Frangello's peers over the course of her life by the men in their lives.
My number one biggest problem with this book–the thing that really kept me from ever letting my guard down, getting into it, or enjoying it–is how oblivious Frangello seems to be to the concept of white feminism. Another piece of information that she repeats at the beginning and end of the book is the fact that a majority of white women voted for Trump. However, she also borderline coopts Audre Lorde and James Baldwin's work, expresses no confession outside of a vague regret for American imperialism for adopting her daughters at a time when her husband was [maybe? still unclear] physically abusive towards her, and there is no examination of what might possibly compel a woman to preserve some of her power by siding with the oppressor–she never draws the line of that reasoning back to herself, a white woman. Perhaps this is because the entire book is steeped in Frangello trying to piece together some semblance of her own power, and maybe she doesn't have the bandwidth or desire to think about relinquishing it. She says offhandedly that Joan Didion was so cool she made people forget to discriminate against her for being a woman. As pretty much every Black iconoclast in United States history could tell you, being cool doesn't exempt you from discrimination. (For God's sake, the word "cool" was appropriated from Black culture.) Where'd she get that idea, from Kanye West? I just don't think that in a book that's written in 2019, presumably, and coming out in 2021 that you can circle the drain of intersectionality, throw in a line about how "maybe your skin color affects how you move through the world" and then also put the word feminism in your title. I mean, obviously you can. Especially if you're white.
Without being so glib and dismissive as the Instagram graphic "your trauma isn't your fault, but your healing is your responsibility," I would maybe say something like, "your trauma isn't your fault, but the harm that you cause others is your responsibility" about this book. I was really interested in reading a firsthand narrative about a wife's adultery, but the fact that there is no meta-analysis of the forces at work here and that it's pure narrative makes for not just an unreliable narrator (which I do tend to love), but a deeply dissatisfying one. I don't think that my point is that all women feminist authors have to have something figured out before they write down their experiences; but it seemed to me like she told us that she did. I felt like she was asking very particular questions of herself, the reader, the patriarchy, society, and then providing irrelevant answers.
Am I being too harsh? Am I being misogynistic? Am I holding a white woman to standards I would never think to hold a white man to? I feel like I was so off about this book based on the other reviews, so I'm curious to know what other people thought. I implied at the beginning that I wish this would have been written as fiction, because I feel like that would have added a level of awareness and some distance from the harm inflicted onto her real-life subjects, children included.
There are several unwritten and unpublished versions of this review that are almost as bitter as the book itself, but I've sat on them for a few days and I think I've settled. The longer I work on this, the more I realize that my experience of this book was likely a problem of expectations vs reality, but...it almost ruined my love of reading. For most of the book, I couldn't help but think, this is what fiction is for.
I took the the thesis of this book to be the fact that women can be more than one thing: based on the French feminists that Frangello read as a student, she bookends the...book...with mentions of this, and the pages in between are filled with examples (kind of). This book, too, is many things: namely, each chapter is written with a different stylistic approach. I actually thought while reading that it could have worked well as a collection of essays, because she covers many distinct topics.
The second half of the last chapter added a half a star to my rating. It's the first time that Frangello demonstrated any real self-awareness to me, often seeming to transcend her earlier reflections. I guess self-awareness isn't necessary in a memoir, but it certainly helps the character development/arc of the narrator/author in the eyes of the reader (or at least, in the eyes of me).
While this books is many things, one thing it's not (in my opinion) is a feminist manifesto, as some blurbs would tell you. There are no public aims or policy here. It's more like...a text by a feminist–even about feminism, or "a story of...feminism", like the subtitle says. But just like the French feminists who she read when she was younger, all of the ideas in this book are at least 30 years old, and have all been written down and read before. It's more like a woman's reckoning of her own feminism throughout her life, but her (admittedly) unresolved trauma has her seeming to believe that the state of her internal world is an accurate portrayal of the external world. The main example of this is her real, present fear that her husband is going to first tell her that he's happy she has cancer and hopes she dies, and then that he is actively going to murder her. For this to be a feminist text, I would expect there to be some analysis of this fear and violence, but all we get (which is powerful nonetheless) is a recounting of the horrors that are visited on Frangello's peers over the course of her life by the men in their lives.
My number one biggest problem with this book–the thing that really kept me from ever letting my guard down, getting into it, or enjoying it–is how oblivious Frangello seems to be to the concept of white feminism. Another piece of information that she repeats at the beginning and end of the book is the fact that a majority of white women voted for Trump. However, she also borderline coopts Audre Lorde and James Baldwin's work, expresses no confession outside of a vague regret for American imperialism for adopting her daughters at a time when her husband was [maybe? still unclear] physically abusive towards her, and there is no examination of what might possibly compel a woman to preserve some of her power by siding with the oppressor–she never draws the line of that reasoning back to herself, a white woman. Perhaps this is because the entire book is steeped in Frangello trying to piece together some semblance of her own power, and maybe she doesn't have the bandwidth or desire to think about relinquishing it. She says offhandedly that Joan Didion was so cool she made people forget to discriminate against her for being a woman. As pretty much every Black iconoclast in United States history could tell you, being cool doesn't exempt you from discrimination. (For God's sake, the word "cool" was appropriated from Black culture.) Where'd she get that idea, from Kanye West? I just don't think that in a book that's written in 2019, presumably, and coming out in 2021 that you can circle the drain of intersectionality, throw in a line about how "maybe your skin color affects how you move through the world" and then also put the word feminism in your title. I mean, obviously you can. Especially if you're white.
Without being so glib and dismissive as the Instagram graphic "your trauma isn't your fault, but your healing is your responsibility," I would maybe say something like, "your trauma isn't your fault, but the harm that you cause others is your responsibility" about this book. I was really interested in reading a firsthand narrative about a wife's adultery, but the fact that there is no meta-analysis of the forces at work here and that it's pure narrative makes for not just an unreliable narrator (which I do tend to love), but a deeply dissatisfying one. I don't think that my point is that all women feminist authors have to have something figured out before they write down their experiences; but it seemed to me like she told us that she did. I felt like she was asking very particular questions of herself, the reader, the patriarchy, society, and then providing irrelevant answers.
Am I being too harsh? Am I being misogynistic? Am I holding a white woman to standards I would never think to hold a white man to? I feel like I was so off about this book based on the other reviews, so I'm curious to know what other people thought. I implied at the beginning that I wish this would have been written as fiction, because I feel like that would have added a level of awareness and some distance from the harm inflicted onto her real-life subjects, children included.
June 26, 2021
I circled around Gina Frangello’s new memoir Blow Your House Down for weeks before gathering the courage to buy it. On the surface it’s a story about a marriage ruined by infidelity, which hits close to home with me. But when the Washington Post included it in their roundup of modern feminist sex writing, I finally opened up a copy. I am so glad that I did.
This book is a study of a family, and of a woman who is so much more than the roles of wife, mother, daughter and adulteress. Gina balances holding herself accountable while examining the circumstances of her life with focus, grace and honesty. When it comes to infidelity and monogamy, we rarely have the space to ask questions without shame and guilt: was this relationship working? Was it humanizing or hurtful before infidelity came into play? Is there a real victim and villain in this situation? What role do power, money, and violence play in monogamy, especially for women? Gina leans into the ambiguity of ending a marriage and falling deeply in love with someone who isn’t your spouse.
It’s a gutting, vulnerable, angry and loving read. Easily my favorite book of 2021 so far. One of those memoirs that helped me understand myself by holding up a mirror to my own doubts in the form of someone else’s life.
Content warnings for suicide, self-harm, chronic illness, sexual violence, physical abuse, basically anything women face in a patriarchal society.
This book is a study of a family, and of a woman who is so much more than the roles of wife, mother, daughter and adulteress. Gina balances holding herself accountable while examining the circumstances of her life with focus, grace and honesty. When it comes to infidelity and monogamy, we rarely have the space to ask questions without shame and guilt: was this relationship working? Was it humanizing or hurtful before infidelity came into play? Is there a real victim and villain in this situation? What role do power, money, and violence play in monogamy, especially for women? Gina leans into the ambiguity of ending a marriage and falling deeply in love with someone who isn’t your spouse.
It’s a gutting, vulnerable, angry and loving read. Easily my favorite book of 2021 so far. One of those memoirs that helped me understand myself by holding up a mirror to my own doubts in the form of someone else’s life.
Content warnings for suicide, self-harm, chronic illness, sexual violence, physical abuse, basically anything women face in a patriarchal society.
January 20, 2021
Never have I read such a captivating, wrenching, and emotional memoir centered around an affair, a subject that typically brings judgemental grimaces and disdain. Frangello had long been part of a loveless marriage that included mentally taxing outrages and even the occasional push from her husband, but these buildups weighed on her more and more as she reluctantly falls into a clandestine romance she has never felt with such intensity before with a man referenced only as "her lover". Within the confines of her marriage, secrets, and illness, Frangello weaves much speculation and reflection on family, infidelity, chronic pain, and patriarchal double standards in the powerful and salacious Blow Your House Down.
April 20, 2021
Blow Your House Down was captivating and brutal. The author’s unflinching honesty and self examination are breathtaking and I could not put this book down. It is also so much more than the raw retelling of her self immolation as a wife, and her emergence from a crushing series of life changes. Her feminist analysis begins like a whisper, or a tap on the shoulder, but culminates in a tsunami that rearranges the landscape.
March 31, 2021
Landed cold-ready
To see a woman about a woman
Journey city maze, illuminated haze
She approaches, weeping snowstorm.
*Gloria Steinem is a feminist. Frangello, not.
#poem
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint to Non-Adulterers
To see a woman about a woman
Journey city maze, illuminated haze
She approaches, weeping snowstorm.
*Gloria Steinem is a feminist. Frangello, not.
#poem
Chris Roberts, Patron Saint to Non-Adulterers
April 7, 2021
My interview with Gina in THE BROOKLYN RAIL: https://brooklynrail.org/2021/04/book...
May 31, 2021
This is a tough book to review. It is about a subject that happens often but wish it didn't--midlife marital infidelity. Frangello examines this and many other issues as possible justifications of her actions including the death of her best friend, her parents' dysfunctional marriage, her husband's fits of anger, society's mistreatment of women, dissatisfaction in her job as a counselor. As a reader I took turns being angry at and angry for Frangello, wanting to condemn her yet completely understanding of her need to tell this story.
It goes without stating that this is not necessarily the book for everyone. I imagine that some people will simply find the author intolerable (after all, the author's 12-year-old twin daughters discover their mother's affair and are subsequently told to keep it from their father). However, the need for honesty on this subject is palpable. Sympathy for the author is hard to come by and I was just glad this book was over with.
The writing here is great, btw. Four stars.
It goes without stating that this is not necessarily the book for everyone. I imagine that some people will simply find the author intolerable (after all, the author's 12-year-old twin daughters discover their mother's affair and are subsequently told to keep it from their father). However, the need for honesty on this subject is palpable. Sympathy for the author is hard to come by and I was just glad this book was over with.
The writing here is great, btw. Four stars.
November 21, 2021
Trust me, I wanted to like her. I wanted to feel her vulnerability but the writing was so over-the-top and "writerly" that I felt a little manipulated as a reader. She conveys a message of out-of-controlness but then when you step back, it feels like the emotions were hers and not at all mine. She's right to recognize that it was a shitty thing to do--to lie to everyone and especially her affair partner's wife who is dying from cancer. She tries to castigate herself on the page which falls flat, but then you get the sense that she really understand the pain she may have caused to the wife or her husband. Like she wants to, but the way she describes the wife is sort of the "cold, hard, bitch" trope or "pathetic and dying" model. Neither seems very real. Her kids are also not real--nor in fact, is her lover. It's just a lot of self-talk and self-criticism about desire. I think the topic is fascinating and I could and would read all the books about this, but this one just fell flat for me.
October 23, 2020
I received an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review
This woman has had a very crappy life and it took me a while to figure out where the feminism was. But it hit me. Women devote their lives to caretaking. To their families. After their children are born, they let their fires go out. So her argument that an affair is in a revolutionary tracks to a degree.
3.5 and very depressing
This woman has had a very crappy life and it took me a while to figure out where the feminism was. But it hit me. Women devote their lives to caretaking. To their families. After their children are born, they let their fires go out. So her argument that an affair is in a revolutionary tracks to a degree.
3.5 and very depressing
April 18, 2021
Brave honest and revealing!
May 19, 2021
I would give it a 20 if I could. The last 30 pages alone should kill a man.
July 28, 2021
I don’t remember the last time a book gripped me so instantly and didn’t let go until the last page. Gina Frangello’s memoir, Blow Your House Down: Family, Feminism, and Treason, is a, fierce examination of what it is to be a woman in today’s society, using her own infidelity and its subsequent fallout as a launching point. Frangello is unflinching and audacious in her self-portrait as Wife, Mother, Daughter and Adultress, evoking a childhood that would not be out of place in a Scorsese movie and thrillingly deconstructing the trope of the Fallen Woman with prose that recalls Margaret Atwood at her most fiery. It left me both electrified and gutted. I’ve never read anything like it.
July 16, 2021
I've been a fan of Gina Frangello since she published her first novel, My Sister's Continent. I wasn't going to miss this memoir despite (or perhaps because of) the controversy surrounding it. As is usual for her, the prose is superior, and this book is actually quite the page turner. Frangello is nothing if not honest: throughout her career she has forged ahead, unafraid to speak about all the forbidden topics.
June 3, 2021
Omg...this is like nothing I’ve read before. So odd, so spooky...like slowly dragging a knife across a fancy Ethan Allen table. Frangello rambles in places, and I could have done without some of the gory details. Some of those details are needed for context, though. However you feel about her situation, you can really feel her anguish. If you need an escapist read and are looking for something really different, pick this one up.
July 8, 2023
“I’m tired of being a woman” this book was intense. Definitely reminded me of Fleabag and the line, “women are born with pain built in.” Because damn this girl went through it, definitely gonna remember it for awhileeeee
June 29, 2021
This book is RAW. I tells the story of Frangello’s marriage ending affair and, at the end, I feel nothing except glad that she has survived and that she is happy.
June 25, 2021
Intense, raw, heartbreaking, and hopeful.
May 6, 2021
violence (against women), adultery, responsibility, parenting, passion, (female) (chronic) illness, death and loss.
social advancement, coming from a rough neighbourhood. mental health, caring for parents, a psychotic father. middle age. unlearning fear and hiding. failing, succeeding.
social advancement, coming from a rough neighbourhood. mental health, caring for parents, a psychotic father. middle age. unlearning fear and hiding. failing, succeeding.
June 16, 2021
Breathtaking, innovative, and raw; this once in a lifetime memoir has cemented Gina Frangello as one of my favorite authors. Chronicling the dissolution of her marriage due to an affair, Frangello writes this memoir as also a feminist manifesto that is best consumed slowly and thoughtfully. This book is a triumph.
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