★ 03/01/2021
"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
2021-02-05
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 Orderand 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.
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
"Compelling, honest, and thought-provoking, Gina Frangello's memoir is an inspired addition to her astounding body of work." —Charlize Theron
"A provocative memoir." —The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
"Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason . . . [is] her most lyrical, adventurous and important work." —Meredith Maran, Los Angeles Times
"My bet for breakout of the year. The Chicagoan’s memoir takes on gender expectations and marital affairs in such a brutal, self-lacerating candor, you wonder who should play her in the movie." —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
"Candid and engrossing . . . A searing indictment of misogynistic expectations, Blow Your House Down blasts through convention, martyrdom and self-loathing to reach the strength, agency, resilience and empowerment that all women deserve. This book will inspire readers to accept themselves . . . and to live a life full of authenticity and joy." —Ms. Magazine
"An unforgettable book." —K.W. Colyard, Bustle, a Best Book of the Month
"Too many memoirs fall into the trap of mistaking martyrdom for nobility, sacrifice for bravery; they float on the still-shiny surface rather than excavating into the murk. Gina Frangello's Blow Your House Down is not that kind of memoir. Instead, it is fierce and violent, a rampaging storm—a breathtaking, luminous reminder of the wreckage we are capable of making of our own lives." —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year
"Underlying this generous and intimate personal history is a censure of the broad cultural suppression (and demonization) of women's rage, passion, and autonomy; and the gleeful eagerness to punish women who have transgressed. Frangello presents rationalizations for her actions, but she isn't asking to be excused: This isn't so much about seeking absolution—though she knows she's being judged—as much as it's about reclaiming a story that is too easily appropriated and rewritten by outsiders, often through a lens of misogyny. It's a powerful, electric testimony." —Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed
"Raw, edgy, and revealing, it is a book that dares to expose everything, not least its author’s vulnerability." —Alta
"Gina Frangello’s new memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason explodes the good girl trope with a vengeance . . . Reading Frangello’s confessional account of her years-long affair with a longtime friend turned lover—and the secrecy, pleasure, betrayal, and upheaval surrounding it—I was reminded of both The Scarlet Letter and Lolita, with a little Ferrante thrown in." —Kelly Thompson, Guernica
"Indeed, the attention and nuance which Frangello gives to her life story and the gendered issues of care and livelihood generate multiple readings that dismantle, strip, and rebuild readers’ understanding of the present. In the end, Frangello is not simply asking us to blow our own houses down but instead to consider how they are built and what they encompass, while also imagining a new edifice from which to move forward. " —Clancey D'Isa, Chicago Review of Books
"All of me loved Gina Frangello for writing this book. With her unapologetic, hold-nothing-back confessional style, she draws us in as she interweaves the messy milestones of her life with feminist ideology." —Megan Vered, The Los Angeles Review of Books
"I’m a sucker for the sort of story arc in Blow Your House Down: Woman follows the rules. Woman becomes wife, mother. Woman is 'good' in all things. One day, following crisis or unrelenting ennui, woman realizes that her life feels hollow or binding, so she sets about changing said life (sometimes in explosive fashion). I love this story enough in novel form, but better yet, Gina Frangello unravels it in all its reckless, transgressive, messy glory in this memoir about womanhood and misogyny, sex and joy." —Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
"In this searing memoir, novelist Frangello charts the spectacular highs and devastating lows of her midlife with extraordinary candor . . . 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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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.' 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." —Library Journal (starred review)
