Gina Frangello - Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

Compelling, honest, and thought-provoking, Gina Frangellos memoir is an inspired addition to her astounding body of work.

Charlize Theron, Academy Awardwinning actress

I dont know anyone who can write like Gina Frangello. Im in awe.

Jennifer Pastiloff, author of On Being Human

Truth is a scarce commodity in books about sex and marriageI mean the real truth, the hard stuff. Blow Your House Down is a truth bomb. Writing with the immediacy of fiction and the acuity of criticism, Gina Frangello gives us her harrowing, luminous, and very real story of love, marriage, and aftermath. Its a huge act of generosity to write these intimate and risky things that make other women feel less alone. We are left stunned and consoled.

Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble

Blow Your House Down is everything a memoir should be: fascinating, beautifully written, unwilling to turn away from terror and joy while also acknowledging how often they intersect and turn into one another. Frangello refuses to cop to an easy happy ending, shining a light on the platitudes and false promises of our myopic understanding of what constitutes a good life. This book burns down our old way of looking and makes way for something bold and new.

Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of the Turning World

In Blow Your House Down, Gina Frangello has created a form, a structure of her own out of necessity: the need to tell all the stories, especially the ones we feel cannot be told. In the process, she gives us a new language through which we might come to some sort of reckoning with ourselves. This book is an excavation of the deepest and most complex corridors of the heart.

David L. Ulin, author of The Lost Art of Reading

Urgent, subversive, and brave, Blow Your House Down is a path-breaking 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. Its a story that is not hers alonethough many will prefer to think soand one that I will not soon forget.

Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game

Gina Frangello can always make me think and laugh; shes also one of the very few authors whos made me cry. Blow Your House Down is searing, honest, heartbreaking, heart-mending, and a hell of a wild ride. Frangello says things women arent allowed to say, even to ourselves.

Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers

Gina Frangellos Blow Your House Down blazes open a radical new portrait of a womans life with dazzling honesty and breathtaking beauty. Threading through the terrors of breast cancer and caretaking a dying father, navigating the end of a long-term marriage and the burst of new love, Blow Your House Down reveals the epic journey of one womans life and body. This book is a heart beating, not beaten. This book is a mighty heartsong.

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge and The Chronology of Water

ALSO BY GINA FRANGELLO

Every Kind of Wanting

A Life in Men

Slut Lullabies

My Sisters Continent

Blow
Your House
Down

A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

_______________

GINA FRANGELLO

Counterpoint

Berkeley, California

This is a work of creative nonfiction. In it, I describe experiences that had a profound emotional impact on me. The events in this book are true to the best of my recollection. For readability, in some cases I altered the order of or compressed sequences of events. I do not pretend that I am capable of remembering everything that took place exactly or offering everyones perspective. This is my story and I write about what struck me personally. To protect the privacy of real individuals, I have changed or left out many names and identifying details, or used composite characters, and in some cases omitted people from the story.

To John LaSalleliar, madman, Anglophile, storyteller, and the worlds kindest accidental fatherfor his rare and unwavering gentleness in a brutal world.

And to Alice Merry Frangello, who saw light in every shadowy place and heard music in every person. Mom, your unconditional love and support allowed me to imagine another kind of future and continues to inspire me to become a better version of myself.

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.

I want to be a mirror for your whole body,

and I never want to be blind, or to be too old

to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.

I want to unfold.

I dont want to stay folded anywhere,

because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

and I want my grasp of things to be

true before you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Contents

The lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths.

Anton Chekhov (misquoting Pushkin)

A is for Adulteress

But you knew that. There is virtually no history of literature without the Adulteress. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Edna Pontellier, Hester Prynne, Daisy Buchanan, Molly Bloom. The adulteress throws herself in front of a train, runs over her husbands lover with a car, walks into the ocean intent on dying without a care for her children. A is for Adulteress, Agent of Ruin. Woman.

A is for Accused

Researchers at Cardiff Metropolitan University revealed that when there has been infidelity in a marriage, most wives tend to blame the other woman, whereas most husbands see their cheating wife as the guilty party.

Basically, whoever dropped dead in the broom closet: the Adulteress did it.

A is for Author

Allow me to reveal the A on my breast. For the sake of this narrative, my name might as well be A. Once a woman becomes an Adulteress, her other identitiesmother, daughter, friend, editor, writer, teacherbecome largely invisible to others, as irrelevant as the clothing she (whorishly, treasonously) shed.

A is for Asshole?

There is no slur for men to match the equivalent of mistress, or even other woman. Philanderer doesnt have the same punch and is sex-nonspecific. Cuckold denotes a man who is being cheated on. A player, or even a dog, can be single or married. An asshole can be the guy who took your parking space at Trader Joes as well as the man who fucked your wife.

There are no names specifically for men who break their promises to women.

A is for Age

For the first time in documented human history, among adults ages eighteen to twenty-nine who have ever been married, a General Social Survey reports that women are marginally more likely than men to be unfaithful. The survey also found that infidelity rates increase in middle age for both men and women, and that, contrary to both social and literary stereotypes, women reach their highest levels of infidelity in their sixties.

A is for Analysis

While wives initiate almost 70 percent of divorces, the researcher Michael Rosenfeld recently made the surprising discovery that no similar gap between the sexesor any gap at allexists between the percentage of breakups initiated by women and men living together without marriage. Rosenfeld also found that, although married women have long reported lower levels of satisfaction with relationship quality than married men, those in nonmarital relationships reported equal levels of quality. These results, Rosenfeld says, support the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable.