Gina Frangello: Truth and Consequences
Gina Frangello’s new memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason explodes the good girl trope with a vengeance. In telling the story of the end of her twenty-five-year marriage, Frangello explores her sexual and psychological coming of age, her roles as a daughter, mother, and friend, and her experience with breast cancer following the deaths of both her marriage and her father. The story, she emphasizes, is about so much more than the affair that blew up her marriage; it’s about a cacophony of catastrophes. “Life keeps hitting you full in the face and stops for nothing,” she told me. “Until it does.”
Blow Your House Down is Frangello’s first memoir, after four novels: Every Kind of Wanting, A Life in Men, My Sister’s Continent, and Slut Lullabies. Writing about her own life at length meant figuring out how to develop herself as a protagonist on the page. Given the twists and turns of her story, and the way she is implicated in them, this was no easy task. 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.
The book’s first chapter is a glossary of terms that start with the letter “A,” taking us from “Adulteress” through “Age,” “Atonement,” Anger,” and finally “Anton (Chekhov),” whose 1899 story about adultery, “The Lady with the Dog,” Frangello finds deep resonance in. Between these we find “Antiheroine,” of which Frangello writes simply, “Um. This is not that kind of book.” A tour de force of cultural critique, Frangello constructs the book as a feminist manifesto of sorts, while presenting herself as an unreliable and sometimes even unlikeable narrator, one who has lied, cheated, and done damage. This doesn’t make her a villain, but someone who is, relatably, struggling with authenticity and honesty. Ultimately, though, Frangello holds herself accountable for the mess she has made, and the pain she had inflicted. Or does she? It is up to the reader to decide.
I spoke with
