Table Of ContentAdvance Praise for Blow Your House Down
“Compelling, honest, and thought-provoking, Gina Frangello’s
memoir is an inspired addition to her astounding body of work.”
—Charlize Theron, Academy Award–winning actress
“I don’t know anyone who can write like Gina Frangello. I’m in awe.”
—Jennifer Pastiloff, author of On Being Human
“Truth is a scarce commodity in books about sex and marriage—I
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. It’s 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. It’s a story
that is not hers alone—though many will prefer to think so—and one
that I will not soon forget.”
—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game
“Gina Frangello can always make me think and laugh; she’s also one
of the very few authors who’s made me cry. Blow Your House Down
is searing, honest, heartbreaking, heart-mending, and a hell of a wild
ride. Frangello says things women aren’t allowed to say, even to
ourselves.”
—Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers
“Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down blazes open a radical new
portrait of a woman’s 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 woman’s 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
Blow Your House Down
ALSO BY GINA FRANGELLO
Every Kind of Wanting
A Life in Men
Slut Lullabies
My Sister’s Continent
Blow
Your House
Down
A Story of Family, Feminism, and
Treason
_______________
GINA FRANGELLO
Counterpoint
Berkeley, California
Author’s Note
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 everyone’s 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 LaSalle”—liar, madman,
Anglophile, storyteller, and the world’s
kindest accidental father—for 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 don’t 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
Author’s Note
Aperture
The Story of A
Affair
Death’s Monkeysphere
Substitute Beauty
The Counterevidence of Love
Embers
What Women Do
Aftermath
Blow Your House Down
Big Blonde
The Summer of Light and Dark
A Short Dictionary of Mutually Understood Words
Blood Moon
Affliction
Two Ophelias
The Cartographers: Fifty Meditations
Acknowledgments
