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

Author: Gina Frangello

Narrator: Hillary Huber

Unabridged: 11 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/06/2021


Synopsis

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, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, 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 reclaim your own life.

About Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello is the author of Every Kind of Wanting, A Life in Men, Slut Lullabies, and My Sister's Continent. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, HuffPost, Fence, Five Chapters, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Reader, and many other publications. She lives with her family in the Chicago area.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lark on 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,......more

Goodreads review by Jeannine on 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 al......more

Goodreads review by Gina on 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 p......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on April 06, 2021

Absolutely brilliant.......more

Goodreads review by Jt on June 07, 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 b......more