Blow Your House Down

A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

By: Gina Frangello

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

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.

©2021 Gina Frangello (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Powerful

One of the most raw, powerful, insightful books I’ve read on the struggle of being female in today’s culture. The authors honesty and ability to rip open the pain of choice whose outcome we can’t control blew me away.

Hits Home

This book is a refreshingly real and poignant read. Hit home and helped me deal with my own life in the midst of its rubble.

A bridge to understanding

Listening to Blow Your House Down made me feel quite frankly uncomfortable. Not too far into Gina’s book, I realized I was being captivated by a memoir of a writer sharing deeply from her own place of darkness.
Many have been in similar places, but rarely do you find someone write about major life drama so eloquent and brave( marriage trouble, parents’ drama, love affair, health scares, and over all tough stressors). Gina captivates the listener and if you’re lucky you realize you have just read a master put words to the human story that many have found ourselves in. Gina - I appreciate your work and how you bridged your story to my own and although much different, I can relate.

Freakin Awesome

I read women’s stories. This one took me by surprise, and took my breath away; it’s so unusual in the telling. And her voice is that of a fierce feminist, but she stays with an abusive husband. The story of a couple of her female friends is riveting. Her bipolar alcoholic lover is not strictly the ideal mate, but their love feels magical. I cannot recommend this more highly than giving it five stars, which I very rarely do. And the reader is stupendous.

I could not get this story out of my head. The writing made it so.

Brilliant writing. Compelling, beautiful, sad, ugly, sexy: it made laugh and cry, and resolve to keep working for the world where men and women (and non-binary) live and love in peace and understanding.

Honest & Helpful No sugar coating in this book

Although I have not had this particular issue in real life I bought this book because I saw Gina's honest face and her childhood from another review is something I understand. I am shocked at any negative speech on this book as it is honest and raw and that is how an author makes an impact- even at the sake of herself. I love the fact she doesn't play the victim- in fact she was her own hero and that matters today more than anything.

MY LOVER

I admire the authors honesty. I couldn’t stand how she refers to the guy she has an affair with as “MY LOVER”. Had a little trouble making it to the end.

this book is so frustrating. Gina is abnoxious.

Okay ... I had very strong negative feelings towards this book - negative feelings that I haven't felt towards a book in a long time. I was really excited about picking this one up; I love unreliable narrators, complicated girlies, memoirs, feminism, etc etc etc. But oh my god. Gina ... I don't even know what to say about this incredibly self-indulgent memoir.

First of all, I was thrown off in the first essay, The Story of A, when she refers to Hillary Clinton as the "most qualified presidential candidate in history" ... And later on she recalls Trump's inauguration as "the worst day of her life." Girlie is dripping with white liberalism/feminism throughout this book, which I found so damn irritating. There were maybe three or four lines in there where she mentions that people are discriminated against by "the color of their skin," and she mentions transgender women once, but ultimately, this was an extremely cis-white-liberal-woman narrative that did not delve into any sort of intersectional feminism whatsoever. Which is fine (kind of, honestly, maybe not) but "feminism" should be erased from the title tbh. It felt like she just learned what feminism was right before she wrote this, and boiled it down to the most stereotypical, blatantly obvious points she could find.

Second of all: everyone in this book sucks. Except for her children. Like genuinely Gina is such an unlikeable woman. She might be a "complex" woman, but she seems to have no real self-awareness. There are so many moral qualms I have with this book I don't even know where to begin. First of all, her children, who she 1) adopted from China even when she was in an abusive relationship with her husband because she believed she could give them better lives (white savior vibes) and 2) she proceeds to traumatize these girls by forcing them to keep her affair a secret from their father ... GINA. Please for the love of god.

Next, the entire affair situation. I am someone who believes that cheating on someone is one of the worst things you can do to a person, especially a person you claim to love. I was looking forward to reading a story from the cheater's perspective, as I thought there would be reflection, compassion, accountability, etc. There is not. Frangello is incredibly self-pitying throughout this book, she does not take accountability for her actions (though she pretends to in multiple cases), and she does not ever come to any meaningful conclusions. Towards the end of the book she talks about fearing that her ex-husband was going to murder her--which is honestly a fair fear to have--but the way she wrote about it all just felt so disingenuous.

At one point she is talking to her ex-husband and she says that "the only 'unstable personal relationship' I have ever had was ... with him" - and in that moment I was certain Gina had no fucking idea what she was talking about. GIRLIE. Literally every single relationship you have depicted in this book has been unstable.

Frangello obviously has many many regrets, all of which are understandable, but just because you express remorse for something does not mean you have done the work to heal.

I needed to put my rage for this book somewhere. I would not have finished this if I didn't read it for my book club tbh.

Awful

I’ve waited a month to review since reading it because I was so disgusted once I finished, I needed time to try and be objective. It takes courage to write a memoir based on what the reviews call a “feminist” and “abusive” experience. This book is neither of those things and certainly no courage was involved, unless she’s referring to the courage of writing this and exposing her innocent children to the tawdry affair. Her passive aggressive attempts throughout the book to paint her husband as the villain disgusted me, and I would guess real spousal abuse victims would agree. The author makes far leaps to try and make herself a relevant part of the Me Too movement, but she falls very, very short of that. She knows someone that knows someone that was victimized, and has absolutely nothing to do with her, but I suppose when you are marketing your novel as a “feminist” memoir, you’ve got to pull from somewhere. The narrator’s monotone voice was lackluster, but I’d venture to guess she was as annoyed at the author’s self centered, privileged, narcissistic whining as I was so I can’t blame her.