Blow Your House Down

Starred review from January 11, 2021
In this searing memoir, novelist Frangello (Every Kind of Wanting) charts the spectacular highs and devastating lows of her midlife with extraordinary candor. Frangello was married for years to her husband, a reliable but quick-tempered man with whom she shared three kids, when she fell “madly in love” and began an affair with a married writer. Frangello celebrated rediscovering her sexuality, but things took a devastating turn after her daughters read her text messages and discovered she was cheating on her husband. Feeling like a “monster,” she confessed to her husband. The marriage quickly disintegrated, and seven months after their separation, Frangello was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then the divorce turned ugly; Frangello’s husband, she writes, “turned off all the utilities in the home I lived in with our three children” and “drained our joint bank account to zero” shortly after she began chemotherapy. Meanwhile, she was taking care of her aging parents as they deteriorated and eventually died. Frangello describes this bold and tumultuous period of her life in intimate and remarkable detail, and despite the tumult celebrates her own resilience. This unapologetic account both moves and fascinates.

Starred review from March 1, 2021

"What happens when the very thing that once taught you how to survive--how to escape--suddenly stands between you and your life?" Novelist and essayist Frangello (A Life in Men) answers this question in her latest work, which tells the story of the profoundly life-changing events that stemmed from Frangello's intense extramarital affair with a longtime acquaintance. While sifting through the ruins of her marriage, Frangello examines her roles as mother, wife, daughter, and friend, and illustrates how often women must submit to escape and self-erasure in order to maintain what society expects of them. Searingly honest and compulsively readable, this memoir serves as a post-#MeToo feminist dictum about the deeply complex and multilayered emotional and sexual lives of women. With humor and a no-holds-barred self-inspection, the author illuminates these layers and reminds us that "the clean reduction of a woman to any prime number is always a lie." VERDICT Uncompromisingly fearless in its candor, this memoir / feminist manifesto is a powerful account of a woman's self-acceptance that deserves a place among the best literary memoirs of the last decade. Frangello's groundbreaking testimony sets itself apart.--Megan Duffy, Glen Ridge P.L., NJ

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March 1, 2021
In this raw, red-hot memoir, novelist and editor Frangello's (Every Kind of Wanting, 2016) in-your-face starting point is the fact that she has committed adultery. She both indicts and defends herself, giving readers--her "ladies and gentlemen of the jury"--an intimate view of her first marriage and the all-encompassing affair that ends it and leads to her second. But Frangello's deeper aim is to address the steep price women pay in a patriarchal society in terms of biased stigma and impaired health and well-being whether they abide by or transgress its rules. Her evidence includes the sad story of her deeply loved parents' dysfunctional marriage and often-harrowing details of relationships she observed growing up in a low-income Chicago neighborhood. She shares her experiences as a wife, mother, parental caregiver, literary professional, and medical patient, of a woman who paints within the lines, until she vividly, wildly doesn't. How fulfilled is a woman allowed to be? In this gutsy, dramatic feminist manifesto, Frangello recounts the cost of eschewing security to choose the utter necessity of love, of being more tomorrow than she is today.

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March 1, 2021
In a debut memoir, a novelist presents her life-altering affair in unsparing detail. Addressing her readers as "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," Frangello invites us to join her in a meticulous examination of the background of--and possible justifications for--a midlife infidelity. Her best friend's death was the immediate cause of her emotional disorientation, but there were also the issues of her husband's temper, her coming-of-age in a neighborhood where girls and women were routinely mistreated, her absorption of more secondhand trauma in her job as a counselor, and her anxiety about reliving her mother's sexless marriage. Frangello pulls apart these and other rationalizations even as she presents them, including the suggestion "that my internalized fear of men was extreme enough to make me...confuse a man whose heart I shattered...with O.J. Simpson, with the weekly predators on Law and Order and Criminal Minds, with the men of my old neighborhood." Before her first weekend with her lover, the author "had never burned a man before...never clipped a wrist cuff to a thigh cuff...never known intimacy so beyond the domain of ego or language." As she explains, it was precisely this intimacy that caused her to "question everything I ever understood regarding how to be Normal, how to be Good." When her twin 12-year-old daughters learned about her affair from reading texts on her phone, she had them keep it from their father for three years. Her husband's life, she writes, "forged on, now with three members of his family holding knowledge to which he had no access." Later in the narrative, referring to a gag order she refused to sign at the time of her divorce, Frangello writes, "perhaps you empathize with my husband's desire that I should be silenced." Though the author hopes her candor will be helpful to other women--and it may be--reader sympathy may be hard to come by. A furious expiation that takes every risk it can find.

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