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Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason
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60
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
43/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
Gina Frangello
Publisher:
Counterpoint Press
Date:
April 6, 2021
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.
What The Reviewers Say
There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello. Blow Your House Down, Frangello’s raw, eloquent account of the demise of her marriage, is an exemplar of self-reflection, tinged with optimism about the power to recover one’s life from the depth of suffering.
... uneven, provocative.
In this raw, red-hot memoir, novelist and editor Frangello’s in-your-face starting point is the fact that she has committed adultery.
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'.
