Book Review: Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down
By Patty Lin, Zibby Books Author
photo by @counterpointpress
When I was asked to host the Zibby Books ambassador book club meeting, I chose Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello. This memoir, published in 2021, chronicles the author’s extramarital affair, which she kept hidden for years until she impulsively confessed, throwing her family into turmoil. During the ensuing ugly divorce, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and struggled to make a life with her lover, who was clinically depressed and enmeshed in a codependent relationship with his own cancer-stricken wife.
I knew this book would bring up strong feelings in the readers. I once wrote a short story about a woman who cheats on her boyfriend while on a trip. When I workshopped it in a writing class, people got very upset. One guy was outraged because the character, who had packed condoms in her suitcase, clearly intended to be unfaithful. He talked about it like premeditated murder! I got the feeling he had some issues in his personal life that he was bringing to the discussion. But the fact is, women’s infidelity has always been demonized. See: The Scarlet Letter. It’s a tale as old as time.
When men write memoirs, they often mention affairs or promiscuity in an off-handed way. But when women write about being unfaithful, it becomes the whole focus of the story. Frangello addresses this in the first few pages of her book: “Once a woman becomes an Adulteress, her other identities—mother, daughter, friend, editor, writer, teacher—become largely invisible to others.”
At a book festival panel, Frangello said that she had to step back and see herself as a character in a story in order to write this book. She treats all the people in the book this way. Writing memoir is tricky because loyalty can make you censor yourself, either to protect people or your own image. Frangello does, at times, defend herself and her choices, and her now-ex-husband comes off looking pretty bad—but so does everyone else, including herself and her lover. And she also includes many wonderful things about them all. Everyone in the book is complex and three-dimensional, rather than strictly a hero or a villain.
This is very hard to do when you’re writing about yourself. Frangello admits that, despite loving her kids fiercely, her actions might have screwed them up, or at least their opinion of her. Her own parents, with all their faults, never caused this kind of trauma in her family. She also admits that although she was no longer in love with her husband, she begged him to stay. Most of us work hard to shape a self-image that does not contain contradictions. It is an act of radical self-acceptance to let those contradictions be a part of what makes us who we are.
I don’t want to read a memoir unless it’s honest, sometimes painfully so. This doesn’t mean the author has to reveal everything in their life—that would be a very unwieldy and unfocused book to read—but they do need to be willing to take a good hard look at themselves. Frangello does this with admirable courage. Will she be judged? No doubt. But no one can say anything about her that she hasn’t already examined herself.
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Patty Lin is an author and former TV writer and producer whose credits include Freaks and Geeks, Friends, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad. She has also written pilots for Fox, CBS, and Nickelodeon. Her Breaking Bad episode, “Gray Matter,” was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. She retired from television to save her sanity and began writing a memoir as an answer to the question, “Why would you quit such a cool job?” She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.
