A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month
“Compelling, honest, and thought-provoking, Gina Frangello’s memoir is an inspired addition to her astounding body of work.” —Charlize Theron
“Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason . . . [is] her most lyrical, adventurous and important work.” —Meredith Maran, Los Angeles Times
“My bet for breakout of the year. The Chicagoan’s memoir takes on gender expectations and marital affairs in such a brutal, self-lacerating candor, you wonder who should play her in the movie.” —Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
“An unforgettable book.” —K.W. Colyard, Bustle, a Best Book of the Month
“Too many memoirs fall into the trap of mistaking martyrdom for nobility, sacrifice for bravery; they float on the still-shiny surface rather than excavating into the murk. Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down is not that kind of memoir. Instead, it is fierce and violent, a rampaging storm—a breathtaking, luminous reminder of the wreckage we are capable of making of our own lives.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29, One of the Best New Books of the Year
“Underlying this generous and intimate personal history is a censure of the broad cultural suppression (and demonization) of women’s rage, passion, and autonomy; and the gleeful eagerness to punish women who have transgressed. Frangello presents rationalizations for her actions, but she isn’t asking to be excused: This isn’t so much about seeking absolution—though she knows she’s being judged—as much as it’s about reclaiming a story that is too easily appropriated and rewritten by outsiders, often through a lens of misogyny. It’s a powerful, electric testimony.” —Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed
“Raw, edgy, and revealing, it is a book that dares to expose everything, not least its author’s vulnerability.” —Alta
“Broadening her own story to examine all the ways our culture entraps women in narratives of ‘goodness,’ Frangello transgresses both societal expectations and genre bounds: this is not merely a memoir, but a call to arms.” —Chicago Review of Books, a Must-Read Book of the Month
“I’m a sucker for the sort of story arc in Blow Your House Down: Woman follows the rules. Woman becomes wife, mother. Woman is ‘good’ in all things. One day, following crisis or unrelenting ennui, woman realizes that her life feels hollow or binding, so she sets about changing said life (sometimes in explosive fashion). I love this story enough in novel form, but better yet, Gina Frangello unravels it in all its reckless, transgressive, messy glory in this memoir about womanhood and misogyny, sex and joy.” —Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
“In this searing memoir, novelist Frangello charts the spectacular highs and devastating lows of her midlife with extraordinary candor . . . 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.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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.’ 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.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“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: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, 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.” —Harvey Freedenberg, BookPage (starred review)
“Gina Frangello can always make me think and laugh; she’s also one of the very few authors who’s made me cry. Blow Your House Down is searing, honest, heartbreaking, heart-mending, and a hell of a wild ride. Frangello says things women aren’t allowed to say, even to ourselves.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers
