TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
Blow Your House Down centers on a time in my life
when I was sandwiched in between parenting my three children and caretaking my
elderly parents, all while my marriage was deteriorating, and I began having a
passionate extramarital affair. After years of leading a double life, I finally
left my marriage only to get diagnosed with breast cancer half a year into the
new start I had imagined for myself—one that did not play out, in myriad ways,
as I’d expected. Ultimately, the book explores, not only through my own
experiences but through outside material about the medical, legal,
psychological and economic treatment of women, the extent to which we still
expect contemporary women to sacrifice our own needs and desires in order to be
all things to others in our lives, and it’s about the consequences, both
devastating and rapturous, that we face when we no longer go along with those
expectations.
Which essay gave you the most trouble, and why? What
boundaries did you break in the writing of this memoir? Where does that sort of
courage come from?
My book is a bit of a hybrid between an essay collection and
a memoir in that it’s told in distinct parts that are sometimes radically
stylistically different from one another, but it has one cohesive story arc
that drives all the pieces and unifies them into a whole ensemble piece larger
than the disparate parts. To that end, the piece that gave me the most trouble
was definitely the one in which my daughters discover my affair several months
in by reading my texts, and my making the horrible decision—one that haunts me
to this day—to allow them to hold that secret for years. It’s interesting…the
boundaries I struggled with were all emotional, even though this is also my
most formally innovative book. The story very much dictated to me the ways it
wanted to be told, whether in the form of an invented dictionary or, in the
opening piece “The Story of A,” a chronicle of how women’s infidelity has been treated
historically. But emotionally, memoir is harrowing. I don’t know about where
people find courage to write what they write, but for me, this was the book I had
to write if I ever wanted to write anything else again, and it was also what I
most urgently wanted to communicate to other women who might need a book like
this, as I myself did when I was going through the experiences Blow Your
House Down depicts. I think we all write the books we ourselves most wish
we could have read, with the knowledge that if we desperately needed something,
there are others out there who need that thing too.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I’m working with Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint, who was also
the editor on my last book, and the general Counterpoint team--such as the
amazing Megan Fishmann who is the director of publicity--is comprised mostly of
people I’ve worked with in the past, so in that sense this was probably my
least harrowing road to publication. My first four books each came out on a
different publisher, so it’s been wonderful, with my fifth, to be in a place
that has become like a home and family to me. That’s especially awesome since
in every other way, publishing a memoir is full of highs and lows. I’ve had
some amazing responses months before the book’s publication from women who have
written me letters that are so intense and urgent that they have literally
changed my life already. But there’s also the part of me who is a person just
living my life, who is separate from my character-self in the book, and it can
be hard knowing that no matter how hard you try, there is simply no way to fully
capture the complexity of either yourself or anyone else in your life through
language, and that to readers we all begin and end with what is on the
page—whereas in reality any memoir is just the visible part of an iceberg with
most buried under the sea. So I would say the whole thing has been an exercise
in remembering the boundaries of art and in letting go.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
My least favorite piece of writing advice is that writers
have to write every single day. It’s a thing I still see cited as an imperative
in a surprising number of places. I think it’s great if someone can write every
day, but I personally have always been a binge writer. Sometimes I don’t write
for nine months or more. As someone with five books out, I wish I could shout
from the rooftops that newer writers should give themselves permission to write
in the rhythms that are right for them. On the other hand, the piece of writing
advice that I give absolutely every student I have is to get involved in the
literary community—to serve and support other writers and presses and indie
bookstores and magazines in whatever capacity you can swing, rather than only
looking to advance your own career, because the literary community has things
to offer beyond just your personal publication credits. Almost every important
relationship I’ve formed since my late twenties has come about through my work
editing books and magazines and sites like The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown
and now LARB. I tell my students to
ask not what the literary community can do for them but what they can do for
the literary community, because if we care about books that’s a thing that
should matter to us. Economics and how busy we are definitely influence what kinds
of contributions we may choose to make, but I think young writers who approach
their careers as if their work and goals exist in a vacuum, rather than
literature being an ongoing and intergenerational dialogue, are missing some of
the most vital joys and fulfilments that the literary world offers.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
A lot of things surprised me, but probably nothing more so
than how brutally honest I needed to be about the difficulties my former
lover—who is now my husband—and I faced for almost two years after we “came
out” as a couple. We are ecstatically happy now, and have been for a long time,
but the people who told us, at first, that we had been in an “affair bubble”
and that there was a big difference between the intoxication of a new and
clandestine love versus being able to build an on the ground life
together…well, those people were not wrong entirely. I mean, think that the
happy ending of our still being together didn’t at first reveal to me how deep
I would need to delve into the harder times that led here, which ultimately
felt acutely necessary for writing an honest book. Because Blow Your House
Down is not a primer on why you should have an affair and blow up your
marriage …it’s no more advocating for that than it is advocating that women
should stay in marriages that no longer fit them or that are actively painful
to them. Rather, it’s an exploration of the enormous complexity in these
choices, and the utter lack of guarantees in terms of what your life will look
like when the dust of such a decision settles—what you will have lost and
gained and learned along the way, and the fact that Life won’t stop and wait
for you (nor, for that matter, will Death) while you figure it all out.
Who is your ideal reader?
My ideal reader is a woman of any age—and I’ll add here that
I never before considered my ideal readers to be a specific gender, but while I
hope men will also read and get something from Blow Your House Down, it
was written first and foremost for women—who feels trapped inside the lines of
who she thinks she is supposed to be versus who she actually is. Sometimes women
get those messages very explicitly, from parents or husbands or from living in
a particular kind of neighborhood or town or being a certain religion, but
sometimes we just get these messages without even knowing we’ve internalized
them, in which women are judged for virtually everything…certainly as a white
heterosexual woman I’ve actually gotten off far easier than many women, who
also have to deal with racism, ableism, homophobia or transphobia, with poverty
far exceeding that I grew up in. The writer Kristi Coulter has written that
there is “no right way to be a woman,” and that can become exponentially more
true the more overlapping identities a woman may inhabit. I led a life for many
years that often could not have been described as “unhappy” and that had many
privileges and comforts, but in which I—increasingly over the years—felt like I
was playing a part, and that I had to continue playing that part relentlessly
in order to keep my whole family system functioning through a particular kind
of nonstop emotional labor and walking on eggshells that I think is all too
common in many women’s lives. Blow Your House Down is for every woman
who has wondered what would happen if she stopped playing the part she believes
herself consigned to. My hope is that it’s a complex exploration of what it
means to begin living more authentically—acknowledging that I hurt people I
truly cared about and owed better to along the way—and that it can help some
women begin to reclaim themselves more mindfully than I did, but reclaim
themselves nonetheless, for their own sake and their children’s and for a world
that desperately needs us to stop towing old lines and to disrupt.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
My parents are major characters in the book and my father
was an amazing cook. He was the youngest of seven brothers in an Italian
family, and he did most of the cooking when I was growing up, and he made the
best eggplant parmesan I’ve ever had—my mother learned to make it from him, and
now I make it too. It’s all about pressing and salting the eggplant first, and
slicing it thin, and what we fry it in before the baking…everyone who ever
tastes it is converted even if they think they don’t like eggplant. But I’ve
never actually followed a recipe, per se. I never saw my father even look at
one. My daughters are much better at following recipes than I am, so their
cooking repertoires are seemingly endless.
***
READ MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: www.ginafrangello.org
& www.circeconsulting.net)
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: I actually am partnering with Women & Children First in Chicago to donate my royalties for the book and a portion of sales through that store to the organization Deborah’s Place, which works with women facing homelessness:
https://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/book/9781640093164