Blow Your House Down

A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

By: Gina Frangello

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

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.

Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

©2021 Gina Frangello (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Hits Home

This book is a refreshingly real and poignant read. Hit home and helped me deal with my own life in the midst of its rubble.

Powerful

One of the most raw, powerful, insightful books I’ve read on the struggle of being female in today’s culture. The authors honesty and ability to rip open the pain of choice whose outcome we can’t control blew me away.

I could not get this story out of my head. The writing made it so.

Brilliant writing. Compelling, beautiful, sad, ugly, sexy: it made laugh and cry, and resolve to keep working for the world where men and women (and non-binary) live and love in peace and understanding.

Honest & Helpful No sugar coating in this book

Although I have not had this particular issue in real life I bought this book because I saw Gina's honest face and her childhood from another review is something I understand. I am shocked at any negative speech on this book as it is honest and raw and that is how an author makes an impact- even at the sake of herself. I love the fact she doesn't play the victim- in fact she was her own hero and that matters today more than anything.

A bridge to understanding

Listening to Blow Your House Down made me feel quite frankly uncomfortable. Not too far into Gina’s book, I realized I was being captivated by a memoir of a writer sharing deeply from her own place of darkness.
Many have been in similar places, but rarely do you find someone write about major life drama so eloquent and brave( marriage trouble, parents’ drama, love affair, health scares, and over all tough stressors). Gina captivates the listener and if you’re lucky you realize you have just read a master put words to the human story that many have found ourselves in. Gina - I appreciate your work and how you bridged your story to my own and although much different, I can relate.