num_pages: 336
description:  A pathbreaking feminist manifesto impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother and in doing so highlights the forces that shaped silenced and shamed her: everyday misogyny puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice and male oppression. Adrienne Brodeur author of Wild Game 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 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 save your own life.
language: English
title: Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason
publisher: Counterpoint Press