Gina Frangello, BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN

[1:42]Zibby Owens: But at that time, I was like going to the guy at Joe and the Juice behind the counter asking him to vote for me and anyone I could. So now I'm coming to all of you to ask you to please vote for moms don't have time to read books to win the People's Choice Webby Award for Best Live Podcast. If you go to vote.webbyawards.com, again, that's vote. Webby, W E B B Y, webbyawards.com. And then go to the little magnifying glass search thing on the upper right. All you have to type in is search by name or entry and just type in moms and it will come up. And then you can click on the best live podcast recording nominee and vote for me. Also, by the way, I won honoree for best influencer, which is crazy. Anyway, thank you for voting. I really, really would appreciate it. I would love to win the People's Voice Award, especially after trying so hard and failing two years ago. So if you could just take a few minutes and vote, I would be so grateful. You could email me after if you want at infosivvyowens dot com. And I will say thank you to you via email myself because I'm so grateful. So email me if you've done it, post about it. I'm just I would be so grateful. Thank you. Hi, this is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Gina Frangelo is the author of Blow Your House Down, a story of family, feminism, and treason. And by the way, it was so good and so well written. Gina is the author of four books of fiction in addition to her recent memoir. Her novel, A Life in Men, is currently under development by Charlize Theron's production company, Denver and Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting, was included on several best of lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazines and the Chicago Review of Books. She has nearly twenty years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press other voices books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community, the nervous breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for the rumpus and as the faculty editor for both Tri Quarterly Online and The Coachella Review and is currently the creative non fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her short fiction essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Plowshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois Chicago's program for writers, where she could return to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago. Welcome, Gina. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Below Your House Down, a story of family, feminism, and treason. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Oh my gosh. You are such a good writer. I mean, I'm sure you know this, but wow. You writing is so intense and vivid and oh my gosh, it was really, I really appreciate that. Thank you. So can you tell listeners what your book is about and how you ended up writing it? Why did you Oh, wow.

[5:31]Gina Frangello: So really one of the reasons that it's hard to describe what the book is about is because it's about all the messy intersections of a middle aged life of a woman going off the rails in various different ways. So some self imposed part of the narrative is that I am having an extramarital affair for several years of the story. And so obviously that wasn't off the rails of my own making. But also my best friend dies of ovarian cancer kind of at the onset of the story, which is a bit of the catalyst for a lot of the events. And shortly after I leave my marriage, after this affair, my father dies who lives in my house and I'm diagnosed with breast cancer. And then I'm then openly in a relationship with the person who was then my lover, who's now my husband. And his ex wife gets breast cancer almost immediately after I do. And then I end up in chronic pain from a hip debilitation that was caused by the chemo and I end up having a hip replacement. And so essentially it's all these different things and all the while I'm parenting three kids. And so the book is a hybrid of memoir and cultural criticism. So essentially it not only relays these events in my life and tries to look deeply into you know, both my experience of them, how they came to be, but also the role of women in psychiatry, in the medical industrial complex, in the law, all of these various different historical components of women's roles. And in many ways, sort of the invisibility of middle aged and older women and this sort of false assumption that our inner lives and our changes and our evolutions just sort of stop after this we get married and we have children, which is the endpoint of so many memoirs about women. And I think that's very industry reinforced. You know? So I'm not saying that in a negative way towards any of the writers of those memoirs. I think there's a big push in the publishing industry to sort of have this happy inspirational ending. And so women may write about like their misadventures of their twenties or their teens. And then at the end, there's this kind of redemption. Okay, I got married, I had children, the sky parted, everything is great, happily ever after. So that was my story until it wasn't. And once it wasn't, I realized there were not a lot of books in the marketplace that were speaking to any of these disparate experiences I was having, that most of them that did exist were in self help. And so I tried to write a narrative that would talk about just the collisions of full throttle life and what happens to women who are over 40, who don't remain in that happily ever after state.

[8:32]Zibby Owens: Wow. I relate to so much of that. And I think that's why I just love this. I also I'm remarried. I have four kids who I had with my previous husband. There's just a lot of we have a lot of parallels going on. But I lost a very close friend to ovarian cancer. I don't know. I just feel like your story, in addition to being just like literary and beautiful, I just found a lot of myself in these pages. Such of course, like, you know, this whole like right to make others feel less alone. I'm like, ah, here we go.

[9:03]Gina Frangello: Right. Right. And I mean, that really, that was the impetus, how I came to write it, were asking. I mean, I originally was just planning to write a collection of essays about caregiving my parents. My parents lived downstairs for me since 1999. My father died in 2015 and my mother in 2019. They were very eccentric, funny, interesting people and caretaking them while parenting three kids was an intense enough experience. And so I had been planning to write about that. But once I got going, just really realized that a lot of these other things I was writing about in secret because I felt they were unpalatable that people maybe wouldn't publish them or that it wasn't okay to write about these things. And then I realized that was exactly why I needed to do it because there were so many women out there who just have felt that some aspect of this has been their experience and so much of it is still taboo, even things beyond our choosing like illness or losing body parts or having a limp or disability temporarily. And that there's so much shame in women for not just having these picture perfect lives that I was trying to portray for a very long time while unraveling.

[10:23]Zibby Owens: Wow. And you did such a good job even of the even just like taking us through your whole backstory, right, so that we get to today and how you painted the picture of your dad then and your dad now so that when you talk about his loss, I feel sad as if I knew him because of the way you wrote about him, which of course is the biggest gift you can give to anyone who's passed away. Right? It's just recreating them and so their spirit, you know, you sort of get to know them. That sounds hokey, but I do believe I do believe that. What I wanted, so thank you. Oh, good. The scene where your dad was sitting next to his friend, like, from the neighborhood and they were in two sort of wheelchair situations and saying like, hey, babe. Hey, babe. You know? And just hanging. Like, that's it. Like, you've I don't know. Aging and all this stuff that happens to bodies and illness and whatever. Like, at the end of it, you're just like two friends being like, hey, babe, what's up? I don't know. It was just so poignant to me. Yeah. I really wanted my parents to come to life because, I mean, if if middle

[11:22]Gina Frangello: aged women who write books are, if there are a lot of cultural misperceptions about what it is to be a middle aged woman, certainly there are even more misconceptions about what it's like to be elderly and to have had all the health problems my parents had, my father struggled with mental illness. So he never graduated from the eighth grade. His is not a story that has been very visible in the world. And I really wanted to bring my parents to life very much in the book because they were so much to me, to my kids and just such an enormous part of my life. And I feel like people like my parents are not written about very often.

[12:03]Zibby Owens: And even when you're like, I wish I had gone downstairs, like it seemed like it was hard. So you're they live downstairs from you and you are up in your crazy life. And, of course, like, it becomes hard to even walk downstairs to see your parents. And everybody has a parallel in their own lives. I should call my mom or I should do this. I should go visit my grandmother. I should you know? And you've it it was just such a good reminder. Like, you just have to stop and go downstairs. Like, that's it. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100 European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and 365 returns. Quince.com/zibby.

[14:29]Gina Frangello: Yes. For such a long time, my mother in particular was part of my absolute daily life when she moved in into 1999 and my father as well, but my mother would come up every single morning for coffee. She hung out with me and my daughters constantly. She kind of went everywhere with us. She was really in many ways a co parent with me. And as my life began to go increasingly off the rails, once I was getting my divorce and I had to scramble to find full time work and then I got cancer and my mom was no longer able to come up the stairs. Well, at that point, my father was really living in a recliner by the window. And so it did, it became almost insanely challenging to continue to have the quality of relationship with them that I had had because so much was happening that I could barely keep my head above water. And so then, yeah, it did make me think a lot about people who only get to see their parents a couple times a year, just how difficult that is. And when their parents get sick and the responsibilities they have to somehow help and they may live in a completely different area of the country. And I found that hard even with my parents right downstairs for me. I just wanted to read this passage if you don't mind. It's kind of random in this point of our conversation, but I didn't want to forget to do it because

[15:50]Zibby Owens: the way you write, I know I've mentioned this. It just stays with me even this scene. So anyway, I just want to read this one paragraph. In that Schrodinger's box of uncertainty, my entire life is contained. In that in between space, I am both having and not having an affair. Kathy is both living and dead. When I wake in my hotel bed alone, two hours behind Chicago time, Kathy has already been carried away in the cart of my father's dreams. That morning, before the phone call comes from my fiance, I dwell on the relative peace of my frantic, overly busy life for the last time before descending into the throes of both grief and feral lust, a dangerous state for a woman, one that makes her feel self immolating and invincible at once. Kathy, Emily's son, my father, and the woman I thought I was, watch us all shoot brief and bright against the same vast sky one last time. Vibrant, singular, miraculously ordinary, full of love and pain we flash. Then one by one, we are out.

[16:45]Gina Frangello: Oh, so good. Thank you. Thank you. That piece is actually it's from an earlier essay that I had written prior to, well, I was written of course prior to the beginning of my fair, as you see at the end of it. I get this call from Kathy's fiance telling me what had happened and that's sort of the beginning of the actions in the book. But in the original version of that essay, I wasn't admitting to unhappiness in my marriage. I wasn't admitting to this attraction to this friend of mine. And so the original version of the essay, which was very much about just going, taking my youngest to visit my old neighborhood, the neighborhood I grew up in poverty in Chicago, compared to just our neighborhood, some four miles away and it being a very different world. And that essay got put in an anthology and so forth. But when I came to revisit it for the book, one of the big realizations I had about so many of the things I'd written about my parents is that I'd really written myself out because I wasn't copying to where I was really at. Even in a case like this where the affair has not yet begun, I'm living this sort of pretense of being this happy person about whom there's nothing to say, right? As Jennifer always says, right when she's talking about fiction craft, like in fiction only trouble is interesting. I mean, obviously that's sort of true of memoir too. And so, because I wouldn't admit to trouble, I was this peripheral narrator on the fringes of these pieces I was writing. So part of the exercise of turning this into a book was cracking open old pieces and realizing what I really needed to say about them to make them not true per se because the things that had happened in them were true, but complete.

[18:38]Zibby Owens: So let's talk about your affair, if that's okay, because let's go there. You you show us in the beginning how at first it's this emotional affair. Right? And should you feel guilty? Should you not? Should you tell anybody that you're on the phone for hours? And what does that mean? And you had some line like, you know, if if both my husband and I are unhappy in our marriage but nobody knows, like, as a tree falls in the forest, like, does does anyone hear it? Like, what does it matter? Tell me how it all kind of evolved and how you look back. I mean, you have this context, right, of women in general and feminism and, know, the the historical treatment of women who cheat, right, and how Scarlet Letter and blah, blah, blah, blah. So just take me through that a little bit.

[19:24]Gina Frangello: So my now husband who was my longtime friend and who I then became involved with, we first encountered each other when I took a story of his over the transom literary magazine I was editing in 1998. So we had had contact as professionals, as colleagues for a number of years. We met for the first time in 2006 at a reading at Book Soup that we participated And then I ended up as a guest writer at the program where he teaches full time and we became friends. And so we started emailing each other a lot and occasionally talking on the phone. And at one point he was touring and he's also a musician as well as a writer. And he came to Chicago. He stayed in our, what I used to to call the visiting writer suite in my basement. And all of this was while we were still platonic, but there was no question that we were becoming very emotionally involved in each other's lives, that we had started to talk about things. And I'm not talking about like sexting or whatever, but we were just talking about intimate things that as adults, we are definitely not encouraged to talk about with people of whatever gender we are also attracted to, except for our partner. And so I think we were aware from maybe about 2010 to 2012 when the affair began, that there was something a little bit beyond in our relationship. And the relationship was filling such a need for both of us that we were very hesitant to stop. We were really pretty intent on convincing ourselves that it was harmless, that this was as far as it would ever go. And once the affair began in 2012, of course we had to look back and really realize like, okay, if we had been happy, if we had been admitting to ourselves the reality of our lives, like this whole kind of two year period from 2010 to 2012 would not have transpired. At one point, one of us would have put on the brakes, have said, okay, we need to go and kind of square things with our respective spouses in order to be having this kind of an emotional intimacy with another person on what had by the end become really a daily basis. And so definitely one of the things that was really important to me is that I show the complications of having an extramarital affair because although I guess in the end, whatever, it worked out in the sense that we stayed together. I did not want to confuse the narrative. The narrative is very much about feminism. It's very much about women's roles, about women being able to own our own feelings and have agency in our lives. But I did not want to confuse that with agency should include lying to all the people who you know and having a double life. So that those two things are separate. And so, I mean, I view very much that having an affair was not in any way a feminist act. It was the opposite really, because it was a silencing of myself. It was a betrayal of so many people, not just my former spouse, but so many different people. Because when you're carrying a secret like that, every time you even have a conversation with anybody, everything you're not saying makes your relationship a lie. And so a lot of it is kind of looking back at what factors in my life and what things I had internalized that had not allowed me to really own up to how unhappy I had been in my marriage for eight years before I left it. And what those factors had been and why I had been so afraid to step outside of this box of this woman who looked like I had this perfect life. And the success story or whatever of having grown up in poverty, and now I was married to a successful man and I had these three beautiful children and all of this. And just essentially, if I can say so, like my own internal bullshit that led me to not be real with myself and therefore not be real with other people. And although I did eventually voluntarily break that cycle by confessing, that didn't make things immediately easy either going from an affair, which in a sense is protected by a bubble. You're not each other's real life person on the ground. And so it's extremely easy for everything to be quite harmonious and just intoxicating. And then you become each other's real life partners and things become much more complex. And so it took us about two years to really figure out how to be a real life couple on the ground and how to be there for each other in a way that was inclusive of my kids and all of these different things. And so I really wanted to show that. I didn't want it to just be some fairy tale story. We had a very intense love and still do, And I wanted that to be visceral, but I also wanted it to be extremely complicated and to show the consequences.

[25:04]Zibby Owens: And how are things now?

[25:06]Gina Frangello: Oh, they're fantastic. I mean, we got married at the beginning of the pandemic on Zoom. We've been living together now since 2017. Thankfully much of what was going on in the book was quite a while ago now. So things are wonderful, but they also, I don't wanna overstate it in terms of, I mean, neither of us, we both led complex and difficult lives in many ways prior to our affair. But in many ways, we had both been married for two decades or more. And there is a sort of end of innocence when you realize that you can have been committed to someone for that long and have really believed like these weren't starter marriages. Like that you really, in both of our cases, really believed like this is the person we're gonna die with. This is how this story ends. And had both been really happy in our marriages until we weren't. And then the slow decline of all of that. So there is a way in which no matter how ecstatically happy we are together and how deeply in love we are, there is always this kind of awareness of like, I didn't ever believe I would be in this place. And this sort of, I guess an undercurrent of grief that life is so changeable and transient that change is the only thing we can ever be certain of. And that you can think with everything you have that this is it, this is the end, this is how I'll always feel. And maybe it isn't. So we're much more volitional and daily in our relationship. We check-in a lot. We communicate a lot. And I think a lot of marriages stop doing that because you just assume that something is static when maybe it isn't.

[27:06]Zibby Owens: So interesting. You know, I had this moment the other day. I was in my car with my husband now and my kids, and I flashed back. We drove past the house that I used to live with with my former husband when back when I only had two kids and everything was different. And I was like, how can I even be on the same street? Do you know mean? Like, how can I just be driving down the street when everything has changed? And I thought that was gonna be my life forever. And now how like, I could never have fast forwarded and believed, I wouldn't have believed myself.

[27:36]Gina Frangello: I hear you. Yes. I would not have believed myself. If someone had told me, you know, fifteen years ago that this was what was going to happen. I mean, I would have thought it was inconsistent with absolutely everything about myself. I would have thought that there was no way that this could possibly be true. Many things, not just the affair, but all the different ramifications, the impact that it had on my family, things that happened after the divorce. It is inconceivable. And I still live in the same house that I lived in during my former marriage. And I live in a neighborhood where my kids went to elementary school and where both my daughter and I went to high school and where I used to hang out with Kathy and where my mother and father and I all lived and hung out. And so my life is a bit of a ghost town. All of these people who used to be here, it's like I drive around or walk around in my neighborhood and it's like, I can see all these versions of my former self with all these different people who either don't exist anymore at all or don't exist in my life. And it's a very surreal experience to lead many lives.

[28:58]Zibby Owens: I am so glad to talk. I mean, feel like this all the time. Whenever I even just on the street here in New York and I'm like, the you know, if I could do one of those flip books, right, and start when I was a little girl because I'm also living in the same neighborhood and this you know, like, here and my parents and all of it. And yet, like the time, the years are just going flip flip flip. And like different people and yeah. Like you said, different people are gone and different casts of characters and yet the same street. I'm like, if I could have a camera on like this corner of this block, you know? Anyway.

[29:30]Gina Frangello: True. And I grew up in Chicago, I've lived away from Chicago for about a decade of my life at various different times, but I grew up in Chicago as well. And so I've been here a very long time and I've owned this house for a very long time. And so now my husband and I have a place near Joshua Tree in California that he's had for twenty years. And we spend time out there and that's surreal in a whole different way. I didn't even know literally that Joshua Tree National Park existed until I was in my late 40s. I mean, it's not a place I had ever spent any time, the California Desert. And so when I'm out there at this house, that's now ours and that we're renovating and I'm driving, looking at the mountains and driving through the desert and there's this desert wind, and I'm just sort of like, who is this person? Like, what is this life? It's so completely different from anywhere else I've ever lived. I've lived in cities my whole life. I mean, I've moved around a lot, but they've all been cities, cold cities. So yeah, just that inhabiting of many different experiences in many different lives that I think as you said, it's not exceptional by the time you reach a certain age, it's almost normative. Like half the people out there, this is their experience of their lives. Maybe they didn't have an affair, but this is still their experience of their lives of that they had this life until they had this life. And so I think that that's just something that isn't addressed enough. We believe as a culture, but certainly also in the publishing industry in endings. And really I say it in the book, like the only ending is death. Like we just keep changing and new things keep coming and lives get more layered and more complex the older you get, not less, which is the way I think we treat older people in society as though they've somehow become simplistic and adorable. And it's just like as if they don't have more complexity than we do with everything they've lived through.

[31:47]Zibby Owens: So true. Oh my gosh. Okay. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

[31:52]Gina Frangello: Oh, I do. I have so much advice for aspiring authors. So I have been in the literary world since about I used to be a therapist and then I started writing a novel and calling in sick to work all the time. I went back to get my master's in creative writing in English. And immediately one of the wonderful things that happened to me was I became involved with a magazine called Other Voices that was housed at the place I was going to graduate school. And I started volunteering my time there as a reader. And I eventually became the executive editor of that magazine, launched a press from that magazine. Through that, I ended up in the nervous breakdown community, which is an online community that still exists now at the rumpus. I'm now the creative non fiction editor at Larb. And I feel there have been other editorships as well. I just feel so strongly that people who want to write, who want to publish have to find ways to get immersed in their peers. It's not just, I've read the great books of history, but finding ways to get involved in the on the ground literary community of your life. And not everyone can do that by volunteering many hours as an editor. Oftentimes these things are unpaid, but we can all go to readings instead of just going to dinner. And we can all, like if we've read a book and we're passionate about it and that author is coming to town, maybe you have time to do an interview with that author and place it and promote their work. So to whatever greater or lesser degree you can afford time wise and economically, there are always ways to get involved. And I'm just surprised how many people, students and things like that who want to be writers, who don't know any other writers and who are not reading contemporary fiction or non fiction. And this is your world and it's such a rich world. It's rewarded me. My life as an editor and my life as a teacher have rewarded me in ever like absolutely

[34:02]Zibby Owens: just as much as publishing my own books. Wow, that's great advice. I think sometimes people don't know where to start, but anyway, it's fantastic advice. Gina, thank you. Thank you so much. I hope I get to meet you in real life. I'm too, Gina. It's such a pleasure and what a book. I mean, Really great. Congratulations and thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you for having me. My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.