Blow Your House Down
A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason
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Narrated by:
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Hillary Huber
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By:
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Gina Frangello
About this listen
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 BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Beautifully Written!
- By Adele Aron Greenspun on 01-12-23
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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All of This
- A Memoir of Death and Desire
- By: Rebecca Woolf
- Narrated by: Rebecca Woolf
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.
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excellentt!
- By S. DAWN HANSCOM on 11-26-22
By: Rebecca Woolf
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The Survivors
- A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing
- By: Adam Frankel
- Narrated by: Adam Frankel, Rob Shapiro
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines - a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam’s mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is.
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Amazing story
- By Alissa on 12-26-19
By: Adam Frankel
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Native Country of the Heart
- A Memoir
- By: Cherríe Moraga
- Narrated by: Cherríe Moraga
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.
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a must read for all chicanx
- By Rachel Barnett on 04-28-19
By: Cherríe Moraga
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Beyond Tears
- Living After Losing a Child, Revised Edition
- By: Carol Barkin, Barbara J. Goldstein, Audrey Cohen, and others
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The death of a child is that unimaginable loss no parent ever expects to face. In Beyond Tears, nine mothers share their individual stories of how to survive in the darkest hour. They candidly share with other bereaved parents what to expect in the first year and long beyond.
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Comforting and familiar
- By Jeanne on 01-12-17
By: Carol Barkin, and others
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
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Crazy Time, Revised Edition
- Surviving Divorce and Building a New Life
- By: Abigail Trafford
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this intelligent and insightful book, Abigail Trafford charts the emotional journey of a breakup of a marriage, identifying the common phases in the evolution from marriage to separation to divorce, and eventually to a new life. This revised edition includes the most up-to-date research on the personal and economic effects of divorce in adults and children's lives, addresses the special challenges of becoming single again in the age of the Internet, and broadens the experience of divorce to the breakup of all committed relationships.
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Better as an additional book
- By Ethan on 09-18-19
By: Abigail Trafford
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A Wild and Precious Life
- A Memoir
- By: Edie Windsor, Joshua Lyon
- Narrated by: Donna Postel, Joshua Lyon
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In this memoir, which she began before passing away in 2017 and completed by her co-writer, Edie recounts her childhood in Philadelphia, her realization that she was a lesbian, and her active social life in Greenwich Village's electrifying underground gay scene during the 1950s. Edie was also one of a select group of trailblazing women in computing, working her way up the ladder at IBM and achieving their highest technical ranking while developing software.
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🏳️🌈 Wow! 🏳️🌈
- By Natalia Zimnoch on 10-15-19
By: Edie Windsor, and others
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Peace from Broken Pieces
- How to Get Through What You're Going Through
- By: Iyanla Vanzant
- Narrated by: Iyanla Vanzant
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author Iyanla Vanzant recounts the last decade of her life and the spiritual lessons learned—from the price of success during her meteoric rise as a TV celebrity on Oprah, the Iyanla TV show (produced by Barbara Walters), to the dissolution of her marriage and her daughter's 15 months of illness and death on Christmas day.
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Iyanla is Inspirational! A GREAT LISTEN!!!
- By Theresa on 12-04-11
By: Iyanla Vanzant
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Smile
- The Story of a Face
- By: Sarah Ruhl
- Narrated by: Sarah Ruhl
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges.
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Synkinesis: I am there
- By Elizabeth Principi on 11-04-21
By: Sarah Ruhl
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What listeners say about Blow Your House Down
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Doc in Va Bch
- 12-15-22
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.
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- Katherine Rightmire
- 10-16-23
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.
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- Alesia Weiss
- 04-30-21
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- MollyUnsinkable
- 01-02-23
Freakin Awesome
I read women’s stories. This one took me by surprise, and took my breath away; it’s so unusual in the telling. And her voice is that of a fierce feminist, but she stays with an abusive husband. The story of a couple of her female friends is riveting. Her bipolar alcoholic lover is not strictly the ideal mate, but their love feels magical. I cannot recommend this more highly than giving it five stars, which I very rarely do. And the reader is stupendous.
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- Gabriella Cordova
- 11-06-24
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.
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- Lisa Silvestro
- 04-10-21
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.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-28-21
MY LOVER
I admire the authors honesty. I couldn’t stand how she refers to the guy she has an affair with as “MY LOVER”. Had a little trouble making it to the end.
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- Caden Bertrando
- 12-21-22
this book is so frustrating. Gina is abnoxious.
Okay ... I had very strong negative feelings towards this book - negative feelings that I haven't felt towards a book in a long time. I was really excited about picking this one up; I love unreliable narrators, complicated girlies, memoirs, feminism, etc etc etc. But oh my god. Gina ... I don't even know what to say about this incredibly self-indulgent memoir.
First of all, I was thrown off in the first essay, The Story of A, when she refers to Hillary Clinton as the "most qualified presidential candidate in history" ... And later on she recalls Trump's inauguration as "the worst day of her life." Girlie is dripping with white liberalism/feminism throughout this book, which I found so damn irritating. There were maybe three or four lines in there where she mentions that people are discriminated against by "the color of their skin," and she mentions transgender women once, but ultimately, this was an extremely cis-white-liberal-woman narrative that did not delve into any sort of intersectional feminism whatsoever. Which is fine (kind of, honestly, maybe not) but "feminism" should be erased from the title tbh. It felt like she just learned what feminism was right before she wrote this, and boiled it down to the most stereotypical, blatantly obvious points she could find.
Second of all: everyone in this book sucks. Except for her children. Like genuinely Gina is such an unlikeable woman. She might be a "complex" woman, but she seems to have no real self-awareness. There are so many moral qualms I have with this book I don't even know where to begin. First of all, her children, who she 1) adopted from China even when she was in an abusive relationship with her husband because she believed she could give them better lives (white savior vibes) and 2) she proceeds to traumatize these girls by forcing them to keep her affair a secret from their father ... GINA. Please for the love of god.
Next, the entire affair situation. I am someone who believes that cheating on someone is one of the worst things you can do to a person, especially a person you claim to love. I was looking forward to reading a story from the cheater's perspective, as I thought there would be reflection, compassion, accountability, etc. There is not. Frangello is incredibly self-pitying throughout this book, she does not take accountability for her actions (though she pretends to in multiple cases), and she does not ever come to any meaningful conclusions. Towards the end of the book she talks about fearing that her ex-husband was going to murder her--which is honestly a fair fear to have--but the way she wrote about it all just felt so disingenuous.
At one point she is talking to her ex-husband and she says that "the only 'unstable personal relationship' I have ever had was ... with him" - and in that moment I was certain Gina had no fucking idea what she was talking about. GIRLIE. Literally every single relationship you have depicted in this book has been unstable.
Frangello obviously has many many regrets, all of which are understandable, but just because you express remorse for something does not mean you have done the work to heal.
I needed to put my rage for this book somewhere. I would not have finished this if I didn't read it for my book club tbh.
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2 people found this helpful
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- C. Richardson
- 04-18-23
Awful
I’ve waited a month to review since reading it because I was so disgusted once I finished, I needed time to try and be objective. It takes courage to write a memoir based on what the reviews call a “feminist” and “abusive” experience. This book is neither of those things and certainly no courage was involved, unless she’s referring to the courage of writing this and exposing her innocent children to the tawdry affair. Her passive aggressive attempts throughout the book to paint her husband as the villain disgusted me, and I would guess real spousal abuse victims would agree. The author makes far leaps to try and make herself a relevant part of the Me Too movement, but she falls very, very short of that. She knows someone that knows someone that was victimized, and has absolutely nothing to do with her, but I suppose when you are marketing your novel as a “feminist” memoir, you’ve got to pull from somewhere. The narrator’s monotone voice was lackluster, but I’d venture to guess she was as annoyed at the author’s self centered, privileged, narcissistic whining as I was so I can’t blame her.
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