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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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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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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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

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

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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Great Writing by a Foolish Woman

Feminism’s Free Pass: Privilege of Destruction
Gina Frangello’s memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason has sparked plenty of buzz for its raw, unapologetic dive into infidelity, divorce, and self-reinvention—all framed as a feminist triumph over patriarchal shackles. But beneath the applause lies a nagging question: does her brand of feminism, and the modern strain it reflects, amount to little more than the freedom to destroy lives with zero accountability? Reading her story, I found myself less inspired than exasperated—here’s a woman who seems more foolish than liberated, her “arc” built on a privilege she acknowledges but rages against and a narrative that bends over backwards to justify the wreckage.
Frangello’s tale is messy by design: a 20-year marriage to a man who raised her twins, cared for her ailing parents, and provided a stable home, only for her to torch it all in pursuit of an affair with Rob Roberge, now her husband.In the end she casts this as a feminist rebellion, a break from the oppressive confines of domesticity. Yet what stands out isn’t her defiance—it’s the safety net her ex-husband wove, one she leaned on to chase her “happiness.” He managed her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her father’s cancer while she was off with her lover; he held the family together as she dismantled it. This isn’t oppression—it’s a foundation most people would kill for. Her feminism, then, starts to look like a luxury good, affordable only because of the financial and emotional labor she could offload onto him.
This privilege is the first crack in her story’s facade. Frangello doesn’t hide her resources—a writing career, a Chicago house, a partner who kept the lights on—but she doesn’t fully wrestle with them either. Critics have noted this too: her rebellion reads less like a universal feminist cry and more like a middle-class woman’s midlife crisis, one she could weather because the stakes were never existential. Contrast that with women lacking such a cushion—those whose defiance might mean poverty or isolation—and her narrative feels narrow, even indulgent. The transition from stability to chaos was her choice, not her cage, which makes the “shackles” she rails against seem more self-imposed than systemic.
That choice leads to a broader tension in modern feminism, one Frangello exemplifies: the slide into consequence-free destruction. She frames her affair and divorce as a radical act, but the fallout—her ex’s betrayal, her kids’ fractured home—gets softened by a feminist-Marxist lens of escaping oppression. Accountability, when it rears its head, is swiftly decried as patriarchal guilt-tripping. This isn’t unique to her. Across feminist discourse, the push for self-actualization often skips who’s left picking up the pieces—partners, children, even other women. The counterargument, of course, is that women have long been chained to others’ needs, so claiming this messy freedom is the point. But when it’s built on someone else’s back, as Frangello’s was, it starts to smell less like equality and more like a power play dressed up as ideology.
Here’s where the discussion sharpens. You don’t need to burn down the house to fix it. Feminism can—and should—advocate for women and family, challenging skewed male leadership without fracturing society’s building blocks. Frangello’s ex wasn’t a cartoonish tyrant; he was a partner who stepped up. She could’ve redefined their dynamic, not detonated it. Instead, she seems more shackled by modernist feminist expectations—perform radical autonomy, reject the “good wife” script—than she ever was by him. She chose her ex, just as she chose Roberge, so where’s the oppression? The real bind might be her need to fit a narrative that demands chaos as proof of strength, not the men she blames.
That need drives her justifications, and she’s dug in deep. In the memoir, she doesn’t deny the damage—she reframes it as a noble cost of liberation. Her ex’s labor becomes part of the system she’s fleeing, not a debt she owes. It’s a feminist-Marxist sleight of hand: personal wreckage dissolves into a grand tale of oppressor vs. oppressed. If pressed on this, she’d likely argue the real shackles were the cultural pressure to stay grateful in a life she outgrew. But that dodges the kicker: she built that life, thrived in it, then torched it when it didn’t fit, all while leaning on its perks to land safely. The justification holds only if you buy the ideology wholesale—otherwise, it’s a house of cards propped up by privilege and self-delusion.
So what keeps her from seeing it? Probably the same thing that fuels this strain of feminism: a hunger for validation that outstrips introspection. Frangello’s story isn’t foolish because she made hard choices—it’s foolish because she cloaks them in a narrative that ducks the bill. Modern feminism doesn’t need to be a free pass to destroy without reckoning. It can build, not just break, balancing women’s agency with the ties that hold us together. Frangello’s arc, for all its noise, suggests she’s less free than she thinks—trapped not by men, but by the ideology she’s desperate to please.

Modern feminism is simply a desire to wreck one’s life and avoid accountability like they perceive men do. However when you sow wind you always reap a whirlwind. It is too late for buyers remorse.

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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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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

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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