Gina Frangello

"Gina Frangello is a long-married fortysomething devoted mom when her life is turned upside down by the sudden death of her closest friend. Worn down from years of caregiving both her elderly parents and three kids, Gina starts to interrogate her own mortality and what she once longed for as a younger woman: a kind of sexual, romantic and artistic intensity radically at odds with her comfortable but emotionally stagnant marriage. Falling into a passionate affair with a writer/musician, Gina begins living a shocking double life while continuing to outwardly project the image of having a "perfect family." As her parallel worlds begin to dangerously intersect, she makes the risky choice to leave her marriage and security in order to take a chance at finally becoming fully herself, midlife. However, when only months into her separation, Gina is diagnosed with breast cancer, her father dies, her divorce grows increasingly contentious and menacing, and her lover falls into a deep clinical depression, an inevitable breaking point approaches, revealing the irrevocable stakes of giving up everything for love, as well as what it means to be a woman in the contemporary American landscape. Examining pivotal moments in a complex family system about to implode, Blow Your House Down is about what happens when a woman who has been very good at playing all the roles society expects of her suddenly refuses to continue being the person her family and friends think they know. In a note from the author to her writing group, she wrote: "If we are all supposed to write the book we most need to read, then this is the book I wish I had had in front of me during the years my marriage was falling apart, the years I gave everything in me to my ailing parents and young children and angry husband until there seemed nothing left, the years I began a wildly selfish and euphoric affair that seemed to save me, the years I decided to leave my marriage but leaving ended up looking nothing like escape and instead like the end of the world, and the years that I was sick and in pain and having body parts removed at the speed of light and not knowing whether illness would destroy any new beginning I had fought so hard to find. This is the book I was so hungrily looking for, with all its brutality and grief and guilt and desire but didn't find. I hold in my head a woman who needs this book to save her own life.""--

A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

Blow Your House Down

When Mary revisits Europe to find out what went wrong on an earlier trip with her friend, Nix, she experiences an awakening in her sexual, spiritual and emotional life. Original.

A Novel

A Life in Men

"Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a "Community Baby." Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happy-go-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to Miguel's old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, with whom she is raising two boys. Into this web falls Miguel's sister Lina, a former addict and stripper, who begins a passionate affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past. But every action these couples make has unforeseen consequences. As Lina faces her long-hidden demons, and the fragile friendships between Miguel and Chad and Nick and Emily begin to fray as the baby's birth draws near, a shocking turn of events-and the secret Lina's been hiding-threaten to break them apart forever. By turns funny, dark and sexy, Every Kind of Wanting strips bare the layers of the American family today. Tackling issues such as assimilation, the legacy of secrets, the morality of desire, and ultimately who "owns" love, the characters-across all ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities-are blisteringly alive"--

a novel

Every kind of wanting

Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a "Community Baby." Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happy–go–lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to Miguel's old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, with whom she is raising two boys. Into this web falls Miguel's sister Lina, a former addict and stripper, who begins a passionate affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past. But every action these couples make has unforeseen consequences. As Lina faces her long–hidden demons, and the fragile friendships between Miguel and Chad and Nick and Emily begin to fray as the baby's birth draws near, a shocking turn of events—and the secret Lina's been hiding—threaten to break them apart forever. By turns funny, dark and sexy, Every Kind of Wanting strips bare the layers of the American family today. Tackling issues such as assimilation, the legacy of secrets, the morality of desire, and ultimately who "owns" love, the characters—across all ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities—are blisteringly alive.

Every Kind of Wanting

What is it about Elena Ferrante's writing, especially her masterwork Neapolitan Novels, that resonates so deeply with millions of readers, making this Italian author who writes under a pseudonym with absolutely no "platform," an international sensation? Brilliantly addressing issues such as class struggle, female friendship, women's autonomy, and literary creation itself, Ferrante's hyperrealist, intense storytelling is a saga of a highly specific place and history, yet somehow also transcends them, resonating on profoundly personal levels with readers of every background. Gina Frangello grew up in poverty in inner-city Chicago two decades after Ferrante's most famous characters, Lenu and Lila grew up in Naples. Despite these seemingly insurmountable difference, Frangello felt that Ferrante was "writing about my youth, my life, my relationships, my struggles." In the latest volume in the Bookmarked series, Gina Frangello contemplates Ferrante's Neapolitan novels through the lens of memoir, literary criticism, and issues of authorial identity and gender. Should who Ferrante "is" matter? And more importantly, what is it about Lenu and Lila's story that taps into such universal truths that makes readers feel that Ferrante is writing specifically to them?

Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels: Bookmarked

Following her debut novel, My Sister's Continent, which delved “fearlessly into questions of identity, abuse…trust, trespass, and delusion” (Booklist), Gina Frangello continues her exploration of the power dynamics of gender, class, and sexuality in this collection of diverse, vibrant short fiction. Slut Lullabies is unsettling. Like the experience of reading a private diary, these stories leave one feeling slightly traitorous while also imprinting a deep recognition of truths you did not know you felt.It is through beauty, horror, humor and chaos that Frangello has managed to pull these ten stories out of her deep understanding of the human experience. A gay Latino man whose pious relatives are boycotting his 'commitment ceremony' becomes caught up in hypocrisy and splendor when his lover's Waspy mother hires a glitzy wedding coordinator; a precocious girl seduces her teacher in order to blackmail him into funding her young stepmother's escape from their violent home; a wife turns to infidelity and drugs to distract her from chronic pain following an accident; a teenage boy attempts atonement in Amsterdam after having exploited his naive girlfriend at home; and a socialite must confront her dark past as her husband's deterioration from Huntington's Disease destroys both her bank account and social standing.Each insightfully drawn, deeply felt character moves delicately amid the despair and wreckage of ordinary life, but always towards hope. And Frangello's oddly uplifting voice acts as the unifying thread, drawing out a beauty and dimension which demands both our criticism and our empathy.

Slut Lullabies

Nineteen vivid and compelling stories explore the often charged and tender relationship between a daughter and her father. Includes such notable authors as Pam Houston, Sandra Cisneros, Aimee Bender, Antonya Nelson, Bliss Broyard, Heather Sellers, Steve Almond, Peter Ho Davies, Dan Chaon and others, along with exciting new discoveries. Guest editor Gina Frangello of the award-winning Other Voices magazine, with foreword by Elissa Schappell of Tin House and Vanity Fair. With its universal family theme, Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters is sure to meet a big reception, reaching out from its literary origins to embrace a broad readership with these beautiful and challenging stories.

Gina Frangello

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