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Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage, and has been included on numerous “Best of 2021” lists including at Lithub, BookPage, and The Chicago Review of Books. She is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men (Algonquin), which is currently under development by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah, and Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint), which was included on several “Best of 2016” lists, including at Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books. Now a lead editor at Row House Publishing, Gina also brings more than two decades 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, the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review, and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for 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, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Dame, and in many other magazines and anthologies, and her column, “Not the Norm,” runs on the Psychology Today blog. She runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black, and can be found at www.ginafrangello.org.
Pop-Up Questions
The writer picks five out of ten pop-up questions.
What book do you wish you could read again for the first time and why?
For many years my answer would have been either The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, or Book of Daniel by Doctorow, both of which blew my brain and writing open--and Unbearable Lightness maybe also blew open a lot of my own psychology that I'd been unable to articulate back when I was 19 or 20 and reading that book for the first time. But those books were unseated in terms of that delirious, delicious first-time pleasure when I read My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante and set off on reading all the books in the Neapolitan Quartet. I have never, ever, been so hungry to fall into a book the way I was with those. I've written about them for Electric Lit, and I think part of their brilliance is the way they make so many readers feel like the books were written just for them and reflect their own lives and psychology back at them. I also read those books back when it was firmly assumed that Ferrante was the pen name of a woman writer, whereas now apparently computer analysis of all published Italian writers has identified the style as almost certainly belonging to a well-known male Italian novelist, and that complicates things for me not--I need to stress this--because I don't think a male writer could understand a female character's psychology well enough to cause women around the world to feel kinship and recognition...I actually believe strongly that literature allows us to inhabit other psychologies and other identities in profound ways and I am somewhat excited or thrilled if it turns out that a male writer could actually have been the one to portray Lenu and Lila...however, Ferrante has given a boatload of interviews in which "she" speaks as a woman, even rather "essentially" about womanhood in ways I don't necessarily agree with but that the Ferrante persona spoke with authority about, and that upsets me. I think it is absolutely cool and brilliant if a male writer was able to write those novels that I have always called "essential reading about female psychology," but I do not think it's cool at all if said male writer goes around masquerading as a woman in interviews, making statements about womanhood. So I'm hoping there is a deeper explanation, such as collaboration between that writer and his translator wife, and that she is the one doing interviews, but at this point, look--will the real Elena Ferrante please stand up? Because it's becoming sort of problematic, no matter how brilliant the books are.
What writer romanticized being a writer for you as a young person?
Well, this answer is a bit gross to me now, but definitely Anais Nin. Speaking of Kundera, I think I saw Nin as a kind of Sabina-figure, this adventurous woman who insisted on her sexual freedom and had wildly passionate affairs and lived a life immersed in art and surrounded by interesting people. But of course it goes without saying now that I see Nin differently, in 2022, at the age of 53. I mean, there is no question that she led an interesting life and that she embraced sexual and erotic honesty at a time when almost no women were able to do so, in her writing, and I still am quite fond of much of her writing and she was a significant artist. But she also had an affair with one of the great sexists of literature, Miller, and of course, far more disturbingly, she had an incestuous relationship with her father that was...it's hard to even fathom, but she was an adult at the time and had not been sexually abused by him as a child, and had not even seen him in a couple of decades, so I guess we have to call it "consensual?" It's hard to wrap my mind around what a woman's inner life and psychology of self must have been to think that something like sleeping with her father who abandoned her as a child was somehow an expression of sexual passion or liberation from taboos--to me, now, where I stand, it seems like a profoundly deep abandonment wound that was being acted out in the most dysfunctional and exploitative way possible, and that it goes without saying that any man who would sleep with his daughter is a predatory monster, even if she writes erotica about it and thinks it's a great idea and is above the age of consent--it is not an excusable thing, under any circumstances on earth, to have sexual relations with your child. So I guess my point here is that we see things one way when we are young--like my husband, who is a writer and a musician, often romanticized and glamorized all the addiction and early death of talented young men in the music world in particular, and now of course, many years into recovery after having nearly died as part of that romanticization of something that is in fact deeply sad--when we're older, we look at the thing we found so romantic and poetic or whatever and it's like: What I was looking at was a picture of pain; I was romanticizing wounds and anguish. And that, if we're lucky, is part of what it means to grow up--to see things differently and to know how we fell into certain self-destructive patterns in our lives by having believed that sad, brutal things were exotic and sexy and romantic.
What music do you love on road trips?
I'm sure this answer will surprise zero people who know me, but really, give me a mix of late 1980s through 1990s edgy-women singer/songwriters and I am all over that shit. Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Cat Power, Aimee Mann, Tracy Chapman, Beth Orton, Liz Phair, early Alanis Morrisette, Melissa Ethridge...I could go on and on...just keep adding them and I will listen to that playlist forever. And in keeping with this vibe, I love a lot of more contemporary women singer/songwriters like the recent Taylor Swift collaborations in her last two albums and Florence + the Machine, and Lana Del Rey, who is apparently rather problematic as a person but who I think is a bit of a musical genius, and Phoebe Bridgers, and Lorde, and Billie Eilish...but also, what's funny, is that when I sing covers, I have a thing for songs by men. I love covering songs written by men and seeing the different meaning in the song when it's a woman singing. I do this cover of The Dream Syndicate's "Merrittville," and the song is wildly different and much, much darker when in the first person of a woman, so those tweaks of meaning fascinate me. Also, my favorite album of all time may be Jason Isbell's Southeastern, so that fits with everything else I've said in literally zero ways, but I will listen to that album on repeat from one end of the country to the other and be entirely happy, so...
What is your favorite bit of writer lore or (not harmful) gossip?
I have a few pieces of weird secondhand favorite lore. So my husband went to Emerson and hung out in the Boston lit scene then and some years after, and used to hang at this bar--maybe he even bartended there because he worked at a lot of restaurants and bars, but he's not here so I can't check with him--where many famous drunken male writers hung out. And apparently one night, while Richard Yates was vomiting into the plants outside, someone more senior at the bar started telling my husband about how many writers had puked onto those plants over the years, and how it became necessary to find plants that were very hard to kill. "Ficus," he told my husband, and nodded and went inside.
I also love one in which John Irving repeatedly tried to take my husband outside to kick his ass because my then-young-and-cocky husband kept mocking wrestling, which of course made Irving anaphylactic.
And another friend told me that whenever Milan Kundera--with whom his brother had been pen pals for some reason for ages--slept with a new woman, he bought himself a tie. While this is not a good story for the post-#metoo world, I still find it kind of hilarious. It's so on brand that it's like...it's a hard story to even believe, because if someone were going to make up a story about Kundera, this is the exact story you would make up, right? So I still don't even know if it's true, which is part of the fun.
What books comfort you?
A novel I re-read a lot because it induces a lot of pleasure in me is Francesca Marciano's Rules of the Wild. It's in my opinion an under-recognized classic in the decadent ex-pat genre. And Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things is a book I re-read frequently for its craft and brilliance and the utter fascination of every sentence, and also because I think it--along with books like Morrison's Beloved, Atwood's The Blind Assassin, and Doctorow's Book of Daniel--is an absolute masterclass in structure, in the mirroring of form and content, and in writing political trauma and personal trauma in intertwined, profoundly intimate ways that change the reader. The ending of The God of Small Things may have gutted me more than any other book I've ever read, and deconstructing how Roy is able to achieve that level of emotional resonance is ceaselessly fascinating.
Photo Roll Story
The writer picks a photo from her phone and tells us about it.
Christina Baker Klein, Anne Burt, Joanna Rakoff, Kelly McMasters @ AWP Philly
“I spent the year following the release of Blow Your House Down hungry for the in-person company of women, so many of whom had reached out to me online to talk about the book, and AWP: Pandemic Edition 2002, was an absolute glut out of joy in that respect.”-Gina Frangello
The Interview
The writer answers questions about her life and work
You've been a writer for many years now, as a novelist, a memoirist, a freelance book doctor, an editor, a teacher, and now, as a lead editor for Row House. Do you think you have made choices that were pivotal in advancing the growth of your writing career? If so, can you talk about what they were?
So you're talking definitely about two very different areas--the difference between working as an editor vs. being a writer--and in particular, until very recently with my new Row House position, the work of being an unpaid editor in the nonprofit system or a voluteer at a publication like the Los Angeles Review of Books where only a select few people at the top are paid. So there's the reality, laid across all other truths, that when you are doing unpaid labor, there are always going to be disadvantages in terms of the time you're giving in relationship to the money you could be earning in that time or the writing you could be doing in that time, or even the time you could be spending with children or friends or your partner or reading already-published books or...you know...doing yoga, or whatever a person might do, rather than working for free. And yet I consistently made the choice to do unpaying editorial work from 1996 until this year, taking about five years off following my divorce when I couldn't afford economically or emotionally to give that time. But overall, I have made the time to do that because my career felt incomplete without the ability to be of service to other writers in a very concrete way--in other words by being able to offer publication and to spotlight their work, even if it was not part of the economic pastiche of my gig economy jobs that brought in money, like adjuncting and freelance writing and developmental editing.
I believed in that system for a long time, because even though there were all the drawbacks I've mentioned, the rewards of seeing other writers snatched up by agents, getting book deals, having their work shared online, getting on NPR, whatever, as a result of my ability to publish their work felt like a privilege I didn't want to part with. My use of the word privilege is very deliberate here, because even though since 2016 I have worked well above and beyond full time hours for pay, for much of my adult life prior to that I didn't have to do so because I was married to someone who had a very financially rewarding career, and I was privileged to choose how to spend my professional time without worrying about having an independent living wage. When I took those 5 years off, I missed editing intensely. I was the faculty editor for The Coachella Review, but my role was supervisory, and I ended up accepting a position as the CNF Editor at LARB in order to be able to have an acquisitions/curatorial role again, and I love this kind of work and I loved being able to publish some 60 writers or so during my time at LARB. It was also, personally, a goal to be able to go back to the kind of editing work I'd long done in my first marriage...to be financially solvent enough on my own income to get to the place where that was possible again...and arriving at that place felt at first like an incredible victory and thrilled me.
But here's where I'm going to veer and say that I've become pretty disillusioned with this system, and ultimately chose to leave LARB and to pursue paid editorial work, both through launching my own company, Circe Consulting (www.circeconsulting.net) with Emily Rapp Black, and by joining Row House, which pays very fairly for its labor. I've become aware--or rather I was always aware, but I've become clearer on how problematic it is--that a publishing system that requires editors to work for free is one that is never going to be able to truly diversify or become inclusive enough of underrepresented voices. I have always done my very best to publish marginalized writers, and one of the highlights of my early professional life was when the poet Wanda Coleman cited my old magazine, Other Voices, as one of the best forums for writers of color in an interview in The Nation. And I was particularly conscious of this at LARB, which is a very international and diverse magazine despite its Los Angeles focus. But that said, until we have a publishing system where people of all socioeconomic stratas can participate in being the...well, kind of arbiters of culture and what gets published, we are perpetuating a system that rewards those with financial stability by giving them illusory positions of power, and by catering to their tastes in what they choose to accept for publication, and I am just not okay with that anymore, overall.
To begin with, it fosters the belief system among hungry young writers and publishing professionals that in order to "get ahead," they have to give away their labor, even if that costs them the ability to earn a decent living. It keeps adult, professional editors with vast experience in the role of unpaid college interns forever, basically. And for those people like single mothers, for example, unless they have family money these positions are really not even available to them while they're trying to feed their kids. Many times, writers will complain that online publications pay very little, or at times nothing, without awareness that even the editors, who may be giving 20 hours a week or more to a position, are also unpaid...that the problem is far deeper than someone only getting $100 for an essay they labored over, but rather that these positions are considered jobs by the outside world, but in reality they cost editors money in myriad ways. So both in the sense that only the privileged (or very young people with few economic responsibilities) can usually hold unpaid positions to begin with, and in the sense that labor has value, time has value, I've personally felt the need to move away from those kinds of editorships, even though they have also been in many ways highly rewarding to me emotionally and intellectually.
It's almost impossible to overstate the value of holding these kinds of positons for one's own work, in terms of what it teaches you, though, so that's the paradox. I learned more in having to navigate how to distinguish between work that was "good" and "publishable," vs. work I felt I would nearly die if I didn't personally have the chance to publish--work I knew I would never forget--than I could ever have learned in the best MFA program in the world. I also made so many connections it would be hard to overstate, and I'm not primarily talking about connections that are professional in nature, though that also happens, but rather that most of my adult friendships--and even my husband--are people I met in some way through my editorial positions, are writers I have published at some time. And that has been...well, cool and fun as all fuck.
But it was time for me to go, so to speak. I'm 53, and I'm a cancer survivor, and I don't know how many years I have left to earn money, but I know that after editing for a quarter century and teaching higher ed just as long and publishing five books, I'm just not in a place anymore where I want to give my time away. My time has become profoundly precious to me. I'm very--obscenely maybe--busy, and the day came when I just didn't want to work for free anymore, and wanted to feel that my editorial skills were being compensated, as people in professions from nursing to teaching to law to medicine to business are compensated--some better, some much worse, but usually never for free. I came to understand that my skills are worth money, and I also came to understand that by more established and economically and educationally privileged white people like myself continue to accept unpaid labor, we make it easier for more marginalized people without the luxury to do this to be dismissed and not have positions as cultural arbiters or taste makers. And honestly, the world has had more than enough of relatively financially secure white editors working for free and perpetuating a system of the literary world--especially online--existing outside of the economy. I don't have any more free time now that I'm editing for pay--in fact I have less--but I'm editing at a publishing house that prioritizes underrepresented voices, and I also co-own a women-run small business, and those things feel more aligned with my values at this time.
You've been successful as a novelist, and now you are successful as a memoirist, too, since the bold and wonderful BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN published in 2021. You'd lived an interesting life before writing BYHD, but still had not felt compelled to publish a memoir. What changed?
Well, in 2015/2016, when my father--who lived in my home--had just died, and I was going through a very difficult divorce, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bilateral mastectomy and chemo, I did not have the imaginative bandwidth for fiction. It was hard--impossible, it felt at the time--to get out of my own skin and experience. And one thing I knew was that I found very few books that spoke to what I was going through...that most memoirs about women focus on the transgressions and redemption of very young women and end with marriage or having children, and that there are few templates out there for older women, for women who are sick or disabled, for women who have made profound mistakes or life changes after becoming mothers...and that epiphany fueled me.
One thing we know is that no one is truly unique. I am not the only person to ever have an affair, or to get a divorce, or to lose my parents after years of caregiving, or to have breast cancer, or to struggle to find agency in my life as a woman amidst caretaking others, or to grieve the death of a friend, or anything that has ever happened to me. My entire life, books have saved me. I'm not alone in that either. And it was the possiblity that I might be able to write a book that would help other people--primarily women, but really anyone whose life is collapsing and reforming in terrifying but transformative ways mid-life--that got me writing again. It was the first time I had ever written with the express hope of helping other people, per se. I had always written fiction largely because it was a compulsion. I couldn't not do it. My memoir was more deliberate. I think many, many people live in isolating boxes of shame over their past mistakes, over their desires, over their bodies, and I wanted to write a book that would make some of these people feel less alone, feel seen, understand that their foibles are not singular and that there is life beyond the explosion. I say in my book that there is no template, when you are a woman, for how to jump off the cliff but not die. I wanted to provide one such template. We all die eventually, of course, but there is a way back from wreckage--or maybe not back but forward. There is life after pain, both our own pain and that we may have inflicted on others. And the more I saw myself as a lens through which the reader might glimpse their own life, the more my creative energy returned as I wrote my memoir.
Now that your children are grown and almost grown, has that changed your relationship to writing?
I feel like for most people, the answer to this is supposed to be Oh yes, I have so much more time now! But because I made the choice to leave a very financially secure marriage and now I focus an enormous amount of my time and energy making a living, the real answer is...Nah, not really. When I was a younger mother, my children were physically present a great deal more and took my energy, and now two of my kids live outside my house and the other is in school 9 hours a day, so theoretically I would have a lot of writing time. But I'm working during those hours, so it's really about the same as always. I've always been a binge writer. I don't write every day or every week or even--other than for my column, "Not the Norm," on Psychology Today, even every month. I'm never going to be prolific like Joyce Carol Oates or my old mentor, Cris Mazza, and sometimes I feel regret about that, but it's just not how I have ever written. Somehow, I have managed to write anyway, and I will continue to be able to write anyway. When the need hits, I find the space. Right now I'm working on a pilot, on spec, which is whole new terrain. I'm also finishing a short story collection, by which I mean I am supposed to be finishing a short story collection, but I am not actually doing that because I'm always working or doing things with family. I'm nearly 54 years old and have made peace with that a long time ago. The work comes when it comes. I don't see it as more sacred than either my personal life or than the work I do for and with other writers. The world is big, and there are a lot of things to do, and I have not-done more of them than I've done, so my desire to focus only on the same things I've already done a lot of has perhaps waned a bit? At the same time, I've got four ideas for new books, and I hope to write them all. I've written since I was four years old--I began my first so-called novel at the age of ten--so I don't see myself ever no longer writing unless I became incapable of it.
Have you ever had a point where you felt that your writing career was 'over' for reasons internal or external? If so, how did you make your way forward?
Probably the two times in my life I felt the most this way was when I lost a beloved literary agent in 2004 only weeks after he had sent my book out on submission, and the period in 2015/2016 that I already talked about. The time in 2004 was worse because I had never yet published a book, so the idea that I might be finished before I'd even started was entirely feasible. But then Lidia Yuknavitch, who used to run a small indie press called Chiasmus, published my debut book, and Bryan Tomasovich at Emergency Press solicited a short story collection from me, and I got a new agent--my present agent--and sold my third book of fiction to Algonquin, so what seemed like the end was actually the beginning. Now I'm on Counterpoint working with the best editor on the planet, Dan Smetanka, and they are never getting rid of me unless Dan or I get hit by a bus, so I guess I have to keep writing!
What is currently your writing routine or non-routine?
Can you hear me laughing from where you are, Maggie? Uh. Yeah, no. This is literally my daily routine. Wake up at 6:16 am to get my high schooler out of bed, because they do not wake up from any alarm clock on earth, even one that literally jumps off the table to make you chase it--nope, they will just sleep right through it. I was the same way as a teen, and my mother had to deal with me, so now it's my payback! So I get them breakfast, get them out of their room and out the front door. Then I go back to bed, because I am Not A Morning Person and feel like I am half dead at that hour of the day. I fall back asleep and wake up at some normal human hour like 10 am when everyone else has been awake for 3 hours, and then I look at my to-do list and read manuscripts, edit, do Zoom meetings, teach, run errands, do laundry, blah blah blah, pick my kid up because I'm not crazy about them riding the CTA in a pandemic, do more of the above (I usually teach at night), and work through until maybe about 9 or 10pm while my husband and I also make sure our teen is fed and sufficiently nagged to do their homework and I can catch up with them about their day and hang out some.
The whole while this is happening I'm also probably on 27 different text threads with friends and my daughters and my business partner and my writing group and so on. By about 10 pm, my husband and I get to spend time together--we're both night owls to an extreme degree and often don't go to bed until 3 am or so, but we're really (really!) working on getting this consitently down to about 1 am. Then I take 97 melatonins and a Benadryl and a CBD gummie to knock myself out because I'm an intense insomniac and the only time I actually feel like sleeping is at 6:15 when I wake up! Then I go to bed and do it all again, unless it's my husband's turn to wake up our teen. I also do personal training or pilates or yoga on Zoom a few times a week to keep my osteoarthritis and Mixed Connective Tissue Disease at bay and keep myself active and mobile.
My husband, who is also a writer and teaches in a low residency program, does most of the cooking and a lot of the household work, so thank god, because though I enjoy cooking I have little time for it anymore. Sometimes, Maggie, I actually leave my house for non-errand purposes and go somewhere fun! Or sometimes I'm in California, where we have a little desert house we're renovating. All of which is to say that I have literally zero writing routine. Once in a while I have a few hours where nothing is scheduled and then I write something for my column on an impulse. I used to wait for August and do no other work in August but my own writing...but now that I have a business and work for a publishing company, that's no longer true. I'm on the Curatorial Board at Ragdale, so right now I'm pretty much operating under the seemingly insane assumption that I'll finish a book next time I go there for two weeks. Wildly, it's worked before, so...
You've started singing! This is awesome. Is singing informing your writing at all?
I have...my mother was a singer, but I never thought I could sing. I've discovered a couple of things: 1) I can't sing quietly, and 2) Just because my voice isn't "pretty" per se, doesn't mean it isn't working. I kinda sound like a man with a drinking problem...which has not stopped many actual men with actual drinking problems when it comes to singing, so why should it stop me? I actually have a particular fondness for doing covers of songs sung originally by men and changing the meaning just by...being me, being a woman. I'm also writing songs, usually collaboratively with my husband but I've done a few alone. My songs are entirely more raw than my literary work. They are...no holds barred. They go to places in me that I didn't know exactly were there. It's pretty intoxicating. Art uncovers us in so many ways, even when we have no idea what we're doing. I'm also learning to drum, though I'm pretty bad. But I can keep a beat, so my husband says I can just be like Mo Tucker...which is a pretty lofty aspiration actually. I've always loved music, but my husband has been a musician his entire life and our relationship has taught me to hear and understand music differently, and the surprise result of that was that I love making it. Like, I love it so much it's insane. I would sing all day if I could. Sometimes, I kind of do.
What are you reading now?
I'm almost done with Outline by Rachel Cusk. Since Blow Your House Down came out, everyone has been telling me to read Rachel Cusk, and I never had done so now I am. Her work is fascinating. But what I'm mostly reading now is somewhere between 500-600 pages of student work per month in addition to my developmental editing clients and my Row House authors, so this has kind of been a year where let's just say I won't be posting any "I read X many books this year" on social media. That load will lighten in September, when one of my Memoir in a Year classes ends. But the thing is, some of my students' and clients' and authors' work is so amazing that it's like constantly being on the ground floor to something important that no one else knows about yet, and I love that feeling of discovery. You never know what you'll find next, and how it will change you.