“Memoir means working within the confines of your choices”: A Conversation with Gina Frangello

“Finding time to write is what comes hardest. Everything else is easier than that.”

On a recent Zoom call, Gina Frangello appears in a ’70s-style halter jumpsuit, hair in a loose updo, sitting beside a trio of guitars belonging to her husband, the writer and musician Rob Roberge. When asked if she is living the kind of bohemian life she had envisioned in her memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Tale of Family, Feminism, and Treason, she says, “Not exactly.” Though her husband’s her first reader, she’s learning how to drum and is collaborating with him creatively: “I have eight million jobs at all times and very little time to focus on creative pursuits of my own.”

Such honesty is one of her writerly traits. In the memoir, Frangello chronicles her role as an adulteress in her previous marriage while struggling to shield her three children from the fallout and care for severely ill parents, all of which comes to a crescendo after a breast cancer diagnosis. Her journey makes us reexamine women’s roles as caregivers, mothers, and sexual creatures—and the pursuit of happiness—in what is still, largely, a man’s world.

Frangello’s no newcomer to the genre. She’s been publishing personal essays for twenty years, though she’s probably best known for her four novels. Charlize Theron and Universal Studios have optioned one of them, A Life in Men, and are shopping it around. Frangello’s also the creative nonfiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and just earned a PhD in English/creative writing at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Frangello talked for almost two hours about the writing process, feminism, and her next creative pursuit.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Joanne Furio: Are you tired of all these interviews?

Gina Frangello: With fiction, at least you’re not talking about yourself all the time. With memoir, usually by the time someone has written a draft and done numerous revisions, and the book’s about to go out the door, they’re already well sick of themselves. Then you discover that you’re going to have to continue talking about yourself for another three to six months! [Laughs.]

JF: In the Author’s Note, you describe how you compressed sequences of events, created composite characters, and changed names and admitted to not being “capable of remembering everything that took place exactly.” Why is this necessary?

GF: It’s necessary to talk about these things openly in the genre of creative nonfiction. For a long time there was maybe an implicit assumption that some things would be compressed or some characters would be composites or some people would be left out entirely—that’s common sense since we don’t walk around with a tape recorder in our pockets since the age of five.

But certain scandals like James Frey have made it more imperative to state these things up front and in interviews. We have to own the limits of how strictly factual and blow-by-blow creative nonfiction has the capacity to be, especially if we’re writing about things in the distant past.

Probably, in my book, the biggest need for that disclaimer had to do with the composite character of Angie, based on several different girls from my youth. When you’re changing someone so much, you definitely need to address that.

JF: How did you choose between writing this book as autobiographical fiction versus memoir?

GF: During the heat of the things that were going on—my father’s death, my divorce, having cancer—in 2015 and 2016, I didn’t have the ability to write fiction. I couldn’t think of anything other than my own situation. I was sort of in a tunnel.

So I started writing about those things, mostly in secret. I also thought it might be a good time to put together an essay collection about my parents. I had published a lot of essays about them, and people had told me, “You should do a collection.” My parents were really eccentric, very interesting characters. So I took all the essays about them that I had ever published and set them next to each other.

When I did that, I saw how much repetition there was among them. Crafting a self-contained piece is different from crafting a book. Every time you craft a new essay, you have to situate the reader. “My father has mental illness. My father can’t walk.” You have to say all these things all over again. Many self-contained essays also hit similar emotional notes. So I ended up cutting all but two of the essays about my parents.

At that point, I could have chosen fiction or memoir. But to me, autobiographical fiction is more a realm where you can explore other possibilities, with things having turned out differently than in real life—where you try on other outcomes. Memoir is being willing to work within the confines of what the choices and outcomes really were.

JF: Since our audience is writers, I’d like to hone in on your decision-making process. The book is a collection of linked essays. Five out of thirteen chapters were published in literary magazines. Was your strategy to start with published essays and then propose a book?

GF: I didn’t sell the book on proposal. I wrote the whole thing and then shopped it. I don’t know if proposing would be for me, because I never know fully what something’s going to be until it’s done. For example, the chapter “The Story of A” was the last thing I wrote, even though it opens the book. Had I pitched a proposal, I would probably have said it was about my parents, which turned out to be only one strain of the book.

JF: Let’s talk about structure. Was your climactic chapter, “Blow Your House Down,” difficult to write a couple of years after the fact?

GF: I’m an avid journaler and often write things I have no intention of publishing. I also email and text my friends a lot. So I have a considerable record of things I said or thought at particular points of my life.

JF: The emotion in that chapter feels so raw. Was it hard to summon those demons?

GF: I wish I could say that it was hard to summon those demons.

Memoir is being willing to work within the confines of what the choices and outcomes really were.

JF: I read somewhere that contemporary creative nonfiction has become obsessed with form. You do change things up yourself, including lists, a dictionary, a pastiche of numbered sections in the last chapter. Does this interest in form inspire you to experiment more?

GF: I’ve experimented with form in all my published books. With this book I probably experimented the most, in large part because I didn’t feel like each of the disparate stories necessarily loaned themselves to the same style. So the pieces about my parents are in a more traditional form. Other pieces are more fragmented, more broken apart or flash. So a lot of the more fractured, nontraditional parts had to do with things that were really hard to tell in linear ways. I had to deconstruct the form to figure out how to tell a long and varied story in a comparatively small space.

JF: Who are the writers who’ve inspired your creative nonfiction?

GF: Pam Houston’s “Corn Maze” essay has been very influential to me in terms of mirroring form and structure and the limits of language. One of my favorite books is also The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, which is a very formally innovative, wild book, full of speculative nonfiction, ghosts, shamans, magic—a book far, far ahead of its time. Many of my friends, like Emily Rapp Black, have also cracked open, through their work, what I previously believed nonfiction to be.

Emily in particular also forewarned me that people don’t always realize that memoirs are highly curated things. They just think, This writer wrote with no holds barred! She told everything! But if anyone told “everything” about even one year of their life, you’d have ninety-seven phone books at your feet.

JF: When it comes to your work, what part of the process comes easily and what comes the hardest?

GF: Finding time to write is what comes hardest. Everything else is easier than that.

JF: In the book, you vomit, describe BDSM, write about having wild sex right after your double mastectomy. Clearly, you have headed Hélène Cixous’s call for women to write our bodies, our sexualities, our secrets. Why is that so important? And why are we not seeing the same type of writing done by men?

GF: Well, men have been writing about their bodies for a long time, perhaps primarily sexually, but also in terms of addiction and mental illness. I just think it’s coded differently. I don’t think we read their books and think, Oh, this man is writing about his body. We look at things written by men, and particularly white straight men, as being universal and organic. Their bodies are far less forbidden in our culture and are seen as normative.

Whereas what I take away from Cixous and the movement of Écriture féminine is that if other people, basically straight white men, have misrepresented your body throughout the history of literature, you need to reclaim the realities of it because it’s been appropriated and misconstrued.

We’re still addressing the fact that, throughout the entire history of literature, women weren’t writing explicitly about our bodies until Second Wave feminism. And that was only fifty years ago. Women writers of color, queer writers, disabled writers have been even more silenced—Écriture féminine isn’t a movement only applicable to women.

JF: When you write about your parents and Kathy, you shine a light on class and dignify it. There was dignity in your parents’ relationship and your friendship with someone you turned out to be so different from.

GF: No one has asked me about this. And yet class has been a big deal in almost everything I’ve written. My last novel, Every Kind of Wanting, is deeply about class too.

People who don’t have any money also have dignity and meaning in their lives. That feels as if it shouldn’t need to be stated, but it does.

My parents were some of the smartest and funniest people I’ve known. My father didn’t finish eighth grade, but he knew everything about jazz and he couldn’t have been as funny as he was without being very sharp. My mother never went to college but was a big reader, loved Dostoyevsky, taught herself to play the piano. There is a lot of ignoring of the bohemian-artistic tendencies among the blue collar. They’re often portrayed and viewed as people who are disinterested in art, who are maybe . . . simple? And that is just not true.

People who don’t have any money also have dignity and meaning in their lives. That feels as if it shouldn’t need to be stated, but it does.

JF: After the book’s climax, I kept trying to analyze the root causes of what happened. I kept coming back to economics and motherhood and how nothing’s really changed. So many women give up their careers when they have children and are supported by their husbands, forfeiting a part of themselves and sometimes straining their marriages as a result.

GF: My financial dependence on my husband didn’t cause the breakup of our marriage. However, once we both fell into more rigid gender roles, because of that division of labor, we had less and less in common and were experiencing two very different realities. One spouse was working twelve- to thirteen-hour days to move up the ladder, earn money, and be a good provider because that’s what a man is supposed to be. The other’s raising three kids, taking care of elderly parents, doing a lot of unpaid labor even professionally because what we still largely code as “women’s work” often exists fully outside the economy. These dichotomies in more traditional marriages can ultimately erode what two people may have had in common when they were young and unfettered.

JF: How is the juggle going for you now that you’re no longer on the Mommy Track and have achieved literary acclaim?

GF: I still have a fifteen-year-old at home and two daughters in college, so the Mommy Track more shape-shifts than disappears—and thank you, but also “literary acclaim” is a slippery thing that doesn’t always translate into financial stability. Early after my divorce, even after having published three books, having been an editor for twenty years and teaching just as long at universities, I had a very rude awakening about how challenging it really is for anyone to earn a living wage in either the arts or academia.

When you’re adjunct teaching, for example, you may make about five thousand dollars for fifteen weeks of work. It took me several years to find my equilibrium in terms of work that is fairly compensated. It’s still a juggling act, but at least I’ve gotten to a place where I felt able to donate the royalties for Blow Your House Down to Deborah’s Place. I still have at least five jobs at any given time, though.

JF: What’s next?

GF: I’m still tinkering on the short story collection that was my PhD dissertation, and my husband and I are writing a screenplay together for fun, which we plan to finish this summer. I’m working on a novel in my head, but I can’t predict when I will have time for it to start its journey outside my brain.