Writing the Body and Sex in Memoir, featuring Gina Frangello

This week’s episode is an intense, powerful, and frank interview with author Gina Frangello as part of WomenLit, a Bay Area program dedicated to elevating women’s voices. Gina’s latest book, Blow Your House Down, is a tour de force and a memoir that’s had everyone talking—because she really goes there: into her shame, into her fear, into abuse, into sex and body, and into what it’s like to live a double life since the book is about having a clandestine affair for three-plus years. This is a brave book that’s making some people uncomfortable and has many reevaluating how truthful and brave they want to be on the page.

ABOUT GINA FRANGELLO

Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She is also the author of four books of fiction. She’s the Creative Nonfiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and previously founded the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. She runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black, and can be found at www.ginafrangello.org.