Gina Frangello > Quotes

“This is what it is to have bitten the apple, and to understand for the first time why female desire and knowledge are the most feared and demonized forces in history. This is what it’s like to be a destroyer of worlds: that woman, that apple, that serpent, all at once. Even if your Eden was partially imaginary, this is what it’s like to watch the dream of it fade forever into the mist and to want to turn back the clock, to want to return, but also to never want to return, to ache to keep running. This is what it’s like to have feared your entire life becoming your martyr of a mother, and to instead have become the monster under your children’s bed. This is what it’s like to choose love.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them. —SIMON VAN BOOY, Everything Beautiful Began After”
― Gina Frangello, A Life in Men

“How do we measure a life’s worth? In laughter? In orgasms? In money? In how often we have been photographed? In children borne or raised? In the number of continents on which we have made love? In number of books published? In latest versions of iPads and iPhones? In jazz albums filling a giant trunk in the basement? In years? We are all specks of dust against the specter of Time. Is ninety years so different from forty in the scheme of things? We are all the walking dead of history.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“What happens when self-erasure has been the norm for so long that the You cannot find its way back to I?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“grief is not a thing that ends. Sometimes, though, it cracks us open and exposes the places we’ve hidden, and that can be a kind of gift.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“There is only one way to tell the truth, but there are myriad ways to live a lie.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I grew up with the mistaken impression that cleverness could exempt me from anything, but middle age teaches nothing if not the lesson that nobody is exempt.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“do not believe in divine retribution or karma or any hand of god or fate that takes a sentient interest in the happenings of our world. But what I know: there are circumstances that unearth you irrevocably, that break you, that leave you never again an unbroken whole.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“But our children are never ours. We belong to them, but they belong to themselves. They belong to people not yet born.”
― Gina Frangello, Every Kind of Wanting

“There is never only one Truth. There is only one truth at a time.”
― Gina Frangello, A Life in Men

“What does it mean to love by degree? What does this say, too, about my place in my own children's love chain? Is this the cycle of life, then? To be prepared to be thrown under the bus, if necessary, by those you value most in the world?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I dare try on the idea that maybe, just maybe, my children will love me through my imperfections just as I have loved my father through his—that I don’t need to be perfect or even better to be worthy of our bond.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“When somebody dies thinking you are someone you haven’t been in years—someone you maybe never were to begin with—what parts of your identity, real and constructed, do the dead take with them?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“If I believe that art can, in fact, save us, over and over again, then does it follow that I risk the audacity of believing that you might be the very one who needs my words to save your life?”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free. —Margaret Atwood”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I didn’t want who I was now to be the most I’d ever be.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I miss her more with every passing day because, just as words once written can never be unwritten, grief is not a thing that ends. Sometimes, though, it cracks us open and exposes the places we’ve hidden, and that can be a kind of gift.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Persevering is what wives do. Staying is what mothers do. Tending is what daughters do.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I am proud because I understand that there are times when self-preservation is more important than sentiment, especially when one is a mother, and I could not afford to be perpetually devoured from the inside out, surrendering my hours and days and weeks and months to this turbulent anxiety over whether some man would ever fully “choose me.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“My life has become a series of fast-moving parts, each hurtling forward while I race to catch up, forever on the verge of tripping.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The ways in which women nth love and support one another, and mistrust and betray and undermine one another, may be the most complex thing in the universe.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Of course, medical marijuana and CBD are not covered by insurance, and a tiny bottle of CBD oil costs about $100. Norco, covered by insurance, costs absolutely nothing. Despite an epidemic of abuse and overdose (the fatalities of which are actually highly linked to the prescription of fentanyl, a drug that should be illegal outside of hospice situations), my opiate painkiller was “on the house” of my medical insurance, whereas THC is a Class 1 substance that could not only potentially influence a custody case but put a serious dent in my family finances.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Still, no matter what you tell yourself consciously, you can't seem to shake your body's belief that somehow male cruelty has the power to make a girl important. That only through the violence of a man can you be made visible and special too.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down

“identity is as impossible to pin down and hold as an ocean.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“Baldwin says that suffering “may be the only equality we have,” and that all pain is real and not easily quantified or measured.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The greatest lesson we teach our children is how to survive us.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“No matter what I give, I will always fall short of what I—daughter, mother, wife—am supposed to be.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“It is impossible to say whether the fact that I am instructing my husband on how to eat, or that he heeds my agitation and revulsion not at all and continues to buy tubs of meringues to slurp at will, is more indicative of the state of our marriage.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“I am proud because I understand that there are times when self-preservation is more important than sentiment, especially when one is a mother, and I could not afford to be perpetually devoured from the inside out, surrendering my hours and days and weeks and months to this turbulent anxiety”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason

“The ways in which women both love and support one another, and mistrust and betray and undermine one another, may be the most complex thing in the universe.”
― Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason