Another Angry Woman Writes a Memoir

Now playing in the angry woman genre is someone named Gina Frangello. You have probably not heard of her. Until yesterday I had not heard of her either. I have been living a sheltered life!

But yesterday I happened upon a review of Frangello’s book Blow Your House Down by a writer named Dani Shapiro. It is so hostile, so dismissive, so negative that it appealed to me immediately. Not so much because I found a kindred spirit but because the "angry woman," brimming with rage and outrage and ire and hatred-- toward men and the patriarchy-- has been done before. It has been done so many times that it ceases to resonate. It feels almost like a fashion accessory, something you wear to your next meeting of the consciousness raising group.

For the record, second wave feminism has been around for more than five decades now. It is exactly as old as Frangello herself is. It has excoriated men and the patriarchy over and over again for yo these many decades. To imagine that we needed one more blast is a sign that Frangello is not living in the real world. 

Worse yet is the implication, not quite made explicit in what I read, that venting all of this inchoate spleen is therapeutic, that it is like passing toxic gas, and that it is an act of ritual purification. 

In truth, announcing to the world that you are allowing yourself to be consumed by rage will more likely damage your personal relationships. Trashing your friends and family in a memoir will not make you someone that anyone wants to invite to brunch. 

As Aristotle said, intemperance is a sin. Frangello should get over it.

Anyway, to give the devil her due, here is the apparent justification for her outrage. It concerns life decisions she herself made, especially the love affair she, a married woman, had with a married man. Apparently, she felt that people judged her for her dereliction, though one suspects that it her own shame that is gnawing at her.

And then, there are the deaths of her father, her mother and her best friend. For someone in the throes of a brain fever it is all linked, implicitly or explicitly. In truth, disease is disease; it is not God’s way of punishing you for sinning. It is not even the revenge of the goddess of the underbrush. As Susan Sontag so aptly put it in Illness as Metaphor, disease is a physiological event. One does best not to psychologize or politicize it.

Introducing the author in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Megan Vared describes the horrors that the patriarchy has visited on Frangello:

We circle through her childhood in a rough Chicago neighborhood, her traditional marriage, the adoption of her daughters, the birth of her youngest child, the agony of illness, the death of her father, the loss of her best friend to cancer, and her adversarial divorce. As if these trials weren’t enough, Frangello, while in the throes of her divorce, endures a double mastectomy; three years later, after she and her new lover become engaged, her beloved mother dies.

As though to warn woman against the daffy notion of politicizing their personal lives, Frangello explains how she was damaged by the patriarchy. In her words:

For example, I spent 23 years of my life completely financially dependent on a man, and I did not look at the ways that impacted my own agency. But also, I had an affair with a man who was also married, and while obviously he had every right to be unhappy in his relationship, just as I had a right to be unhappy in mine, and he had every right to seek a divorce if that was what he needed, just as I did, I found myself engaging in a clandestine affair on and off for three years with another woman’s husband, which is obviously not a very feminist thing to do. And then, once I had confessed to the affair and was leading my life back in the open, it became very apparent that pretty much everyone involved in the situation blamed me for what had gone down wildly more so than they did him. 

It may not be a very feminist thing to do, but since when has anyone used feminism to set moral standards. Besides, if sexual liberation does not mean following the call of one’s loins and ignoring social convention, what does it mean? 

Besides, feminism told women to defer marriage and  family in the interest of career advancement. If you have been just slight aware of what is happening in the world, rest assured that some number of feminist career women, as their biological clocks started ticking louder, were happy to poach some other woman’s husband. Only the most hopelessly naive would ignore this reality.

Anyway, Fangello is angry. She is spitting venom. Her reason, the world is less kind to adulterous women than it is to adulterous men. Had she exercised her minimally competent brain power, she would have factored in the reality of sexual congress-- namely, that men and women who couple are not doing the same thing, are not entertaining the same risks, and are not facing the same potential consequences. 

Being a zealot means ignoring reality. As noted, one suspects that Frangello’s guilt and shame, neither or which she is capable of acknowledging, led her to blame the patriarchy for her own decisions. After all, the patriarchy did not force her to destroy her marriage:

But the fact remains that those in his life and those in my life tended to cast much more responsibility on me and show much more anger and a lack of forgiveness toward me than toward him, and that was … also informative. Men are far more allowed to fuck up than women are, and are far more congratulated for having any self-awareness and guilt and remorse, whereas both men and other women alike grant forgiveness much less easily to women.

But, being a product of our therapy culture, she feels compelled to tell her ex-husband of the affair. Obviously, she feels that this will be liberating. She doesn't consider that this might hurt the man, someone who, we are led to believe, has not done anything to deserve this mistreatment:

It took me a very long time — far too long — to tell my ex-husband the truth about my affair, but it was a thing I eventually did volitionally, by choice, and I did that not only because he deserved to know the truth, obviously much earlier than I actually provided it, but also because, in many ways, my affair had stemmed from feeling like I was living inside this narrow box of other people’s beliefs about me and a narrow range of behaviors that could make other people happy. And my affair, which I originally conned myself into believing was some kind of freedom or respite from that constriction, needless to say only ultimately made me more and more penned in to artifice and acting out a pretend version of myself.

One does not, reading Frangello’s words, come away thinking that she is anything but a spoiled brat, someone who politicized her personal life and who is paying a price for it. Given that she takes no responsibility for her own behavior, she seems to function as a moral eunuch, but, without further ado, examine what novelist Dani Shapiro writes about Frangello in the The New York Times.

It is bracing. And it rings true:

I’m not sure I’ve ever read, much less reviewed, a memoir that has gotten under my skin the way this one has. 

According to Shapiro the writing itself is a godawful mess:

Ostensibly the story of a destructive love affair that upends her marriage, her family and her life, “Blow Your House Down” posits itself as a feminist manifesto, and its author veers between the two poles that are the greatest no-nos in writing about the self: revenge and justification bordering on self-congratulation. She does this in increasingly dizzying recursive loops, arriving again and again at the same descriptions, questions and conclusions, without ever deepening her inquiry. She begins by placing herself and her story into a sociological context, hoping, one can only assume, to enlarge it by association: “You may have noticed that anger is making a comeback for women,” she writes early on. “It might be fair to say that this is the moment I’ve been waiting for since the sixth grade.” 

Problem is, in middle age, Frangello feels she may have missed the boat. “I am too old … beaten to the punch. As women are finally rising up en masse to denounce their widespread treatment by men, I am left naked, with no pristine red robe of Victimhood. Rather, I have cheated, I have lied, I have done damage. I have been selfish and ruled by my desires … in other words, I have conducted myself like a man, despite being a mother, and hence have perhaps forfeited my claim on female rage.”

Obviously, feminists have been angry with men for five decades now. That Frangello trots out her own mindless rage as a new feminist statement tells us that she is hopelessly self-absorbed. There is a psychiatric term for this, but I will pass on the obvious.

Shapiro explains that Frangello seems to hate everyone:

Except that “Blow Your House Down” fairly drips with rage. With the exception of her children, no one escapes the force of Frangello’s fury, which has the effect of rendering her unreliable. She torques the people in her life into cleverish caricatures. The man with whom she’s going to embark on an affair is her “Not Yet Lover.” A cousin’s wife who dies by suicide is not spared, referred to as “a beautiful train wreck of a woman, a former model (or so her saying goes) of my age.” Why the parenthetical “or so her saying goes”? What does that add to the narrative? It’s a potshot aimed at a dead woman.

We ought, if we have any decency or dignity left, to get over the notion that there is a redemptive value to spewing anger at the world, and at everyone who inhabits our own private world:

The literary trouble with rage on the page is that it leaks into everything. Rage is incoherent — although observed rage, or revenge, or even self-congratulation, can be coherent. Near the end of a chapter describing her best childhood friend, Angie, from the old neighborhood, Frangello, who has left Angie behind for college and her eventual escape into a marriage with a man “by any definition a good catch,” “not just smart but ambitious, generous,” lists possible outcomes for her friend, among them a stripper, a junkie, a mother of four, a bank teller, a murder victim. The list, written in the second person of which she is fond, concludes: “It does not matter what Angie becomes. The point is that you left.”

So, hats off to Dani Shapiro for calling quits on the rage-driven life narrative. And thanks to the New York Times for having the courage to publish it.