For Gina Frangello, author of four novels and countless essays, writing her memoir Blow Your House Down wasn’t a choice. She simply couldn’t write anything else until she put this book in the world for readers who, like herself, found their lives to be filled with unrelenting challenge. She doesn’t prescribe any particular action or that readers should seek the once-in-a-lifetime love affair she has found as the only catalyst for change. She is, instead, gifting women or men in similar situations with a voice strong enough to carry them until they find their own. I first came upon Frangello’s work through her essay “This Is Happiness” on The Nervous Breakdown, which through a specific incident with her father speaks volumes about the dynamic of their relationship, her upbringing, and her skill as writer. What pulled me in, however, was her honesty, humility and ability to use humor in describing the deterioration of a parent living a lifetime with mental illness and with whom she had had a complicated relationship built upon a foundation of love from childhood. Blow Your House Down builds on this essay and shows readers that mental and physical illness doesn’t have to limit the love in one’s life, and that while anger and upbringing may drive choices made over a lifetime, it’s never too late to change course; love and forgiveness for mistakes made in families are what true happiness is built upon.

Please See Me: Why this book for you? Why now? For your daughters?

Gina Frangello: Blow Your House Down was originally written because I had found myself unable to focus on fiction while my life was on fire—several different fires—simultaneously. But it became much more to me than the wall I had to scale to get back to my first love of fiction. I began to hope that maybe the book could offer recognition, solace, a feeling of solidarity and being seen, to many women out there who may not have the ability to speak of many of the subjects in the book—from infidelity to caregiving to cancer to disability to the collapse of one life and the sometimes arduous but worth it road to building another—to people in their lives, and who may feel enormous shame and loneliness. I tried to write the book I had needed myself as I went through my turbulent forties, some of the turbulence of my own making and other aspects imposed from the outside or just a matter of chance. While I did not write the book consciously for my daughters, who are wildly averse to public declarations of strong emotion, several different interviewers and readers have told me that the book reads like “a love song” to them. Which is cool—my entire life would be a love song to my formidable, brilliant, hilarious daughters if I had any say. However, if they’re reading this, let the record show that they’re currently cringing and texting each other saying, “OMG she is so dramatic!” They’re very stoic people, as my mother was.

PSM: One of the hardest things in writing any book is organizing the narrative. How did you come to this form, especially the style of the Aperture and A Short Dictionary chapters?

GF: “A Short Dictionary of Mutually Understood Words,” which is told in dictionary form in direct address to my then-lover/now-husband, was inspired by a section in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Sabina and her lover Franz have a dictionary of “misunderstood” words. Kundera shaped my literary imagination, and that chapter blew me away when I first read the novel in my teens. I was interested, though, in exploring the ways in which even having a very profound mutual understanding of things doesn’t make the road from an extramarital affair—which Sabina and Franz were also having—to a real-life partnership on the ground a simple one.

Then, the opening chapter, “The Story of A,” was based on notes I’d been taking throughout the writing of the whole manuscript, and it suddenly occurred to me that the notes were the beginning, because the story I’m trying to tell is larger than just my story and has to do with how women’s lives, especially female sexuality, illness, motherhood, and age, have been mishandled throughout history and internalized so deeply that even today, writing candidly is still taboo.

PSM: You write, “If my memory of these events is so clouded by trauma, shame, and fear, then what can I assume about the memories of two girls who weren’t even in high school?” That reinforces the idea of the unreliable narrator in memoirs in a very poignant way. You then close the book acknowledging that this may be perceived as a one-sided experience but that it was yours, and you were willing to stand accountable to those who might be upset by you writing your story. How would you advise others waiting to write their memoir so as not to offend the others in their lives?

GF: I would not, actually, see myself as any authority on how to advise others in this area. I’m not sure anyone is. This is a deeply personal decision on the part of the writer. There are writers who believe implicitly that memoirists should write “as though everyone you know is dead,” and that if people don’t want to come off badly in your book then they should have “behaved better”—these are both very famous and oft-cited ideas, but they are only ideas, true for some writers and the opposite of true for others. It is equally valid not to write something you know will damage a relationship that is more valuable to you than telling that particular story. For myself, I tried to straddle a middle space here. I include people in my life in the book, obviously—all memoirists must do this to some degree—and some of what I include is quite intimate. But I also eschew almost any details about my kids, for example, that don’t directly bear on my story—I don’t talk about their personal lives outside of me and that was extremely intentional. In some cases, I left people out of the story altogether even though they played major roles. In another case I also use a composite character—my childhood friend “Angie”—who is based on several different girls from my youth. I tried to understand what parts of real people did not overlap with my central story, and to not include those things if they didn’t make impacts on me that directly impacted my actions. For example, there is one specific fact I withheld in the book entirely that might have made me come off as more sympathetic to some readers, but it was not my story to tell and so I did not tell it. In not telling it, I made the choice that I would rather the reader dislike me than that I violate this specifically private thing in another person’s life. So you draw your own strong lines. But also, full stop: you cannot write a memoir without offending someone. If you honestly achieve that, I would venture that you have not put enough at stake in your book.

PSM: Mental illness is not only passed genetically in families, but behaviorally too. We mimic behavior we’ve learned to rise above, but the baseline for that dysfunctional behavior remains rooted within. Who rises above their circumstances, and who falls “victim” to repeat the same cycles? For example, what called you to travel and choose higher education, when others in your family and neighborhood chose to stay close to home or found more destructive outlets?

GF: I had an extremely supportive mother with whom I credit nearly every good thing that ever happened to me. I also happened to be born with the capacity for high academic performance, which proved to be a ticket out of the environment in which I’d been born. Both of my husbands have also had extremely high IQs, which no doubt helped them escape certain traumatic situations and open new doors for themselves in their paths; this is true of a lot of people in my life. But what I mean is that I feel more gratitude for having been born with a supportive mother and a particular type of brain than I feel self-congratulatory about somehow elevating myself when some others did or could not. Encouragement and some level of natural intellect or other marketable talent go a very, very long way.

We live in a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture, this self-made man mythology, and that isn’t only mainly a fantasy in that it’s not how most prominent figures in this country ascended: money and connections are very important. But the myth in this country is that everyone can just magically rise up and “make it,” irrespective of massive factors like racism, ableism, pervasive abuse, poverty. I got lucky on various fronts, and yes people there are people from absolutely every faction of society who rise and make it—whatever making it means to them—but we also too often judge those who don’t as being lacking in some kind of character, instead of looking at the societal factors that may be holding them back.

PSM: You wrestle with unconditional love many times and dance with emotional abuse viewed through the lens of causation. You ask if something can be a mental health issue and truth simultaneously. When does unconditional love turn to codependence? When does the truth of a mental health issue warrant walking away to save one’s self?

GF: When something is making you smaller, more frightened, more careful, walking on eggshells, nervous all the time—essentially a more and more narrow version of yourself, then probably as sad as it may be, you need to walk away. Codependence is a complicated word, though. I know people whose marriages might be viewed as codependent who are ecstatically mutually happy with that situation. There’s no-one-size-fits-all definition of when the level of enmeshment and dependency a couple shares crosses over from a natural part of a relationship into a dysfunctional space. Sometimes codependence works until it doesn’t. There’s no precise moment in time, maybe, when a couple “became” codependent and at that magical moment one person needed to flee. Usually, I think, codependence—like any addiction—at first seems to “help” assuage a pain or make people feel better and even genuinely happy…and who has any right to tell a genuinely happy person that their life is dysfunctional? Emotional abuse is complex in that way too. Sometimes a person is behaving in an emotionally abusive way because of their own history of abuse or their intense pain, but those things are not just a get out of jail free card that exempts them. I would say that if you think it’s your job to save someone, you are probably not in a healthy relationship with either that other person or—importantly—with yourself. Likewise, if you think that your life would be “nothing” or not worth living without the person with whom you are in a consensual adult relationship, that is…probably not a great sign either that you’re maintaining healthy autonomy. But listen, this is also true, that life without intense intimacy is not very fulfilling, and intense intimacy brings risks. It can take a long time to figure out how to maintain healthy boundaries or even that you are supposed to have boundaries.

PSM: How did you come to such generosity and understanding of your father and his limited view of who you were and should be?

GF: I’m not sure I ever…was angry at him exactly for his original view. Initially I felt guilty and inadequate that I couldn’t be the daughter he would have believed most likely to have a happy life, if that makes sense, within the context of the only world he knew. I internalized that my father felt a little sorry for me, because I was smart instead of pretty and athletic, because I wasn’t popular with the people he would have considered an in crowd. They were the only people I knew too, and I had the sense from that context that I would always be an outsider. I think my father and I learned together that this wasn’t true—that there were spaces I belonged, and actually spaces that he even understood better than we adequately explored during his life. My father was a jazz fanatic. He knew a lot of musicians, the lives of people in the arts. Although my first husband made a better income than the kind of struggling artists my father had known, in reality I think that he understood the creative disposition—he had just never applied it to a young girl; it was a male disposition in his experience. And I’ve realized since his death that I never spoke to him much on that level. I talked to my father a great deal through my mother as an adult, which indicates that we had stopped understanding each other some time back. I don’t mean to overstate that—we were always close, and my father was a storyteller, so we talked. But we missed the opportunity to connect in the realm of the creative and artistic because of assumptions we both made about each other. In the arrogance of youth I often assumed I had outgrown my father as I accumulated far more education, but that was very erroneous—my father was extremely smart, and in those years I imagined myself more savvy, I was generally wrong. I coded him a certain way based on educational class and he coded me on gender—he was able to relate to me much better in my roles as a wife of a successful man and mother of his grandchildren than he was to me on the basis of my own interests—and I think we both missed out. I regret that we didn’t understand each other on those levels. But I always knew he adored me. I was always grateful for the ways in which he differed from the other men I knew in my youth. We always had a mutual unquestioned love, despite our misconceptions about one another.

PSM: The reverence you have for your mother makes me wish I had known her and even more grateful for having met you knowing all you’ve survived. This type of resilience, especially of women, is what we need to elevate more in narratives and art in all forms. Do you see yourself as resilient? Is this ultimately a story of resilience?

GF: Emily Rapp Black and I talk a lot about resilience, which is of course the subject of her new memoir, Sanctuary. It’s a hard thing to deconstruct. On the one hand, look, human beings do not usually lie down and die because of trauma. Although too many people die by suicide, the vast, vast majority of people who live through enormous pain choose, by natural instinct, to survive. Emily talks a lot about how branding those who have faced tragedy as “resilient” is a way of othering them and not having to bear witness to their pain or believe it could happen to you—as though you are warding yourself off from pain by proclaiming someone else more able to withstand it than you because of their magical “resilience.” So there’s that, and I agree with this entirely. And yet, my god people are resilient. Because while most of us survive trauma in the sense of staying alive, some people remain very stuck in a loop of their demons and do not seem able to still make space for joy, and others do find it in themselves to do so, and that is, maybe, where the word “resilient” lies. People would often come up to Emily when her son had Tay-Sachs and say things like “I would die if I were you,” and it’s like…No. No, you actually wouldn’t. You would not get to just lie down and think, All right, I’m done with this pain, I am no longer alive. To take one’s own life is a drastic act. But among that overwhelming majority who have it in them to live through intense pain, some people do not seem to continue making space for love and trust and joy and others do. My mother was incredibly resilient by that definition, in addition to her incredible physical resilience through so many medical issues. Of course, I think women in particular do not get the luxury of just allowing ourselves to remain in a closed room of pain, because that level of depression debilitates and women often have intense emotional responsibilities to others—our children, our parents—that simply makes falling apart not an option. The women in my family have survived murdered husbands, sexual abuse, the death of five of seven sons, domestic violence, immigration, and though the circumstances differ this is true of the women in almost every family, across all ethnicities and races and religions. Women endure. So in that sense, my book is a story not of the women in my family in particular but the resilience of women, period.

PSM: You ask: “How many Real Fucking Diseases intersect with the mind?” I would contend they all do, that you cannot separate mind and body and be well. However, not all physicians get that. After all you’ve been through yourself, and while caring for parents and kids, it sounds like you’ve become a tremendous advocate in a complicated healthcare world that all too often dismisses a woman’s experience of illness and pain. How would you advise women to best advocate for themselves when their symptoms are written off as “all in their head” or their pain is ignored or seen as drug-seeking behavior?

GF: I would start by differentiating these two things: for vast majority of women, it is assumed that their pain is all in their mind because the psychiatric and medical worlds have always regarded women as unreliable, untrustworthy, weak, unstable, overly emotional—that women just work themselves into a state and where sick becomes synonymous with “crazy,” which is a thing women can still be branded easily despite it mainly being a triggering slur without literal meaning. So I don’t think that most women’s illnesses are ignored because the doctors think they’re drug addicts or seeking pills, but because they plain and simple don’t believe anything is wrong with the women but that these women genuinely believe they’re sick because of their weakness, unreliability, and so-called craziness. If you read Elizabeth Land Quant’s “Hysteria & Me,” you will see information about how women who are survivors of abuse or trauma get treated in the medical system, you will just be shocked, and yet then you’ll take a moment and wonder why you’re shocked because you will know numerous women whose experiences in the medical system were…wait, just like that. The disinformation around the opiate crisis is a whole other beast. The vast majority of these deaths are caused by Fentanyl, which should only be available in hospice situations and yet is routinely available both in medical settings and in recreational drugs. The pharmaceutical industry basically conned physicians into overprescribing Oxy, and then far too many physicians just still ran with it even after the risks were known. This situation impacts both women and men in serious chronic pain, who now often cannot get prescribed medication they need largely due to behavior among pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and street dealers. It’s true that many people are addicted to opiates, but the pervasive policy of under-prescribing them so intensely now that the people with serious pain conditions cannot obtain medication to help them function is very complex. It’s true that as a woman you are even less likely to be prescribed these drugs than men, because of a lot of those earlier mentioned preconceptions of women, but I think the way our perceptions of the opiate epidemic has impacted medicine is a clusterfuck that defies just being a gendered issue.

PSM: Do you feel we’re making progress in normalizing mental health as one component of whole health? What have you witnessed that might be holding us back? What progress have you seen based on your childhood with your dad versus loving someone with a bipolar diagnosis today?

GF: I love complex questions and you are definitely giving them. I mean, my god, look, of course it’s changed. Public figures are talking openly about mental illness; the stigma, while it very much still exists, is nothing similar to what it was when my father was, say, forty, in 1961. But there are several complicating factors here. One is that I don’t think medical science has kept pace with our growing social awareness, and for example clinical depression is still not very effectively treated by antidepressant medication, and more promising treatments like Ketamine and microdosing remain far out of the price range of the average person…not to mention that there are sometimes significant time commitments that working people cannot easily make. People with mental illness are protected under disabilities laws now, and so forth. But ableism is still absolutely enormous. When I have ever told any friends about what it’s like when my husband has a so-called psychotic episode, which first of all does not involve…psychosis as anyone imagines it. In my husband’s case, he is aware that what is happening to him isn’t real, always, so again, I think the phrase “with psychotic features” is wrongly named…but anyway almost all of them have immediately asked me the question, “Weren’t you scared?” And I was not, and I think if they were in my place they would understand why there would be no possible reason to be scared, but it reveals misconceptions we still have about brain chemistry disorders. This all being said…I mean, my husband has written a memoir about his bipolar and being in addiction recovery, Liar, and he teaches at a university, has been the professor of the year, has the respect of his peers, which means he was allowed to reveal these things about himself without dire professional consequences, and I don’t think that could have been as true in my father’s generation irrespective of social class. And of course, medication has improved enormously for bipolar, no longer unilaterally flatlining people’s emotions to the point that those with bipolar were notorious for going off their meds because they were so numb. It is a different world…but again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. There has been progress but not nearly enough progress…as is true of most forms of discrimination.

PSM: This passage hit home hard: “It was the season I lost control of a narrative I finally understood I’d never had any right to control to begin with. It was the season I Could Take No More. Maybe you too have that invisible line in the sand….” It’s as though you’re telling the reader there’s a point we can all say: “No–this isn’t working for me. I’m done.” Did you write this intentionally to empower others, or are we as readers just fortunate to benefit from your experience?

GF: I absolutely without question hoped beyond hoping that one thing some readers might take from the book is that there are numerous options on the table, and you are allowed to choose one. Staying, meeting the expectations of others, fulfilling promises you made when you were a radically younger and different versions of yourself, is not the only option in a marriage. You can choose to leave. Each option will have costs. There is not one option will only yield easy results. While my book talks about this in regard to marriage, it also applies to many, many other narratives in which women tend to believe that a “good person” would only ever choose in one direction. Women are not taught that our happiness matters, and if we make unhappiness for others, we are bad, end of the story. I am not here to argue that making unhappiness for others shouldn’t be important in our decision-making processes—I wish very much that I had made certain decisions that could have caused less pain to others. But women are taught to prioritize how others see us above our authentic emotions, and whether it is remaining dutifully close to a parent who was abusive, or not pursuing a career because of guilt about not being constantly available to one’s spouse and children, or whether it is staying in a marriage that has not made you happy for nearly a decade because good people keep their promises. I believe my book strongly owns the fact that very rarely, unless one’s life is at stake, is lying—much less lying for a prolonged time—the best option for absolutely anyone. But I think the choice to lie and the choice to leave were very separate choices. Both had costs. But one was an indisputably wrong choice and the other was a choice that I had every right to make even though it hurt both me and others. I do wish for a world in which all women are empowered to understand that what they want and need matters. And for those who burned things down in ways they may regret, I hope they find recognition and empowerment too, because we all deserve a chance to move forward and not remain stuck in a place of shame forever. In fact, I would venture that remaining in eternal static shame and self-loathing can be as toxic as lying. People who are stuck in a cycle of shame can rarely see beyond themselves, and this can ultimately become a kind of narcissism. If you can make peace with yourself, there is more room inside for kindness and empathy towards others. I still have lingering issues around guilt, but I try to remind myself that remaining in that static place is not constructive. You are allowed to heal. You need to put your own oxygen mask on first before you can be much good to anyone else. You deserve to breathe.