Don't Bite The Hook

The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer and editor Gina Frangello

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Gina Frangello’s memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage, and included on numerous “Best of 2021” lists. Her sixth book, on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, is forthcoming from IG Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series. Gina is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting. Now a lead editor at Row House Publishing, she brings more than two decades of experience, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review, and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is on the low residency MFA faculty at the University of Nevada-Reno/Tahoe and runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black.

1. What are you reading now?

I’m reading an ARC of Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed, which I’ve been waiting for since the deal was announced. I’m also writing a book on Elena Ferrante for IG Publishing’s Bookmarked series due next month, so her Neapolitan novels are also my constant companions.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I didn’t really have to hide books from my parents because in 1980, you could read Flowers in the Attic at the age of eleven right under your parents’ noses and nobody blinked. Attitudes around “protecting children” were extremely different, and my parents—who took me to see films like All That Jazz when they came out—weren’t staying up nights worrying I might be exposed to sex or violence in books. This was the age of General Hospital’s Luke and Laura as daytime TV’s first supercouple, and when I think of some of the books we also read at the time that passed for just regular smutty popular literature, so much of it involved sex with underage girls, rape, and kidnapping in the name of “romance,” in addition to sadistic grandmothers physically torturing teenagers and leaving siblings to have nonconsensual sex with each other...the whole atmosphere was beyond repugnant, even in light of how prevalent rape culture still is in television and film. When I was growing up, celebrity teenagers dated grown men in the public eye and were photographed for magazines like this was normal, so most of those who were not famous just accepted these things as normal...even as, by contrast, a politician like Gary Hart could disappear in one day flat as a result of having a woman not his wife sit on his lap, so the sexual mores of the my youth were confusing to say the least. But my favorite childhood book actually wasn’t the least bit racy—The Changeling by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, about friendship and social class, still some of my favorite themes in literature.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time? 

I have a few books I’ve reread so often they’ve literally fallen apart, including my old paperback of The Unbearable Lightness of Being...likely no other writer influenced me quite as much as Kundera did, especially in terms of sparking my interest in playing with point of view. I wrote about his use of the editorial omniscient in LARB some years back and am rereading some of his books now that he’s died. Margaret Atwood, especially The Blind Assassin, and Mary Gaitskill were also huge influences and are writers I revisit a lot, and Doctorow’s Book of Daniel was a head-exploding game changer—I teach it, Beloved, The Hours (and Mrs. Dalloway), and The God of Small Things frequently, which requires rereading. But it’s possible that I’ve read the relatively obscure novel, Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano, about a bunch of decadent, drug-addled, bed-hopping expats in Nairobi, more than I’ve ever read any other book except my husband’s memoir, Liar.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

I’ve dressed virtually the same for my entire adult life since college, excepting a brief period in my early thirties when I was trying to look more grown up and respectable for whatever strange, misguided reasons. Most things in my closet have been there for well over ten years if not a quarter century. Photographic evidence indicates that I feel most like myself in dresses—I wear a lot of dresses because I find them extremely easy and comfortable. People are always saying things to me like, Oh, you took the time to dress up! when actually, it takes less time to put on a dress than it does any other type of clothing, and you don’t have something like stiff jean fabric between your legs when moving around. Give me a maxi dress any day.

I also have these old Frye cowboy boots that I wear with far greater frequency than any other shoes. I bought them in early 2011, and my friend Kathy—who would be dead by the end of the year of ovarian cancer—said to me, What’s with these boots and all those silver and gold studs on them, they’re a little loud for your tastes, and I told her Just give these boots five years to get worn out and you’re not going to believe how amazing they look. Maybe I wore them more often because she was gone, but indeed once the boots got kind of roughed up, they were fabulous. Whenever anyone compliments them, I feel a sense of maybe Kathy being able to see them and laughing at my determination, so I’m kind of emotionally attached to them for superstitious reasons that belie my atheism.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

My friend Julie Coyne once said to me, at an extremely volatile juncture in my life, “Don’t bite the hook.” I don’t think I’ve ever found myself in a bad situation since then when I haven’t thought of her advice and, when I’m smart, applied it.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

One of my cats, Kennedy, is almost seventeen now. She’s part Russian Blue, and very fat, and for a lot of years—I’ve had her since she was two—she was really more my twin daughters’ cat. Both of my twins were home for a lot of the pandemic, so although they’d gone away to college, they were back much of mid-sophomore year to senior year, so I think Kennedy thought that was that and they were home for good. When they moved to Brooklyn after graduation, she was pretty bereft. And slowly, although I think she’d previously thought of me as her alpha female competition in the house, we started to bond, almost like we were empty nesters together, and now we’re incredibly close and we spoon and cuddle all the time.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Oh, Jane. I could make you a forty-page list of things I’m happy worked out differently than I expected...but the two most important are:

1)     I haven’t had any recurrence of breast cancer, knock on all the wood—I’m an Italian girl after all. I was diagnosed eight years ago this week, actually, and I did not expect to get this far disease free, but my biggest wish was that I could stay healthy at least until my children were all over eighteen. My youngest has a few months to go, but I was always extremely clear that if I could get through these years, the rest are gravy. Which doesn’t mean I’m not hopeful for a lot of gravy.

2)     I was worried that my kids might never accept my second husband, who moved in with us in 2017 and whom I married in 2020. But they have all shown just incredible grace to us—to him and, absolutely, to me—and the way they’ve allowed our family to evolve has been the gift of my life. I mean, they are the gift of my life. But that particular gift has been the single greatest factor that could have made me an unhappy person had it gone differently, and instead has allowed me to experience incredible joy and excitement about the future.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

I do both of these things! But I’m also in a band, The Hitchcock Brunettes, with my husband and two of our friends, so I guess these days the singing part wins out.

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

My biggest hopes are tied in to the answer I gave above about things that have worked out better than I could ever have expected—just living a disease-free life for as long as possible, managing my osteoarthritis and Mixed Connective Tissue Disease and having a good quality of life that allows me to enjoy my artistic and adventurous kids, my creatively rich marriage, my work, my forthcoming move in 2024 to the California desert. I have a lot of hopes and have always had a lot of hopes and dreams—they got me out of poverty and out of my old neighborhood, and they also got me through some times in middle-age when my life felt like a five-alarm dumpster fire. But the thing is also that I’ve reached a point where there’s nothing I feel I’ve missed out on. And I count myself extraordinarily lucky in that, and I’m also thankful to my husband Rob for the ways we’ve been able to make each other’s lives bigger than they were.

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I have a really hard time asking for help, and yet somehow despite that my life has been overflowing with kindnesses from others. A lot of this is the luck of the draw. I was born to extremely kind parents, people who, even though they were living in poverty and my father suffered from overwhelming medical and mental health issues, sacrificed absolutely everything to help me rise out of rough circumstances and obtain an education. Now that I have three kids of my own, living in a world that is far more precarious than any I could have fathomed as a girl, where nothing a parent does can guarantee Gen Z will be able to have what was once thought of as a “normal lives,” my parents are my constant role models in terms of keeping my eye on the ball of what they may need, without allowing it to pull me out of the present and keep me from appreciating joy now. My parents were my ride-or-dies, and if my kids know that I’m that for them, then I’m repaying my parents’ legacy in a way profoundly important to me.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

Mothering. Intense love. Art. Friendship. Travel. Gratitude. Rinse and repeat.

Meet me in the comment section

Do you have any pieces of clothing that remind you of beloveds? Have your hopes and dreams gotten you through difficult times? Who are your ride-or-dies? What resonated most with you about Gina’s words?