For authors Courtney Zoffness (The Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow) and Gina Frangello (Every Kind of Wanting), years of writing fiction have informed their latest projects in narrative nonfiction. The results are compelling and complex narratives of womanhood, motherhood, and art from authors who have a deeply formulated understanding of society. The authors joined us online for a conversation on Zoffness’s collection of personal essays, Spilt Milk, and Frangello’s memoir Blow Your House Down.
Featured Books
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Spilt Milk
By Courtney Zoffness
Published by McSweeney's Publishing
What role does a mother play in raising thoughtful, generous children? In her literary debut, internationally award-winning writer Courtney Zoffness considers what we inherit from generations past—biologically, culturally, spiritually—and what we pass on to our children. Spilt Milk is an intimate, bracing, and beautiful exploration of vulnerability and culpability. Zoffness relives her childhood anxiety disorder as she witnesses it manifest in her firstborn; endures brazen sexual advances by a student in her class; grapples with the implications of her young son’s cop obsession; and challenges her Jewish faith. Where is the line between privacy and secrecy? How do the stories we tell inform who we become? These powerful, dynamic essays herald a vital new voice.
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Blow Your House Down
By Gina Frangello
Published by Counterpoint Press
Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness.
Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress “being good” in order to reclaim your own life.
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