A Conversation with Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello’s latest book, Blow Your House Down, tells the story of how she left her marriage in explosive fashion, and it is a testament to a woman’s power to make choices for herself, even if they’re deeply unpopular. This is something we can’t get enough of at Undomesticated, and although Frangello’s book mostly takes place in her hometown of Chicago, it includes poignant moments from her trips abroad that speak to urgent social issues from sexual assault to ethical travel.

Undomesticated: You write that your concept of travel as a young woman was so different from what you’ve been able to provide to your children. You were “sleeping on train floors around Europe, squatting in the traveler’s subculture of London surrounded mostly by men and working under-the-table jobs as a bartender or maid.” And later, you write, “Unless you count camping, my children have never previously vacationed anywhere rougher than a Super 8 motel—a fact that fills me with shame and pride simultaneously.” Can you talk more about that? Do you think it’s important to have experiences that make us stronger and more aware? Have your thoughts about this changed at all since you wrote the book?

Gina Frangello: I'll start from the end here and specify that the line there about my kids and the Super 8 Motel is no longer accurate, nor do I have the same feelings about that now, in 2021, that I did during the 2015 trip to Guatemala that the line applied to, when I was only about three months out of my first marriage.

I don't talk a lot about my kids in interviews, but what I'll say here is that all of my children seem to have absorbed by osmosis or nurturing my obsession with traveling, and one of my daughters spent part of the pandemic traveling around remote parts of the United States living out of the back of her rusty, dilapidated truck and camping, so in a whole host of ways my kids have now claimed their own relationships to travel that transcend the narrative of how a parent who grew up in poverty, as I did, may have fantasies about giving her children a so-called-better-life as that has to do with economics.

My experiences traveling—while there were definitely harrowing moments—were also some of the most valuable and formative times of my life, and I couldn't be more excited or proud that this seems to be true of my children too. Rather than the Super 8 motel analogy, I now think in terms of things like having the context and savvy to keep yourself safe to the best of your ability. My late teens and early twenties were spent often flinging myself into somewhat dangerous situations in the name of experience—in the name of running away from where I'd come from—and I'm extremely glad to see that my kids are more wary in this regard. Things have changed a lot since the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was doing that kind of train-floor-sleeping and squatting. There was a sense for those of us who were growing up in Gen X—and I mean especially women but perhaps this is true across the board—that we weren't supposed to flinch at danger, and that when traumatic things happened we weren't supposed to let them get to us—that we were supposed to be tough, unflappable, at some cool remove from—and I'm obviously being sarcastic here—petty concerns for our own personal safety.

I'm very glad to see that this generation of young women, as well as people of color and LGBTQIA+ youth, don't seem to be drinking that Kool-Aid, and have the courage to value their own safety and to insist upon it. I very much came into motherhood wanting to offer my children far more safety than I'd had in my youth, and it can be easy at times to confuse economic comfort with safety because that's true within limits. People with absolutely no economic safety nets, whether it's nowhere to live or no health insurance or no idea where their next meal is coming from, are not leading lives where they feel personally safe, obviously, but—and I've said this elsewhere—once a person's basic needs are met economically, safety often isn't about money, and experience is a valuable thing for coming into adulthood.

In my own youth I confused experience and adventure, too often, with personal risk. I hope my kids don't make that mistake, and therefore I feel pretty confident that they can accumulate experiences in their passion for travel irrespective of whether they're in the back of a truck or staying at a friend's borrowed home, or sleeping in a motel, or camping, or splurging on a resort. What matters to me is that hunger to see more of the world than our own niche, and to try to learn from that, and to recognize that even getting to leave your own environment at all—something my parents didn't have anywhere near the opportunities to do that I've had, much less than my kids have—is itself an immense privilege to be handled with care.

Undomesticated: In the same light, my heart raced when I learned in Blow Your House Down that a pivotal scene in your first novel, A Life in Men, was also based on your own life. The novel, which is about a friendship between two young American women traveling together in Europe, takes a dramatic turn when they are held hostage in Greece by men who had seemed upstanding and trustworthy. It’s one of the most chilling novels I’ve read and I still think about that scene, even though I read it some years back. That’s saying a lot for a 50 year-old memory! What advice do you have for readers to avoid this? Now with cell phones, communication is easier, but trafficking is still such a horrible problem around the world.

Frangello: To be clear, I don't think what happened to me and my friend Amy when we were twenty—which was the basis for the incident in Greece in A Life in Men—was trafficking per se as it's commonly understood. On maybe our third day in Greece, we went off with two men who were considerably older than we were, who claimed to be airline pilots but could have been anyone, in an environment where we didn't speak the language, didn't know the layout of the land or where the hell we were once we got into their car, and so on, and we ended up with one incredibly predatory, misogynistic, and potentially violent man and one man who seemed less intent on holding us captive but was complicitly following his friend's lead.

Zorg, whose real first name I used, did also tell me that I had to come to Spain with him or he would come to the United States and find me and kill me, but these thirty-two years later, I believed then and still believe that he was exhibiting a kind of toxic masculinity in which he genuinely thought his saying that was romantic, and that I would be wooed by it rather than absolutely terrified—and also that if I was terrified that was cool too because it made me less likely to resist him when he wanted to fuck later.

So...I mean, I'm not giving this "it wasn't exactly trafficking" disclaimer in order to downplay what happened to us, but rather to say that I don't consider myself an authority to speak to the intense global severity of trafficking. What I do know is that almost all women at some point are in a situation in which they feel in sexual or physical danger or both, and that my friend and I encountered a pretty rapey guy and his enabling friend while we were in an environment we couldn't control at all, that left us very much at their mercy.

I also think they themselves weren't sure what was going to happen, and that like a lot of men, it was less their goal to violently rape or kill us than to wear down our will, our confidence, and our sense of control until we capitulated to their desires in order to maintain some illusion of free will. I think this is an extremely common tactic among men: to obtain false consent by creating a situation in which a woman fears for her safety more if she tries to resist than if she goes along without a fight.

But also, A Life in Men is a novel. The Greece situation is very closely based on real life events—the false laughter on the balcony, the being taken to an all-Greek bar where we wouldn't be likely to see other travelers, and then our actually encountering a bunch of guys from Harvard Medical School who "rescued" us by outnumbering the two men with whom we were there...a bunch of it is true, even the stalking us through various bars and having to escape out back doors and the two would-be-rapists waiting for us all night outside the door of what had been our rented room, but that we'd had to move from that morning due to a shower flood and therefore they didn't find us—that all happened. What didn't happen was the rape itself.

The dynamic between friends Mary and Nix in that novel is very different from the dynamic between my real friend Amy and me, and I allowed Nix's fears for Mary, a fictional character who has a life-shortening illness, to guide her actions in the novel. In Amy's and my case, our two amateur abductors got hungry and found no food in the villa and took us out before anyone had actually been raped, and we then managed to stage our escape by relying on a different group of men to "rescue" us, which itself felt dangerous but turned out not to be. I'll also add here that even as I was saying we weren't raped...well, in the sense that we were groped, kissed, pressured into drinking, taken to a location from which we couldn't escape...those things are of course sexual assault. What I mean is that it didn't get to the point that it does in the novel, where Nix is raped by both men while Mary is passed out.

Back to the question at hand of what women can do to keep themselves safe: Yes, cell phones make it easier. Being smart enough not to be transported by vehicle to somewhere you don't know where you are in a foreign country where you don't speak the language is a basic safety measure. But there isn't anything one can do that can genuinely prevent someone from sexually assaulting you under any circumstances. Women can exercise the best of judgment and take every precaution, but ultimately we need to focus far more heavily on prosecuting rape more strongly in the legal system, believing rape survivors, and teaching our young boys and teens from their earliest education not to rape and not to be party to a rape or complicit in a rape. Rape can't be stopped by the potential victims only changing our behavior; it has to be stopped at the root.

Undomesticated: I completely agree and am so glad you survived that! Back to Blow Your House Down, I was really drawn into the scenes when you took your daughters to Guatemala and helped your friend Julie at her non-profit, Education and Hope, an organization that provides all aspects of a healthy education to children. You contrast it with a previous trip to a Kenyan children’s home where you were “subjected to a series of cringeworthy White Savior performances, such as the orphanage director dragging every child out to the courtyard—even one in a wheelchair—to take photos with us and our stacked-up donated goods, and in the end, even though we had brought a month’s worth of rice and toiletries and school supplies, we all left feeling slightly dirty.” In Guatemala, though, “Julie makes no effort to make this reunion moment about us—she doesn’t even introduce us, much less prompt the children to thank us, hug us, introduce themselves, or speak English on cue.” Since the pandemic started, I have been thinking more about traveling responsibly and one of the things I’m more aware of is giving back to communities I visit, whether it’s patronizing a mom-and-pop restaurant or volunteering with a children’s program. At the same time, I want to make sure it’s done in the most respectful way. Can you talk a little about your work at Education and Hope and how it influenced your own views of travel and white saviorism?

Frangello: This is a profoundly complex topic. My daughters and I talk about this a lot and it's something one of them has studied fairly extensively too. My current husband and I went down to Brownsville/Matamoros to do work at the Texas-Mexico border in 2019, and that issue crops up in such situations also, and was a thing we unpacked a lot.

I have no huge answers in this regard. All I know is that you have to go into any situation fully aware that you're going to learn and receive as much as or more than you teach and give, or your attitude is potentially quite damaging to the people you think you're serving. There are a lot of complexities around organized "service trips," perhaps especially of the variety that affluent Americans pay big bucks to send their kids on, where the goal is definitely very messy and can involve everything from wanting to have an adventure for yourself to wanting something to look good on a college application to honestly having an imperialist and colonialist and racist view that your mere presence doing X or Y for a couple of weeks is going to be an epiphanic transformation for the population you're working with.

It's all sticky because you can likewise talk yourself in circles so much that the alternative is complacency, like Oh I don't want to be a white savior so X situation has nothing to do with me and I think I'll just go out to dinner and forget about it. This is a thing white people need to grapple with and listen to people of color about, and listen to those experienced in genuine and longstanding service and activism about, and not just barge in thinking we have some wisdom to impart or that we're "gracing" people by showing that we care, if that makes sense.

I know a woman—she's white, she's an attorney, she's quite well-off—who has devoted her life these past five years to issues at the border, but when she goes to a new location to work, she doesn't stride in brandishing her law credentials and acting like everyone should be grateful to see her; she asks those who have been there for a long time doing the on-the-ground work, "What do you need?" And maybe what they need is for her to stand in a windowless room and sort and fold clothing by size for 10 hours, so that those clothes can be given to the right people, and it's not going to be an Instagram moment and it's not going to be an "experience" for her, it's just plain and simple doing what is needed, without ego.

White people...my god we have a lot of ego. We have so much collective ego that sometimes white progressives can't stop trying to virtue-signal and out-woke each other, arguing back and forth about whose motives are purest, at the expense of doing cooperative grassroots work. And yet I know so many activists I admire, too, both people of color—the writer and attorney Natashia Deón comes to mind; she's amazing—and white people too, like my friend Eiren Caffall, a writer and musician whose work centers around loss, extinction, and nature. I think if you can find someone who you can see is not acting out of either ego or some creepy religious savior dogma, and let that person put you to some kind of use, it's maybe a step in the right direction. But this is a huge issue and one I haven't even remotely fully sorted out for myself yet—I'm still trying, one day at a time.

Undomesticated: Same here. These conversations are so helpful, so thank you very much for taking time to discuss your work with Undomesticated!