[Interview] with Gina Frangelllo

Gina Frangello has a lot going on.  Currently, she is a teacher, coach and editor for writers from novices to MFAs, and co-founder and co-operator of two businesses serving writers.  She is also a novelist, memoirist, short story and essay writer and magazine columnist, with six books and a 30-plus-year history of feminist literary work under her belt.Betty-Jo Tilley of Kelp talked with Frangello about the recent re-releases of her short story collection, Slut Lullabies, and her novel My Sister’s Continent, and why these books are even more relevant today than when they were first published 16 and 20 years ago.  Frangello also took the time to share why her fictional relationships are messy and her characters can never seem to come out clean, the myth of the fulltime writer, a little bit about the stories in her mind that haven’t yet been written, and how she joined a band and started drumming and singing in her 50s.  

 (KELP JOURNAL): Will you tell us about your background growing up, and when you began to write?

(GINA FRANGELLO): I started writing before I actually knew how to write.  I was four, and I would illustrate little books and dictate them to my mother, and she would write them down and we'd staple them together. By the time I was 10, I was writing my first novel. I grew up poor, so my mom used to buy these brown butcher block rolls of paper for economy because my novels were like 400 pages long, and I would write and illustrate them. And then when I was probably around 12 or 13, I moved over to notebook paper. By the time I was 15, I had four book length novels all about the same characters.

(KJ): Were they variations on real people you knew, or were they totally made-up?

(GF): They were a fictional world about four orphans, Genevieve, Karen, Patrick, and Frank, and their misadventures, first at their orphanage and then they all managed to get adopted into the same home.

Then I got a driver's license and started going out a lot, but in college, I started writing again, and studying creative writing on the side. I was a psychology major, and I have a master's in psychology, but I was also writing all that time.

(KJ): Tell us about the academic and early professional influences that led you to writing full time.

(GF): Well, I don't write full time at all, and I never have. Part of the reality of nearly 95% of professional writers, I would say, is that we don't write full-time.  It just is not that sort of business, even for writers who have multiple books published.   

The major transition for me, though, is that I used to be a practicing therapist and my writing was going to be sort of a hobby, and when I was about 26, I redirected my life and went to grad school for English and creative writing. At that point, I was going to get my master’s and go right back into working as a therapist. But that never happened. I stayed in the writing world for the remainder of my life.I have many jobs besides being a writer, though everything has to do with the literary world in some capacity; teaching creative writing, editing other people's work. My writing doesn’t earn enough money to be my only job, so part of the reality for me and most writers is that we write in the spaces between teaching or other work that sustains us economically.

(KJ): My Sister's Continent shows a deep understanding of Freudian psychology and particularly Freud's case of Dora. How did that play into your synthesis of the novel?

(GF): So, I had studied psychoanalysis as part of my education as a therapist. When I was coming up, psychoanalysis and Freudian theory had already largely fallen out of favor. I read many feminist revisionists, and later, when I got into the literary world, I was completely surprised to find out how heavily psychoanalytic theory played in literary theory. I was fascinated to find French feminists like Helene Cixous talking about Freud and Dora, you know, things that I had learned about in my previous world. I designed and taught a class at University of Illinois, Chicago called, “The Hysterics in Literature,” and we read Fragments of Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud’s short book of the “Dora” case study.” And as I was immersing myself in it, I came to realize that these characters I had published quite a few short stories about had weird parallel mirroring of the families in the Dora case study. I decided to go back and recast these characters, in a retelling of Freud’s Dora case study, and that became My Sister's Continent.

(KJ): At the core of this novel is a complex love and rivalry between two twin sisters. How did your life experience inform the characters and the setting in the novel?

(GF): I’m an only child, but I grew up with a very big family on my father's side. I mean, there were about 60 relatives in a four-block radius of my house. I grew up practically like a sister with my two cousins next door, and one of them and I used to pretend to be twins. Then, when I was in college, I lived with identical twins for several years, which ratcheted my interest in twins up further because I was the third twin, so to speak. But it was also a bit of an intellectual exercise to fragment the Dora character into two sides.  Freud ended up hypothesizing that the reason for his failure in his analysis with Dora -- and I would posit there were numerous reasons for his failure, but the one he put forth --  was that he had failed to realize that she was bisexual, that he had been singularly fixated on a belief that she was afraid of her desire for Herr K, right, when in actuality she was attracted to Herr K’s wife, Frau K? So, I decided to split Dora into two sisters, and explore these two pathways of sexuality, the fears and the dangers and the intrigues of each direction.

(KJ): Your publisher obviously considers My Sister's Continent relevant today, 20 years after it was first released.   And it's been 121 years since Freud wrote his study of Dora. What’s your take on why your book is still so relevant?

(GF): I would argue it's even more relevant than it was at the time I wrote the novel. When I first wrote it in 1998, I would say the situation for women was wildly preferable to what it is now.  While there were all the same problems of violence against women and, you know, basically an entire human history of patriarchy, we collectively believed we were on a path towards progress, and that it was inevitable, right? I see hints of that even in the text, this assumption that from the time of Freud, we were on an ascent, and that we would continue to be on that ascent as women. By the time the novel came out, the post-9/11 landscape had already started to indicate that that might not be as true as we had assumed in the '90s. There was a bit of a frenzy of traditionalism and a move away from progressive ideology, as there often are in times of fear. But shortly after the book came out, we would have two Obama presidencies, so I admit I was naïve enough to think we were back on course. At this point, though, we’re a decade in to this complete shit show of American history, you know, the eradication of women's rights, and of queer rights, and of immigrant’s and people of color’s rights. These last two issues are not tackled in My Sister's Continent, but when one marginalized group suffers, all tend to suffer. So, I could not have foreseen, sadly, how relevant things would still be all these years later. I would have thought it would read like a historical novel by this point! And I was wildly disturbed to see, when intensively revisiting the novel for the first time in many years, that almost nothing has changed, except in a negative direction, ala Dobbs.

(KJ): My Sister’s Continent quotes Freud: “The sex life of even the mature woman still presents a dark continent to psychology.” What was your thinking behind your title?

(GF): When I was first writing the book in the 1990s, we were still in the fairly early decades of women starting to write about our own sexuality, rather than having it defined in literature by men.  Until the 1970s, women writing candidly about this were far and away the exception. Some women like Jean Rhys were luckily slipping through the cracks, but for the most part, female sexuality in literature was still largely defined by men, just as it had always been in psychoanalysis and in the terrain of psychology. I felt an enormous urgency in that emerging body of literature reclaiming women’s bodies and sexuality from the male narrative, and retelling old stories was part of that.

(KJ): One of the sisters writes to her therapist about her father, “You choose one truth, his. I offer instead the messy parallel reality in which we dwell.” Would you say that rings true for your writing?  

(GF): I think the reality of human experience is that there often isn't only one truth, and that one truth doesn't necessarily utterly invalidate another.  I wanted to add another layer into My Sister's Continent, because, when we look at demographics of women and various factions of feminism, it isn’t like all women homogenously agree.  So, I have the sisters fundamentally disagreeing about their own history, as well. Not presenting things in black and white, in binaries, or through one utopian lens has always been important to me, and I play with that a lot in my work.   

(KJ): How long did My Sister’s Continent take you to write, and what were the various stages of drafts. to finished novel, to final publishing house?

(GF): It was a very, very long journey, which I cite a lot to students, because it’s easy to lose heart. I started working on the first version of the novel in 1993, when I was 24 years old. That version of the novel had nothing to do with Freud. When I realized it wasn't quite working, I went back to University of Illinois at Chicago's Program for Writers in order to learn to write a better book. I’d had some wonderful undergrad writing professors like Lorrie Moore and Ann Packer, but I had only studied writing casually, as an elective. In grad school, I started writing a lot of short stories about the characters, many of which were published, and then I began revising the novel, added the Freudian elements. I mean, almost nothing survived from the original version. I finished that draft in 1998. Then, I got my first literary agent in 2001, and My Sister's Continent went around to the big publishers in New York, the Big Five, as we call them now. And it had some close calls, but it was largely seen in the post-9/11 landscape as too cerebral and too dark. One editor hilariously said, “I wouldn't know how to explain this book to my marketing department without blushing or breaking down.” And so, that was that, for a minute, and I started writing another novel. Then Lidia Yuknavitch launched a press. I knew she was also interested in French feminist theory and psychoanalysis, and the Dora case study, which she would later publish a novel about, too. My friend, Cris Mazza, one of my professors at UIC, recommended I send to Lidia. I did, and the book was accepted three days later.

(KJ): Wow. You mentioned you wrote a lot of short stories in the interim, which leads us to Slut Lullabies.  There’s so much humor in these stories, but their themes sting as much as the largely unfunny My Sister's Continent.  Would you shed some light on the role of humor in your work?

(GF): I think in general, there is a fair amount of humor in my work. When we're dealing with darker material, humor is a way of achieving emotional variance, of not just getting mired down and turning things into trauma porn or exhausting the reader with just one emotional note. Slut Lullabies deals with gender politics and power struggles, and class issues and violence. I'm not interested in light humor, but I'm very interested in gallows humor, which I would say My Sister’s Continent also contains to some degree.

(KJ): “My Parasite,” in Slut Lullabies is a darkly hilarious story about conjoined twins with a conjoinment coach for their constant bickering over privacy issues.  And one of them, Rita, has written a memoir called, A Vagina of My Own… 

(GF): Yes, there's a whole world that “My Parasite” exists in, in a more detailed fashion, in my head.  Things like the conjoinment coaching, and the weird laws in that dystopian alternate reality; I have other stories in my head but only “My Parasite” has been written.

(KJ): In the story, “Attila the There,” a young Dutch woman remarks, “You Americans always say this kind of girl and that kind of girl. It's just like your politics. One party's for rich white people, another for all the poor people and the immigrants. You say you all believe it and you run out and you vote for this person and you marry this kind of girl.”  Can you fill us in on the milieu in which you wrote this passage, both contextually in the story, and with what you were observing in the life around you at the time?

(GF): So, I used to live in Amsterdam in the late 1990s, and what fascinated me, among many things, about the culture there was that people were extremely free with sexuality, with decriminalizing sex work and many drugs, all these things that appeared to be ...for lack of a better word liberated, compared to the United States. If a woman wanted to try on a shirt in a store, she would just undress and try it on right there in the aisle--once, I went for a massage, and everyone of every gender had one dressing room and then sat around the waiting room with a tiny towel the size of a hand towel, otherwise naked, reading their magazines and so on while the fully dressed receptionist chatted away on the phone--it was a lot of culture shock that at first I processed as Amsterdam being some kind of utopia without the moralizing around sexuality and other behaviors that torment people in so many countries and cultures. And so it made sense to me that many young people in A'dam see Americans as being a bit ridiculous in terms of the binaries in our culture, which is what the young woman in the story is saying. And it is certainly true that the Netherlands are a great place to be queer compared to the States, and I should also add that I love Amsterdam and hope to live there again someday. But what I also found when I scratched the surface of Dutch culture was racism, xenophobia, and classism embedded into the sex work industry and the lower rate of married women with financial independence or who attain high level positions like CEOs than in the States, and I had the same kind of crash I described earlier of, Oh shit, things really are in many ways the same everywhere. People are just less embarrassed by naked breasts in some cultures, but that doesn't mean women or people of color have attained equality. This being said, the United States has gotten much worse for every marginalized group since the late 1990s, so the double standards of the Dutch seem pretty mild in the scope of history compared to what's currently happening here.

(KJ): “Saving Crystal,” in Slut Lullabies, explores agency when the protagonist, Jenna, both discovers her power dynamic and remains victimized.  What was the inspiration for that story?(GF): That was written in the early 1990s, when I was a therapist for teenage foster girls who had been taken out of their homes for very hard-core sexual abuse. I also worked with teens with disordered eating, and with survivors at what was then called a “battered women's” agency. And so the story grew somewhat out of threads of what I saw as a therapist in terms of multi-generational violence where a father is abusive to his wife, and then his daughter ends up in an abusive situation... Because I grew up in the inner city and had seen a lot of violence, I thought to myself, Oh, when you leave your old neighborhood, it's not going to be like that in other places. I was still in my early 20s writing that story and coming to the epiphany that it was kind of the same everywhere. The thing about Jenna's power dynamics is that she makes a play of her power with Robert, her teacher, that is temporarily successful, but she doesn't maintain her power. There is a steep price to pay for it, and that, I think, is very true to life.  lt's not easy to overcome centuries of patriarchy and violence.(KJ): Will you share what you're writing now?

(GF): I just finished a draft of a novel, and actually, the characters from My Sister's Continent are part of that novel.

(KJ): You are also in two entrepreneurial ventures with two close writer friends. Tell us about Circe Consulting, which you operate with Emily Rapp Black, and about Craft School, which you also founded with Emily and with Jeannine Ouilette. 

(GF): Emily and I have been in business together at Circe since 2019. We do developmental editing, coaching, some ghost writing. We ran small classes and retreats with no more than 15 people, and we had fantasies about doing something larger.

I got to know Jeannine, and I loved her work, and at one point, she was talking about how she ran a program called, “School,” that was more educational in emphasis, rather than workshop based.  Emily and I were drawn to a model that was primarily craft and close read driven, with the capacity to expand into a larger community than the workshop model. Particularly in our current landscape, where many people are feeling divided from their neighbors, their family, we see creative people hungry for a community of people who are maybe more like-minded to themselves. So, we started talking about ways we could expand on what Jeannine had been doing, by adding two additional faculty, Emily and myself.  And we ended up forming a whole new business called “Craft School.”

(KJ): You are married to novelist and memoirist Rob Roberge, who's also a musician with a band. Tell us what it’s been like for you to discover your musical voice in your 50s.

(GF): It’s literally ridiculous how fun it’s been. One night, we were out on the porch in the California desert, where he was playing one of his band’s old songs on the guitar. And I'll tell you, I probably had a tequila or something because I just started singing. I had never done that before in front of any living being other than my small children, and I just started belting out the lyrics, and Rob said, Why didn't you tell me you can sing?” And I said, “because I can't.” And he was like, Hold on, let's play with this a little. So, we started singing and playing together. Rob has been with the LA punk band, The Urinals, since 2006. But when he moved to Chicago, he wasn't able to play with them as much. I have two great friends in Chicago, one of whom plays the guitar and one of whom plays bass. We four ended up forming the Hitchcock Brunettes. I started drumming, and Rob and I write the songs.  We made our little debut album. “A View of the Swans,” and it's just absolutely insanely fun. One of the most fun aspects is that it has nothing to do with work or ambition or money or having to be great. It's just pure creative expression in this way that I haven't quite been able to tap into since I was in my 20s, you know?  I mean, the sense that you're doing something entirely for yourself and that there is not necessarily an implicit audience interaction. We play shows, sure, and we made an album, but the vast majority of our life as a band takes place in our friend Matt's basement, or between Rob and me in our own house. It's been one of the great joys of my 50s.

(KJ): Where do you live now, and how can we hear the Hitchcock Brunettes?

(GF): Rob and I are just closing out our second year living in California for the academic year, but we still spend summers in Chicago, so that band has some gigs already this summer around Chicago.  We also just played at the High Desert Lo-Fi Lit Fest in California, a festival Rob and I co-founded.  So, we play wherever we can, when we can all be in the same place. You can also find “A View of the Swans,” on all the streaming platforms.  We don't have a website yet, God only knows why. I mean, maybe because we're busy? (laughs)

Gina Frangello has written four books of fiction and two books of nonfiction. Her novel My Sister’s Continent, 2006, and short story collection Slut Lullabies, 2010, have just been re-released by Northwestern University Press.  Her memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a “Best of 2021” at Lithub and The Chicago Review of Books, among others. Gina has served as editor for numerous publications and publishers, including Other Voices Books, The Nervous Breakdown, TriQuarterly Online, The Rumpus, LARB, and RISE Books. She is a columnist for Psychology Today, and on the low-residency MFA faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno/Tahoe.  She co-founded and co-runs Circe Consulting and Craft School. She is also the co-founder of the Bombay Beach Lit Fest and the High Desert Lo-Fi Lit Fest.

Betty-Jo Tilley is a Los Angeles-based writer and 38-year real estate veteran living in Atwater Village after losing her home in the January 2025 Pacific Palisades Wildfires.  Her related essays were published in The Keepthings and Opposite of Nihilism. A graduate of UCR’s Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program, her creative nonfiction has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, and her fiction in Scavengers Literary Magazine and Lit Angels. The Coachella Review has featured her critical work and author interviews, and she is a regular contributor of interviews to Kelp, including with Flynn Berry, Alex Espinoza, Ivy Pochoda, Nicholas Belardes, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, and Elizabeth Crane.  She has recently taken to blasting the Hitchcock Brunettes’ “A View of the Swans,” while navigating the LA freeways.