In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be. This account of Carmen Maria Machado’s years in an abusive same-sex relationship plays with form, blending elements of literary criticism, pop culture essays, folk tales and the shadowy worlds of her short fiction.

She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. In the Dream House is a most unmemoir-like memoir. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press) In one of the stories from Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection, women afflicted by some unnamed.

Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.Īnd it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope-the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman-through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties, Judging by incels, alpha males, redpill, et al., I think that it’s still a common belief that a disinterest in a man’s dick must be a species of psychosis.