in the dream house a memoir by carmen maria machado

Sometimes she tells the story straightforwardly, as if pouring out her memories through a sieve shaped like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. There’s ‘Dream House as Bluebeard’ (after the folktale), ‘Dream House as Noir’ and ‘Dream House as Murder Mystery,’ to name a few. The house, and the woman in it, are solid and unchangeable, but the author tints and transform her memories through formal experimentation, refracting them through different genres, from erotica to stoner comedy.Įvery few pages Machado yanks her story in a new direction. The form of the house, ever-flexible, echoes and contrasts the constantly shifting forms Machado’s tale comprises. It is, as Machado urges us to believe, ‘as real as the book you are holding in your hands.’ But it’s a place of metaphor, too, representing how easily a place filled with the promise of domestic bliss can transform into a prison. ‘The Dream House’ is, ostensibly, the couple’s Midwestern home. Machado’s abusive ex never gets a name she’s known only as ‘The woman in the Dream House.’ The house straddles reality and metaphor, sometimes uneasily. In the Dream House balances grief and fear, with an undertone of gratitude and relief at the opportunity for Machado voice her story.

Yet Machado deftly disassembles domestic abuse narratives in same-sex couples, drawing upon her own traumatic experiences with an abusive ex-girlfriend, with a sleight of hand familiar to those who enjoyed her previous collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Three hundred or so pages packed with emotional manipulation and physical terror is, unsurprisingly, a challenge for readers. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is noteworthy for many reasons, but for this most of all: Machado will keep you reading when you most want to turn away. It’s not that readers do not care for the subject in fact, caring is what makes it hard. People, generally speaking, do not want to read a memoir on abuse.

The New Yorker / TIME Magazine / New York Times / NPR / Publishers Weekly / BookPage / Vulture / Autostraddle / LitHub / Vogue / Kirkus / Entertainment Weekly / Harper’s Bazaar / The Atlantic / Paris Review / Vogue / Washington Post / A.V.In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado, Graywolf Press, 2019, pp.304, £14.99 (hardback) Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction / Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction / Finalist for the Stonewall Book Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award / Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing / Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction One of the best-reviewed nonfiction titles of 2019 Proceed directly into the forbidden room enjoy the view as the floor gives way.” -Parul Sehgal, The New York Times My debut memoir, In the Dream House, is available from Graywolf Press (US) and Strange Light (Canada), and Serpent's Tail (UK).

In the dream house a memoir by carmen maria machado