Overview
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. 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.
And 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. 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.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
In the Dream House is a memoir showing domestic abuse in a queer relationship. The author describes her trauma in poetic prose that is so freaking haunting. Every aspect of her story resonated so deeply with me, and there's a reminder here that being queer doesn't make you good or bad. The prologue of Carmen Maria Machado's memoir, In the Dream House, defines the concept of archival silence: “sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.” Queerness itself has been left out of the narrative for. In her memoir, In the Dream House (2019), Carmen Maria Machado probes the ugly depths of an abusive relationship she experienced while studying for her MFA at the University of Iowa. A personal examination of the events before, during, and after the relationship, the memoir is also an exploration of the cultural realities of life as a queer woman and the assumptions people make about queer relationships. A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties 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.
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Carmen Maria Machado: Fiction Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book.