In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado, 2019
Graywolf Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781644450031
Summary
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.
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1986
• Where—Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., American University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Gpuggenheim Fellowshi
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives with her wife in Philadelphia, Penna., where she is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Each chapter hews to the conventions of a different genre: road trip, romance novel, creature feature, lesbian pulp novel, stoner comedy.… What could seem gimmicky… quickly feels like the only natural way to tell the story of a couple. What relationship exists in purely one genre? What life?…There is something anxious, and very intriguing…. The flurry—the excess—feels deliberate, and summons up the image of the writer holding a ring of keys, trying each of them in turn to unlock a resistant story, to open a door she might be hesitant to enter.
New York Times - Parul Sehgal
A stunning book, both deeply felt and elegantly written.
Boston Globe
[In the Dream House] is a genre-bending, formally inventive, generous memoir that adds both documentation to the archive as well as a work of art to be admired…. Machado’s memoir adds something vital to the canon of queer history…. Above everything else, this book is a gift to the reader, to anyone suffering in violence that is hard to prove or name, and people looking for ways to tell their stories that have few or no precedents.
San Francisco Chronicle
Piercing…. In the Dream House makes for uneasy but powerful reading.
USA Today
Breathtakingly inventive…. Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. But what makes In the Dream House a particularly self-aware structure—which is to say, a true haunted house—is the intimation that it is critiquing itself in real time.… Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming.
New Yorker
In the Dream House is the kind of book that burrows under the reader's skin while simultaneously forcing her to inhabit the body of the writer.
NPR.org
In the Dream House—a book that manages to break open nearly everything we think we know about abuse memoirs… The result is a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat—not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity.
Entertainment Weekly
A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all (Best Books of 2019).
Time
[A] dizzying, dazzling amalgamation of memoir and criticism.
Vanity Fair
Carmen Maria Machado is as much alchemist as author.… In this brainy, playful, shattering account, Machado ultimately tells her own singular tale.
Oprah Magazine
(Starred review) [H]aunting…. Machado interestingly weaves in cultural references… as she considers portrayals of abuse.… The author eventually leaves her toxic relationship behind, but scars remain.… [A]n affecting, chilling memoir about domestic abuse.
Publishers Weekly
In this open examination of abuse—how it starts, how it hides, how it tears at the victim’s sense of self—Machado reimagines and plays with the memoir form, bridging the gap between reader and author in a way that is original and haunting. —Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami
Library Journal
(Starred review) [Machado’s] writing exhibits all of the formal precision of her fiction, and the book draws the reader deep into the varied rooms of the haunted house of the past. Highly recommended.a
Booklist
(Starred review) [A] daringly structured and ruthlessly inquisitive memoir…. [Machado] applies the astonishing force of her imagination and narrative skill to her own life…. A fiercely honest, imaginatively written, and necessary memoir from one of our great young writers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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