in the dream house a memoir by carmen maria machado

So throughout In the Dream House, no matter what narrative trope or genre is framing the chapter at hand, she uses footnotes to mark off fairy tale motifs as they occur.

Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markīut while Machado is fluent in many genres, her native tongue is the fairy tale, and specifically the dark and bloody Angela Carter kind. In the Dream House skips between genres less playfully, but revolves around a variation on the same theme: Machado herself, her body - as well as her mind and emotions, with the titular “dream house” acting as a metaphor for Machado’s body - and the woman in that dream house, who believes herself to be entitled to control over Machado. That book was an anthology, a collection of short stories that skipped playfully between genres but revolved around a single theme: women, their bodies, and other parties who believe themselves to be entitled to those bodies. In many ways, this format is an echo of Machado’s much-celebrated debut, Her Body and Other Parties. She chases her from room to room and then, when Machado finally emerges, asks sweetly, “Why are you crying?”Īs Machado retells the story of their relationship, she spends each brief chapter playing with a different narrative trope: noir, erotica, folklore taxonomy. The woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of infidelity, of flakiness, of being inconsiderate. Over the course of the memoir, Machado meets her girlfriend - referred to only as “the woman in the Dream House” - and finds herself rapidly infatuated, wooed, love bombed.

Specifically, In the Dream House is a memoir of Machado’s abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend. It has to be, because it is a memoir of trauma, and memories of trauma are fragmented. The result is a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat-not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity.Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a memoir told in fragments, in shards.

“If there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them, Carmen Maria Machado has found a way to do exactly that, ingeniously, in Dream House-a book that manages to break open nearly everything we think we know about abuse memoirs.

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.” -Katy Waldman, The New Yorker Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality.

“A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all.” -TIME, Best Books of 2019.

Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

Winner of the 2020 Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction.

In the dream house a memoir by carmen maria machado