The prevailing sort of anxiety about this book is not about sex and it's not about polyamory and it's not about queerness.

When you write from those perspectives, are you ever concerned about being perceived in negative ways, and how do you get over those types of feelings? That was just really, really important to me.Īpart from this book dealing with partner abuse between queer women, you also continue to discuss sex and polyamorous relationships really frankly. There's something important to me about owning up and saying, 'This is my experience,” not through the lens of this premise or this story, but in my own words, and in my own way of thinking. But this is an important story that just hasn't had a lot of space in the memoir and creative nonfiction world. I have written quite a lot about my experience through fiction and that was quite helpful to me in terms of thinking about my myself in this removed way from my experience. Can you talk a little bit about that decision and why it's important for you to publish it as a memoir? It's been a lot.īut at the same time, you're committed to it being a memoir, though you're clearly adept at fictionalizing experience. It's been very hard to do press for, difficult every time I talk about it. This book has been very hard to write and edit. Very stressed out! Far more stressed out than I felt for my first book.

The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.How does this book coming out feel different compared to your short story collection? She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. 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. 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

In the dream house carmen machado