Staff Pick
I've been circling this book for a while, and wow I'm glad I pulled the trigger on it. One of the most unique memoirs I've ever read, Machado's account of her experience in a queer abusive relationship is brutally vulnerable and meticulously researched. Thoughtful, achingly personal, and somehow funny in spite of the subject matter, Machado resurfaces a veritable archive of hushed queer experience and encourages readers to see queer folks as people rather than saints or sinners, in all their vulnerability, complexity, and fallibility. Recommended By SitaraG, Powells.com
Impossible to put down, even when it made my heart hurt/stomach turn/eyes sting with tears, Machado's memoir unfolds with the insidious, blooming ache of a bruise into something spectacular and necessary. I wish, for her sake, it were a work of fiction, but the fact that it isn’t — the fact that it breathes life into something that is woefully under-documented and widely ignored — is part of what makes it so powerful. Machado is a brilliant, generous writer, and In the Dream House is nothing short of extraordinary. Recommended By Tove H., Powells.com
Devastatingly beautiful, In the Dream House is a work of traumatized text, made up of stunning vignettes and fragmented stories of one queer woman’s experience with an abusive lesbian relationship. It’s intermixed with literary theory and poignant observations about the nature and history of LGBTQ relationships and abuse. Recommended By Alice G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
“Carmen Maria Machado’s rise in the literary world has been nothing short of meteoric.” —The Week
Now available in paperback, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a searing account of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman. Each chapter in this wildly inventive memoir is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds her story up to the light, examining it from different angles. She considers 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.
Review
“Breathtakingly inventive.” —The New Yorker
“Merge the house and the woman—watch the woman experience her own body as a haunted house, a place of sudden, inexplicable terrors—and you are reading the blazingly talented Carmen Maria Machado.” —The New York Times
“A stunning book, both deeply felt and elegantly written.” —The Boston Globe
About the Author
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.