Love that dare not speak its name.” Elsewhere, she imagines they are characters in I Love Lucy and Star Trek. In one chapter, she compares her torrid romance to a lesbian pulp novel: “Depraved inversion. Her dazzling autobiography drags that discussion into the light, examining her experience through the prism of different tropes and genres in search of answers to her traumatic past.

And by “the silence,” she means a dearth of similar stories: Seldom is domestic abuse in same-sex relationships summoned from the shadows.

“I speak into the silence,” Machado writes. When Machado was a grad student in Iowa, she met her first girlfriend it made her feel like “a child buying something with her own money for the first time.” That woman would become her abuser. Now, with her inventive memoir, In the Dream House, Machado continues this thrilling amalgamation of narratives to lay bare the emotional toll of her own real-life horror story. In 2016’s genre-bending short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, she melted the raw materials of literary fiction and fantasy-horror and melded them into an uncannily original assemblage of feminist fairy tales. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.Carmen Maria Machado is as much alchemist as author. 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

Carmen maria machado in the dreamhouse