In the Dream House: A Memoir
Description
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.Product Details
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About the Author
Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
Reviews
"A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all."
-- "Time""Breathtakingly inventive."
-- "New Yorker""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""Machado's wit and compulsive post-mortem approach configure her story into a wildly propulsive memoir, an ambulatory survey of the genre."
-- "New York Times Book Review""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""A story of psychological violence. The memoir is the rare blend of criticism and personal history that demonstrates the disorienting effects of a trauma, while also building a language with which to understand that devastation. It's a book that will stay with me for years to come."
-- "The Atlantic""We need this book precisely because it's so literary--enabling a view of domestic abuse, in the LGBT community and beyond, that only literature can manifest...[Machado] uses formal experimentation to extend [empathy] into moral and political territory."
-- "Psychology Today""Machado is able to captivate the reader while telling a brutally honest narrative of abuse."
-- "Marie Claire"
