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Carmen Maria Machado

In the Dream House: A Memoir

Name: In the Dream House: A Memoir
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.4 (6302 reviews)
Author: Carmen Maria Machado
ISBN: 9781644450383

Carmen Maria Machado

(Author)

4.4

6,302 ratings

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties

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.

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ISBN-10

1644450380

ISBN-13

978-1644450383

Print length

272 pages

Language

English

Publisher

Graywolf Press

Publication date

November 30, 2020

Dimensions

5.55 x 0.8 x 8.25 inches

Item weight

11.8 ounces

Popular Highlights in this book

A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.
Highlighted by 3,388 Kindle readers
Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.
Highlighted by 2,533 Kindle readers
Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together.
Highlighted by 2,108 Kindle readers
This is what I keep returning to: how people decide who is or is not an unreliable narrator. And after that decision has been made, what do we do with people who attempt to construct their own vision of justice?
Highlighted by 2,044 Kindle readers
Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.
Highlighted by 1,976 Kindle readers

Product details

ASIN :

B07TQHVNJH

File size :

5105 KB

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Editorial Reviews

“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.”―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Breathtakingly inventive. . . . Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. 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. . . . Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming.”―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

“Machado’s wit and compulsive post-mortem approach configure her story into a wildly propulsive memoir, an ambulatory survey of the genre.”―The New York Times Book Review

“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. . . . The result is a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat ― not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity.”―Entertainment Weekly

“In the Dream House is the kind of book that burrows under the reader's skin while simultaneously forcing her to inhabit the body of the writer.”―NPR.org

“Machado’s revolutionary and innovative gothic memoir about domestic abuse is a work of epic talent. In it she interweaves myth and cultural analysis―alongside her own searing, dreamlike recollections―to construct a portrait of what it is to be queer and in an abusive relationship, a subject long ignored by even some of the most vociferous domestic violence survivor advocates. Machado uses legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains to create one of the best memoirs in recent memory.”―Nylah Burton, Oprah Daily

“Piercing. . . . In the Dream House makes for uneasy but powerful reading.”―Mark Athitakis, USA Today

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

“[A] dizzying, dazzling amalgamation of memoir and criticism.”―Vanity Fair

“[In the Dream House] is a genre-bending, formally inventive, generous memoir that adds both documentation to the archive as well as a work of art to be admired for its narrative achievements. . . . Machado’s memoir adds something vital to the canon of queer history. . . . Above everything else, 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

“Carmen Maria Machado is as much alchemist as author. . . . In this brainy, playful, shattering account, Machado ultimately tells her own singular tale.”―O, the Oprah Magazine

“As her folkloric references suggest, the cycle of abuse is a kind of poisonous enchantment in which victims can be enthralled. Ms. Machado’s memoir casts a powerful counter-spell.”―The Economist

“Machado rejects standard memoir conventions in favor of short discursive chapters. . . . The result is a thoroughly engrossing, sometimes enraging must-read.”―BuzzFeed

“A stunning book, both deeply felt and elegantly written.”―Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe

“Celebrated for her inventive writing, Carmen Maria Machado will not disappoint her fans with this dazzling memoir that journeys through a maze of stories, each vignette (some only a sentence long) an individual room containing a moment of wonder, curiosity or sorrow.”―NBC News Latino

“Two years after first commanding the world’s attention with her debut collection Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado is back with In The Dream House, an engrossing memoir that blurs the lines between personal narrative and literary criticism.”―Harper’s Bazaar

“Machado is able to captivate the reader while telling a brutally honest narrative of abuse.”―Marie Claire

“In the Dream House gleamingly smashes our notion of memoir, relocating Machado’s genre-bending mastery from fiction to nonfiction. As with her short story collection, an intoxicating mix of fabulism and horror, sci-fi and gutting realism, Machado’s playfulness on the page is intoxicating.”―Newsday

“Carmen Maria Machado’s pointedly funny, deeply reflective In the Dream House manages to be a short story collection, memoir, and lesson in fragmentation all rolled into one.”―The A.V. Club

“The world needs this book. . . . 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

“Forget everything you think you know about memoir when reading Carmen Maria Machado's brilliant, twisting, provocative entry in the genre.”―NYLON

“In the Dream House―a devastating chronicle, interrogation and historical contextualization of her experience in an abusive relationship―is no less than a brilliant revision of the form.”―Salon.com

“Machado’s telling of this particular story is anything but common: It’s compassionate and thoughtful and achingly honest. Most of all, In the Dream House is a generous book. It is generous to all the readers of the future who might find themselves in the Dream House as Machado did. And so that they don’t have to make up their own language to make sense of what is happening to them, it offers itself up, bare and vulnerable.”―Vox

“[In the Dream House] is an impressive, finely calibrated work of literature, one that throws open the door to a subject that’s still rarely broached, and makes the reader’s stay equally illuminating and unsettling. . . . In assuming the role of architect and archivist, Machado makes In the Dream House as much a memoir as a monument.”―The A.V. Club

“There are hundreds of ways to be haunted, In the Dream House shows, but not all of them have been written: Via a delicate polyphony of storytelling and criticism, Machado lays out how the literary tradition of domestic abuse has both expressed and muffled the experiences of women in danger in their own homes.”―Bookforum

“Machado is not just a beautiful writer, she’s a brilliant writer.”―The Rumpus

“In the Dream House is proof, a nod towards justice, however nebulous or impossible that idea might be, as it sounds out against gatekeepers, archival erasures, and silence, articulating the possibility of queerness against the grain of singularity.”―Frieze

“Machado's innovative memoir does not pull punches. . . . In the Dream House is a brilliant successor to her acclaimed short story collection.”―Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“You leave In the Dream House dazzled by the author’s artful inventiveness and pondering her hard-won wisdom. . . . Truly remarkable.”―The Seattle Times

“Machado’s book vibrates truth.”―Bitch Magazine

“Deeply intelligent and fiercely innovative.”―Slant

“The way [In the Dream House] seamlessly weaves the facts of [Machado’s] life with fictions―the ghosts that still haunt her, the fact that even time travel could not undo what’s been done―is a masterstroke. Machado's that writer who can convincingly code-switch between sci-fi nerdery and lyrical realism. She's equally at home in both worlds.”―Angela Watercutter, Wired

“In the Dream House [is] one of the more unique memoirs you’ll ever read. . . . It will be needed and recommended and read and reread for generations to come.”―Autostraddle

“An unflinching, engrossing memoir.”―POPSUGAR

“[In The Dream House] is a tour de force that demonstrates the many tools that Carmen Maria Machado wields as a writer. This is a difficult book and a glorious one.”―Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A groundbreaking memoir in terms of both form and content. . . . Get ready for Machado to take you on several breakneck cross-country trips of the soul.”―The Observer

“In the Dream House is a deeply personal, chilling memoir of abuse and a testament to the healing strength of vulnerability. Machado expertly centers each chapter around a different narrative device and in so doing provides a new reading experience altogether.”―Ms. Magazine

“The Philly author of the much-awarded Her Body and Other Parties comes back strong with this memoir about adolescence, sexual identity, and damaging love.”―The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A raw, innovative memoir.”―BBC Culture

“In the Dream House is a tough read – dark, disturbing, incandescent. But Machado bravely has decided to not be silent about her pain, and in sharing her story, she delivers a stunning and important work.”―Suzanne Tobias, KMUW

“What might feel gimmicky in another writer’s hands is revelatory in Machado’s: In the Dream House becomes a complexly layered exploration of the personal and the political, and the literary, both a brave baring of a painful experience and a reckoning with our collective failure to truly deal with queer intimate partner abuse.”―Lambda Literary

“In the Dream House is not only a memoir but a masterclass in what genre can do.”―Electric Literature

“[In the Dream House] confronts the issues of credibility, self-doubt, and disbelief that all too frequently arise when survivors of domestic abuse speak out. But the work also stands as an intervention explicitly aimed at the silences, erasures, and lacunae of the culture at large. . . . A human story, full of artistry, candor, and grace.”―The Brooklyn Rail

“In the Dream House is both innovative in its approach and nerve-striking in its subject matter.”―Pacific Standard

“Carmen Maria Machado's rise in the literary world has been nothing short of meteoric.”―The Week

“A spectacular literary performance.”―ZYZZYVA

“In the Dream House further cements Machado’s status as one of the leading writers today.”―Refinery29

“Machado’s skill at cracking the candied shell around life’s warm, sweet organs is on par with her mastery of gothic atmospherics: both are essential to this book’s power.”―Triangle House

“Cycling through a staggering array of modes and strategies, In the Dream House wheels in and out of fabulist, formalist, and realist registers, cultural analysis and polemic to produce a fresh and unflinching interrogation of abuse in queer relationships. . . . In the Dream House arrives with a thunder that resounds.”―4Columns

“It seems absurd that no one has written about abuse in queer relationships like this before. Mercifully, In the Dream House fills an aching void.”―Women’s Review of Books

“Machado has pulled off an amazing feat: a book that comments on its own existence and the silences it endeavors to fill; a work deeply informed by a sense of identity and community; and page after page of flawless, flaying, addictive prose.”―Sam Worley, BookPage, starred review

“Daringly structured and ruthlessly inquisitive. . . . The heart of this history is clear, deeply felt, and powerful. A fiercely honest, imaginatively written, and necessary memoir from one our great young writers.”―Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Machado has written an affecting, chilling memoir about domestic abuse.”―Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[Machado’s] writing exhibits all of the formal precision of her fiction, and the book draws the reader deep into the varied rooms of the haunted house of the past. Highly recommended.”―Booklist, starred review

“In this open examination of abuse―how it starts, how it hides, how it tears at the victim’s sense of self―Machado reimagines and plays with the memoir form, bridging the gap between reader and author in a way that is original and haunting.”―Library Journal

“Absolutely remarkable. . . . What makes this book truly exceptional is how Machado creates an archive where, shamefully, there is none.”―Roxane Gay

“It’s a testament to Carmen Maria Machado’s abilities that a memoir as harrowing as In the Dream House can also be so energizing to read, so propulsive.”―Kevin Brockmeier

“Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir about being trapped in a love relationship that turns nasty and shameful is unflinchingly honest. . . . In the Dream House affirms that Machado is one of the most talented young writers of our day.”―Lillian Faderman

“Wrought with alarming premonition, propulsive rhythm, and a trove of folkloric archetypes, Machado’s genre-crushing memoir is a meditation on the eclipse of knowledge and intuition by the narcotic light of a destructive bond that feels like love.”―Melissa Broder

“Carmen Maria Machado has re-imagined the memoir genre, creating a work of art both breathtakingly inventive and urgently true. In the Dream House is crucial queer testimony. I’ve never read a book like it.”―Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Sample

Eros limbslackener shakes me again that sweet, bitter, impossible creature. —Sappho, as translated by Jim Powell

Dream House as Not a Metaphor

I daresay you have heard of the Dream House? It is, as you know, a real place. It stands upright. It is next to a forest and at the rim of a sward. It has a foundation, though rumors of the dead buried within it are, almost certainly, a fiction. There used to be a swing dangling from a tree branch but now it’s just a rope, with a single knot swaying in the wind. You may have heard stories about the landlord, but I assure you they are untrue. After all, the landlord is not a man but an entire university. A tiny city of landlords! Can you imagine?

Most of your assumptions are correct: it has floors and walls and windows and a roof. If you are assuming there are two bedrooms, you are both right and wrong. Who is to say that there are only two bedrooms? Every room can be a bedroom: you only need a bed, or not even that. You only need to sleep there. The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions.

I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying. If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you.

Dream House as Picaresque

Before I met the woman from the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Iowa City. The house was a mess: owned by a slumlord, slowly falling apart, full of eclectic, nightmarish details. There was a room in the basement—my roommates and I called it the murder room—with blood-red floors, walls, and ceiling, further improved by a secret hatch and a nonfunctional landline phone. Elsewhere in the basement, a Lovecraftian heating system reached long tentacles up into the rest of the house. When it was humid, the front door swelled in its frame and refused to open, like a punched eye. The yard was huge and pocked with a fire pit and edged with poison ivy, trees, a rotting fence.

I lived with John and Laura and their cat, Tokyo. They were a couple; long-legged and pale, erstwhile Floridians who’d gone to hippie college together and had come to Iowa for their respective graduate degrees. The living embodiment of Florida camp and eccentricity, and, ultimately, the only thing that, post–Dream House, would keep the state in my good graces. Laura looked like an old-fashioned movie star: wide-eyed and ethereal. She was dry and disdainful and wickedly funny; she wrote poetry and was pursuing a degree in library science. She felt like a librarian, like the wise conduit for public knowledge, as if she could lead you anywhere you needed to be. John, on the other hand, looked like a grunge rocker-cum-offbeat-professor who’d discovered God. He made kimchi and sauerkraut in huge mason jars he monitored on the kitchen counter like a mad botanist; he once spent an hour describing the plot of Against Nature to me in exquisite detail, including his favorite scene, in which the eccentric and vile antihero encrusts a tortoise’s shell with exotic jewels and the poor creature, “unable to support the dazzling luxury imposed on it,” dies from the weight. When I first met John, he said to me, “I got a tattoo, do you want to see?” And I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Okay, it’s gonna look like I’m showing you my junk but I’m not, I swear,” and when he lifted the leg of his shorts high on his thigh there was a stick-and-poke tattoo of an upside-down church. “Is that an upside-down church?” I asked, and he smiled and wiggled his eyebrows—not lasciviously, but with genuine mischief—and said, “Upside down according to who?” Once, when Laura came out of their bedroom in cutoffs and a bikini top, John looked at her with real, uncomplicated love and said, “Girl, I want to dig you a watering hole.”

Like a picara, I have spent my adulthood bopping from city to city, acquiring kindred spirits at every stop; a group of guardians who have taken good care of me (a tender of guardians, a dearheart of guardians). My friend Amanda from college, my roommate and housemate until I was twenty-two, whose sharp and logical mind, flat affect, and dry sense of humor witnessed my evolution from messy teenager to messy semiadult. Anne—a rugby player with dyed-pink hair, the first vegetarian and lesbian I ever met—who’d overseen my coming-out like a benevolent gay goddess. Leslie, who coached me through my first bad breakup with brie and two-dollar bottles of wine and time with her animals, including a stocky brown pit bull named Molly who would lick my face until I dissolved into hysterics. Everyone who ever read and commented on my LiveJournal, which I dutifully kept from ages fifteen to twenty-five, spilling my guts to a motley crew of poets, queer weirdos, programmers, RPG buffs, and fanfic writers.

John and Laura were like that. They were always there, intimate with each other in one way and intimate with me in another, as if I were a beloved sibling. They weren’t watching over me, exactly; they were the protagonists of their own stories.

But this story? This one’s mine.

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, 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, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS 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

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

6,302 global ratings

JJR

Intriguing, informative, troubling and creative

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2020

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I heard the author on a PRS interview and was intrigued by her life story, her writing talents and the way she presented her troubling story of domestic abuse in her gay household. She spotlights deep trouble in our culture that goes unspoken, undiagnosed and untreated and so it is hidden. I especially noted the way she spoke of herself in the third, impersonal voice when she was speaking of her time "in the dream house" or under her partner's abusive spell. Her awakening came at last and she moved into speaking of herself as "I". That subtle use of the pronoun, and the way she identified each "dream house" with short, titled chapters created an engaging, compelling form of first-person storytelling. I was troubled throughout the book and kept rooting for her to wake up from the dream. The value was that her story is so common and found in millions of relationships; I kept reading on. I recommend this book for its compelling story and for the story structure that housed my attention and curiosity the whole way through. It's a map through the brambly parts of mental illness, the dangerous distress of dysfunction, and the people who get caught in the dream house.

Kristen Smith

Best Memoir of the Decade

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2019

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I read this book in one sitting - it was utterly un-put-downable. It tore my heart apart, but stuck around to gather the pieces and offer a healing salve. Even if you've never experienced any type of abuse, the story is so well written, the style not just creative but cleverly reflecting the topic of the book, and the narrator's voice so likable, that it's a memoir that anyone could easily name in their top 5 favorites. It's very clear that a lot of intention went into the entire piece.

If you have ever found yourself in an abusive relationship, you know how isolating and bleak it feels. If you’ve ever found yourself in a queer abusive relationship, you know that the feeling of isolation is also threaded with shame, confusion, and a lack of visible precedence. If you’ve ever found yourself in a queer, psychologically/emotionally abusive relationship, then you know how utterly impossible it is to find representations of your experience in movies, art, literature, television, etc. This book is important not only because it serves as a brilliantly written cautionary tale that anyone, in any kind of relationship, can be preyed upon - but also because those of us who have can finally add a book to our shelves that accurately represents our experience, or even use it as a resource to suggest to others who are struggling to understand our experience. The book benefits everyone who reads it - queer or not, abused or not.

Towards the end of the book, Machado mentions a moment in her past, wherein a woman at a party whispers to her, "I believe you". She is so overcome with gratitude and begins to cry so hard that she has to leave the party and go home. Every page of this book felt to me like a soft, gentle whisper in my ear: "I believe you. I believe you. I believe you."

71 people found this helpful

Tyson

YES YES YES!!!

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2019

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A 1000x better than expected, and I expected nothing short of holy scripture.

Months earlier I stumbled upon the description and knew this book would be monumental. As early reviews crept in, my anticipation grew. I had my Kindle fully charged and stayed up until midnight so I could start reading the second it released. By 2am I was 30% done. A few marathon readings later, I reached the last page with breathless finality. The result? Monumental doesn't even begin to cover it.

The funny thing, it's not monumental because of what happens. Bad relationships happen all the time. Abusive relationships, mental and/or physical, happen all the time. It's talked about less in queer relationships, that's true, and Machado does a great job pointing that out, but I doubt anybody will be dumbfounded by what they read. They will be surprised, however, that there's someone brave enough to talk about it, and by how personal she's willing to get. They will be surprised by how she structures it.

The structure really is what makes this a masterpiece. It's not just the experience, it's the delivery. The darkest memories are brilliantly conveyed in second person and through varying lens. Most of them literary devices. Machado recounts her life through the eyes of Chekhov's Gun, Choose Your Own Adventure, Haunted House, Erotica, Plot Twist, and dozens more. Each section is short and precise. Never a wasted word. For those uncomfortable reading about abuse, she doesn't take it too far either. This isn't battered woman porn. She doesn't go on and on. We get snippets, glimpses of a life that we can easily piece together, and, more importantly, relate to.

What she accomplishes for the queer community specifically, I think, is breaking the ice. After hard-fought battles for marriage equality, there's this unspoken rule that gay relationships must work. If they don't, people will point and say I told you so. By extension, rights may be taken away. Obviously that's not the only factor that kept Machado in her relationship. It may not even be in the Top 10, but it is a shadow that hovers over the scene. She points to lesbian stereotypes as well. Society expects men to be abusive, but two women? Their relationship should be a utopia, right? These stereotypes, this ice, is something she clearly wants to break apart. And she succeeds tremendously.

Of course you don't have to be queer to recognize this is a master work of memoir and creative non-fiction. It is a testament that all experiences, however ordinary or unique, should be shared. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book is the relentless honesty. She veils it slightly by the structure and 2nd person, but in a way this makes the experience more real. More true. And the accomplishment, I think, is for any one person to read this and be able to know that, for sure, they are not alone.

51 people found this helpful

Rachael Winterling

Beautiful Writing, Ugly Story

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2024

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I was absolutely beside myself when I finished this. What an incredibly up-close look at emotional abuse. You can tell that the author really dug into her past - her strengths, weaknesses, insecurities - to offer us this raw and vulnerable look at some of the darkest parts of humanity. This is juxtaposed with lyrical writing and commentary that took my breath away. I highlighted so much of this book, and think about it often. Beautiful story through and through.

Chairman Meow

Beautiful

Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2024

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Struggling between 4.5 and 5 stars, so I’ll round up. I loved this memoir. I’ve never highlighted anything so much in my life, and even though I’ve never been in an abusive queer relationship, there were so many parallels to my existence. The prose was lyrical and beautiful, and tackled the subject material in a raw unflinching manner that I appreciated, without overwhelming the reader with secondhand trauma for shock value. Just a really wonderful book.

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