Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House
Photo credit: Art Streiber
“I didn’t expect it to be therapeutic. I don’t think I expected it to be quite as painful as it was….I wished as I was writing it that I hadn’t agreed to do it.”
Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir In The Dream House.
In the Dream House is Machado’s 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, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
That struggle 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.