The effect of constantly switching between narrative traditions. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be. The section entitled Dream House as Epiphany has one line that simply reads: Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal. 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. Provocative, sensual and gender- and genre-defying, with strong elements of science fiction and gothic horror, its eight fabular tales smouldered defiantly. 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. Carmen Maria Machado was hailed as a modern-day Angela Carter on the publication of her first collection of stories, Her Body and Other Parties, in 2017. 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.
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