Keynote
“Carmen Maria Machado’s rise in the literary world has been nothing short of meteoric.”—The Week
Book Title
In the Dream House
Subtitle
A Memoir
Cover Image
- “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
Body
Now available in paperback, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a searing account of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman. Each chapter in this wildly inventive memoir is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds her story up to the light, examining it from different angles. She considers 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.
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.
List Price
$18.00
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About the Author
Credit: Art Streiber / AUGUST
Praise
- Winner of the 2020 Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Winner of the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize
Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction - “A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all.”—TIME, Best Books of 2019
- “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.”—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
- “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
