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In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado
In the Dream House

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  • Synopses & Reviews

ISBN13: 9781644450383
ISBN10: 1644450380



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Staff Pick

Impossible to put down, even when it made my heart hurt/stomach turn/eyes sting with tears, Machado's memoir unfolds with the insidious, blooming ache of a bruise into something spectacular and necessary. I wish, for her sake, it were a work of fiction, but the fact that it isn’t — the fact that it breathes life into something that is woefully under-documented and widely ignored — is part of what makes it so powerful. Machado is a brilliant, generous writer, and In the Dream House is nothing short of extraordinary. Recommended By Tove H., Powells.com

Devastatingly beautiful, In the Dream House is a work of traumatized text, made up of stunning vignettes and fragmented stories of one queer woman’s experience with an abusive lesbian relationship. It’s intermixed with literary theory and poignant observations about the nature and history of LGBTQ relationships and abuse. Recommended By Alice G., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

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.

Review

"Machado’s writing is full of repressed physical energy and the raw juice of annihilating female fury." Louise Erdrich, The Millions

Review

"[Machado’s] use of a vivid experimental lens to show women struggling for agency is startling." The New Yorker

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)

Review

"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

Review

"A riot of quirkiness and eccentricity, and the mood of the book, which shifts from droll humor to melancholy to gentle vulnerability, is unclassifiable — and just right." Kirkus

Synopsis

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.


About the Author

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

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Average customer rating 5 (1 comments)

`
Weems , October 02, 2021 (view all comments by Weems)
I wasn't a complete fan of Her Body and Other Parties. And I also found myself shy of embracing The Low, Low Woods.But inthis book,Machado delivers, not only to bring light to the subject of abusive queer relationships, but to offer up a memoir that presumes no interest and instead generates its own. One thing Machado does so expertly is the use of 2nd person point of view. All too many memoirs feel the need at some point to wax philosophical, or historical, or even mythological, something like a chapter in the book Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, that takes us through a prolonged exploration of the myth of the Green Knight. The chapter feels horribly indulgent, the author talking down from the pulpit, and worse, exploiting any sympathy they've generated to highlight their own pedantry. Machado does offer a rather intellectual reaction to her own past, but she handles this aspect regularly along the way of the book, rather than stepping out of the timeline for a prolonged exercise in self-obsessed thought. That the book is generally set up in relatively short chapters probably helps this matter, but I found the scattering of this approach rather than the lump-chapter approach so much more engaging. Again, I am sorry that I am finding Machado's strongest work to date the result of having to struggle through the horrific events she offers up, but I hope the process was healing. Call me an unreserved Machado fan. I look forward to what comes next.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9781644450383
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
12/01/2020
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
Language:
English
Pages:
272
Height:
.80IN
Width:
5.40IN
Author:
Carmen Maria Machado

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$16.00
New Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
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