From the mythic to the domestic, the horror story to the “Choose Your Own Adventure,” In the Dream House is a shapeshifter of a book. In short chapters, she moves her tale from one story model to another. Here, in her memoir, Machado disrupts genre boundaries even more directly. In her previous book, the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, Machado explores the spaces between what we call “realism,” “fantasy,” and “literary,” troubling the boundaries we erect between genres. In her new memoir, In the Dream House, Machado tells a story of abuse that often goes unrecognized, exploring what happens when we don’t have ready narrative models for our experiences. Or what are you looking at when the person abusing you is one hundred pounds lighter than you or six inches shorter?” As Carmen Maria Machado discusses in a recent interview with Jera Brown in Poets and Writers, “There is something so interesting about this element of what it means when the person abusing you is another woman, and you’ve been taught that lesbian relationships are egalitarian and sort of a paradise. They don’t fit into expected forms or structures, and many queer writers must be inventive to tell the true shape of their experience. How do you tell a story you don’t have the language for? So many queer stories fall into this space of elusiveness.
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