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In the Dream House: A Memoir

In the Dream House: A Memoir

Current price: $41.99
Publication Date: December 19th, 2019
Publisher:
HighBridge Audio
ISBN:
9781665180306
Pages:
0

Welcome to the Dream House in this daring new kind of memoir that defies boundaries and boldly discards the conventions of genre. Inside, Carmen Maria Machado bares her soul in all of its pain and beauty, offering an intimate and profoundly vulnerable look at her own life, love, and sexuality. Machado has a gift for exposing the raw nerves and small miracles lurking beneath the surface of our daily lives. Her words move with a strange kind of urgency, surreal and yet true, like late-night phone calls when the rest of the world is asleep. I didn’t feel like I was reading a book so much as observing a person’s innermost thoughts. In the Dream House is a unique and extraordinary book.

Jason Foose, Changing Hands, Tempe, AZ
November 2019 Indie Next List

Carmen Maria Machado uses short memoir pieces to build a sinister Dream House around her readers. She is a master architect who occasionally lobs a brick through the glass, disturbing collective notions of ‘lesbian utopia’ and violence as masculine. Her pivotal story interrogates stereotypes and contributes essential questions to the global #MeToo discussion. She is an innovative writer and queer hero of our time. I feel so grateful to her for sharing her painful past, giving us new ways to think about power and persuasion, and grateful to Graywolf for giving her a platform.

Alsace Walentine, Tombolo Books, St. Petersburg, FL
Winter 2020 Reading Group Indie Next List

Description

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.