In the Dream House

Carmen Maria Machado is a writer, critic, and essayist. She earned her Master of Fine Arts through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won several prestigious fellowships, awards, and nominations for her fiction. Her memoir In the Dream House explores ways in which narrative techniques, literary theory, and archival silence can be used to better represent the nuances of queer relationships.

As described in In the Dream House, Machado was a devoted Christian as a teenager and has been greatly influenced by religious teachings of submission to a beloved higher power. This spiritual posture also expresses itself in her adulthood: When Machado first meets her partner, Machado is poised to regard her as the beloved, divine figure from her childhood—and she loses her sense of self, her time, and her other relationships in the process of appeasing her partner. She even makes the direct comparison when she identifies with Lot’s wife, whom the Abrahamic God punitively transforms into a pillar of salt. Machado is also interested in demonic possession stories, which she cites in deliberation of her partner’s culpability.

Machado uses the literary techniques of her academic background to represent the Dream House and its abusive psychological impact. She increasingly explores various narrative techniques while describing the abuse she endured, thereby affording different modes of expression for her emotional life. She arrives at fragmentary narration, which allows her writing to embody the often confusing and contradictory elements of the abuse. Throughout this memoir, Machado concerns herself with representation, responsibility to the queer population whose stories have gone unheard, and developing a voice that can encompass a range of queer experience.