In the Dream House: A Memoir Carmen Maria Machado

Table Of Content

• ‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado: An Excerpt
• About the Author
• Is there a lump sum or 'cash option' for HGTV Dream Home 2024 contest? Do winners keep the Dream Home?
• 'Her Body And Other Parties:' Be Your Own Madwoman
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado – review
• How much is HGTV Dream Home 2024 worth? What is total HGTV Dream Home grand prize package worth?

The memoir, by the acclaimed author of the short-story collection “Her Body and Other Parties”—which was a finalist, in 2017, for the National Book Award—chronicles Machado’s experience in a horrifying relationship. Just as it is difficult to say when the book begins, it is difficult to say when Machado’s girlfriend, blonde and slight, also a writer, first reveals her nature. Is it when she flies into a rage after Machado fails to respond immediately to a text? When she digs her fingers into Machado’s arm?

‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado: An Excerpt

The names of previous winners in HGTV's annual Dream Home sweepstakes contest are public record. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. “You’re not allowed to write about this… Don’t you ever write about this. ” So said Carmen Maria Machado’s ex-girlfriend after she had unleashed a tirade of verbal abuse.

About the Author

Part of writing the book was trying to say, some people might not think that what I'm describing constitutes abuse. And then when it got really bad, there was a lot of drinking and a lot of, you know, she would drive really insanely with me in the car — which was terrifying — and threw things at me, and screamed in my ear as loudly as she possibly could. "I met her and sort of fell head over heels. You know, I'm queer, like I had dated a bunch of men, but I had never dated a woman. And I remember thinking that this was what I'd been waiting for, this experience. And she was really attractive, and really charming, and really funny — and she liked me, which was really intoxicating."

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It was a rental that was not a dream home in any conventional sense of the term, a “nondescript house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana,” where her ex-girlfriend lived. The place was crowded with never-unpacked cardboard moving boxes repurposed as furniture and slowly disintegrating into the carpet. “They are soft and smell sweet like Pizza Hut boxes damp with grease,” Machado recalls. As she tells it, when Machado was a young creative writing student in the Midwest, she met another writer, a woman, “rail-thin and androgynous,” who goes unnamed in this account, and the two tumbled into a passionate affair. The woman became Machado’s first real girlfriend. For someone who felt that as a “weird fat girl” she was lucky to be loved at all, the relationship was revelatory.

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She was shortlisted for a US National book award in 2017 for her gothic-flavoured short stories about sex and gender. With hindsight, her short story, Mothers, which deals obliquely with domestic abuse between two women, now appears to be a rehearsal. The first element that makes In the Dream House so inventive is that most of it is written in the second person. Most of the story takes place in a beautiful small house in Bloomington, Indiana, where Machado and her nameless girlfriend start living together shortly after they meet.

'Her Body And Other Parties:' Be Your Own Madwoman

It brought me this person who is the most special and important person in my life. And I feel so grateful and so lucky that something really beautiful could come out of such pain. I think one of the hardest things ever in this book is acknowledging that damage was done to me. ... I think there's some version of me that says that writing this book made me realize that something happened in the past, and it changed me, and that I am different now, and I always will be.

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They try to destroy Machado, but she somehow becomes stronger because of it and turns into a new person despite the fear, tears, and bad memories. Throughout all of it, Machado learns to navigate her own sexuality and her writing while making sure she understands the place she occupies in a world that has always tried to erase women like her. In the first chapter, Machado reflects on her childhood years and tells a story about her time in grade school. Machado then elaborates on experiences in her childhood and environment while growing up. She goes on to discuss instances with her previous lovers, leading up to meeting and falling in love with "the woman in the dream house" who domestically abused her. For Machado, the Dream House was such a closed system.

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I think one of the hardest things ever in this book is acknowledging that damage was done to me. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a memoir told in fragments, in shards. It has to be, because it is a memoir of trauma, and memories of trauma are fragmented. Soon, she was doubting her own perception of reality. If Machado expressed satisfaction in her own work, the woman from the Dream House would make her list (even write down) all of her flaws. But the cruelty was often followed by sweetness and denial.

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Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. I've had this thought where it's like, you know, if I could go back and change it, would I? And the answer is no, I wouldn't because it brought me Val.

And you're like, "Don't do it. Oh my God, what are you doing? Run away!" You know? And there's something really dark about that and really upsetting and to have to put my hand up in that way to the world and be like, "Okay, I'm just going to tell you, not through fiction, but in this nonfiction book." This is profoundly embarrassing. And again, that's never something I would ever say to another person, but it's definitely a feeling that I have overwhelmingly about myself. This was an enchantment the younger Machado couldn’t break; relief only came when her ex got involved with another woman (of course), tried to date both of them for a while, and then finally dumped her. Machado then confronted another story-based dilemma.

But it's like that way in which one is hard on oneself, way more than you would be on anyone else. And I think for me, we're counting, or sort of trying to verbalize, this is what I believed about myself. I ended up reading a bunch of reviews out in the last couple of days, and people have been talking about how it's like watching a horror movie where someone's going into the basement and you're like, "Don't go into the basement." And I feel embarrassed to be the woman going into the basement.

“Afterward — when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies… — you’ll wish that she had hit you,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her groundbreaking memoir, In the Dream House. One of the sort of chief struggles of my adult life, my artistic life, has been trying to reconcile the things I knew to be true about myself with the way that the world views me. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago called "The Trash Heap has Spoken," and I talk about how, in Shirley Jackson's biography, there's this really bizarre line where they're interviewing somebody who knew her, and they said she was so fat she took up half the couch, but she was really brilliant. And I remember thinking, "why the but?" And I think we expect fat people to be unlovable, and we expect them to be stupid. And I think it's a very deep-set bias that a lot of people wouldn't even necessarily acknowledge out loud.

Machado appears to be wrestling with the imagined objection that her book participates in a tradition of demonizing gay characters. Her answer—that queer people “deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity”—feels a bit like Intro to the Politics of Representation. Another chapter, “Dream House as Unreliable Narrator,” walks a similar line between basic and resonant. Loved to refer to me as ‘melodramatic,’ or, worse, ‘a drama queen,’ ” Machado writes.