![]() ![]() In the Dream House skips between genres less playfully, but revolves around a variation on the same theme: Machado herself, her body - as well as her mind and emotions, with the titular “dream house” acting as a metaphor for Machado’s body - and the woman in that dream house, who believes herself to be entitled to control over Machado. ![]() That book was an anthology, a collection of short stories that skipped playfully between genres but revolved around a single theme: women, their bodies, and other parties who believe themselves to be entitled to those bodies. In many ways, this format is an echo of Machado’s much-celebrated debut, Her Body and Other Parties. She chases her from room to room and then, when Machado finally emerges, asks sweetly, “Why are you crying?”Īs Machado retells the story of their relationship, she spends each brief chapter playing with a different narrative trope: noir, erotica, folklore taxonomy. The woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of infidelity, of flakiness, of being inconsiderate. Over the course of the memoir, Machado meets her girlfriend - referred to only as “the woman in the Dream House” - and finds herself rapidly infatuated, wooed, love bombed. Specifically, In the Dream House is a memoir of Machado’s abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend. It has to be, because it is a memoir of trauma, and memories of trauma are fragmented. ![]() ![]() Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a memoir told in fragments, in shards. ![]()
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