Author Carmen Maria Machado Submits Her Story for the Record
The National Book Award finalist’s upcoming memoir—about emotional and psychological abuse in a lesbian relationship—goes beyond the universal
Carmen Maria Machado told me she writes for herself. Still, within any self, there are many others. Her second book, In the Dream House, coming out on November 5, is a memoir written in fragments. A fair comparison in form would be Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, though written by a young master of prose, In the Dream House is poetic, associative, and elliptical. An epigraph by artist Louise Bourgeois reads, “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” The other epigraph by writer Zora Neale Hurston (the namesake of this publication) goes, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” And the dedication: “If you need this book, it is for you.”
Machado, though early in her career as a published author, has already gathered legions. In a review of Her Body and Other Parties, Machado’s 2018 debut collection of queer horror fairy tales, New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal wrote, “Not since Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, in 2006, has a debut collection of short…
