These chapters are not exercises in style for their own sake they point to the ways in which tropes and clichés haunt us, how they structure–and sometimes limit–the language available to us (particularly queer folks) to describe our experiences. Each chapter refracts Machado’s experience and research through the lens of a trope, form, or genre each chapter is named after a literary device: “ Dream House as American Gothic,” “ Dream House as Queer Villainy,” “ Dream House as American Gothic,” “ Dream House as Noir,” and so on.… What might feel gimmicky in another writer’s hands is revelatory in Machado’s: In the Dream House becomes a complexly layered exploration of the personal and the political, and the literary, both a brave baring of a painful experience and a reckoning with our collective failure to truly deal with queer intimate partner abuse. Like her debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (a National Book Award finalist and Lambda Award winner), In the Dream House interrogates and innovates familiar formal tropes. It is activated by point of view.” Her new memoir, In the Dream House, takes this premise and uses it to tell the story of her own experience in an emotionally and psychologically abusive relationship, as well as the story of our larger failure to come to grips with intimate partner abuse in queer relationships. “Places are never just places in a piece of writing,” writes Carmen Maria Machado. ‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado
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