DREAM HOUSE AS INTERVIEW

IN HER NEW BOOK, IN THE DREAM HOUSE, CARMEN MARIA MACHADO REIMAGINES THE MEMOIR FORM BY EXAMINING HER PERSONAL STORY OF DOMESTIC ABUSE USING DIFFERENT NARRATIVE TROPES AND SHINES NEW LIGHT ON THE HISTORY AND REALITY OF ABUSE IN QUEER RELATIONSHIPS.

In her new book, In the Dream House,

Carmen Maria Machado reimagines the memoir form by examining her personal story of domestic abuse using different narrative tropes and shines new light on the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

FOR some writers the line between fantasy and reality is so fluid, they are able to uncover the poignant truths that can be found in that fringe space in between. This borderland is the realm of fantasy and horror writers like Shirley Jackson and magical realists like Jorge Luis Borges, two inspirations for Carmen Maria Machado, the author best known for her debut collection of speculative short stories, Her Body and Other Parties.

Magical realism, or nonrealism, is also fertile ground in which to write about ideas and identities that are generally muted or oppressed in dominant society. In a piece in the Atlantic that appeared shortly after her first book was published by Graywolf Press in 2017, Machado, a queer woman of Cuban descent, said nonrealism is a way of insisting on something different. “It’s a way to tap into aspects of being a woman that can be surreal or somehow liminal—certain experiences that can feel, even, like horror,” she said. “It allows you to defamiliarize certain topics like sexual violence that some people might unfortunately dismiss as ‘oh, just another story about rape.’ Nonrealism makes room for mythic expressions of the female experience and I think can be a way

to satisfy the hunger for narratives in which women have rich inner lives.”

Machado’s stories often feature women suffering violence in relationships or simply exploring love and sex amid the collapse of society in which communal and interpersonal horrors blend together. Readers found love, sex, queerness, violence, and dystopia throughout Her Body and Other Parties, which the New York Times included in its “New Vanguard” list of fifteen books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the twenty-first century. “There is abundant, utterly hypnotic invention in these stories,” wrote New York Times critic Parul Sehgal, “but it’s the psychological realism at their core, their depictions of the everyday violence visited upon women, that gives them their otherworldly power.”

Despite being rejected by close to thirty publishers both large and small before Graywolf offered it a home, the book went on to be named a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Fiction—and won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, a Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize.

But even before her debut publication, Machado had become a critical voice in the literary world. Her short stories and essays were appearing in literary journals and mainstream publications, spreading truths about the realities of being a woman of color, a fat woman, a queer woman, or just a woman in general, in the United States today.

Her new book, In the Dream House, released in November by Graywolf, is a memoir about Machado’s abusive relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman she met while she was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The woman, who is never named, was living in Iowa City while applying to MFA programs, and after she enrolls at Indiana University in Bloomington, Machado drives from Iowa City to Bloomington every other week to visit her for the next year. Readers follow their relationship from its enchanting start through the first shocking moments of violence and then watch as the abuse escalates. There are many reasons that Machado—and those around her—struggle to identify the relationship as abusive: The violence was primarily emotional, it was a smaller person abusing a larger one, and it involved two women.

Throughout In the Dream House, Machado uses literary and cultural themes to make sense of her own story as well as the more general ways we think about domestic violence—and queer domestic violence in particular. The memoir is composed mostly of one- to five-page miniature chapters with titles like “Dream House as Plot Twist” and “Dream House as 9 Thornton Square,” a reference to the site of a murder in the Ingrid Bergman film that birthed the term gaslighting. Machado uses these themes to both tell her story and simultaneously critique it. Some chapters read like literary essays, weaving together the personal and the scholarly while drawing from sources such as Kerry Lobel’s Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering and case studies found in law journals. But Machado also analyzes her own story like a piece of fiction, using footnotes to connect narrative moments to specific entries in the Aarne-ThompsonUther Classification of Folk Tales as well as Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature—a massive six-volume catalogue of motifs found throughout folklore. For example, the simple sentence “Midnight comes” is linked (via footnote) to the motif “Taboo: doing thing after sunset (nightfall).”

Like many a survivor’s story, the memoir is written years after the end of the relationship. Time aids Machado’s perspective, as does the author’s current, much healthier relationship with her wife, Val Howlett, who appears in the memoir in a surprising way. Machado, who teaches writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania, including one on speculative fiction, spoke to me by phone from Philadelphia, where she and Howlett live.

In your new memoir you frame your own story using common tropes and themes found throughout literature. What did these themes allow you to tap into?

As soon as I untangled myself from the situation, I tried to put words to it. But I was trying to tell it as this traditional narrative, in a linear way, and it wasn’t working. And everything I wrote was bad. I remember a friend reading something, and she was like, “So here’s the thing. You’re a good writer. This is not bad writing, but you’re not in the right place for this, and this is not the way to tell it.”

I was trying to piece it together in a way that made sense to me. That process was so slow, and trying to do it before I actually did it was so bad, that when I was writing this book, I looked back to see if I could harvest some [older material], but I couldn’t. I was just thinking about this question of how to explain something that’s really hard to explain. And a lot of my work is like that: experiences you have not been taught how to articulate. Some people are taught how to talk about themselves and what happens to them, and some people are not. And if you haven’t [been taught], then that’s a very, very difficult thing to figure out.

I think so much about genre and narrative; it’s just how my brain works because I’ve been writing for so long, and it’s the way that my head organizes time and space and my relationships with other people. And I thought, “What if I use these things as lenses?” Somewhere in my notebooks is a massive list of tropes, ideas, genres, subgenres, and narrative structures. It just poured out of me. Looking at them, suddenly I could look at a frame like “haunted house” or “generation starship” and use that as a framing technique to explore some element of the situation. For me it was this clarity that I had not had before.

These themes helped you frame your story, but we also live and interact with them outside of literature. As you started to explore how these themes worked in your own story, did you also begin to identify ways that they can create an environment that allows for abuse?

We have normalized so many aspects of domestic violence. If we look at the things that we fetishize—jealousy, for example, as a marker of love or ownership or possession—there’s a lot of dynamics that can play out. With straight couples, we say, “Oh, that’s just heterosexuality.” With queer couples, “Oh, it’s just drama.” Or the fact that we’ve stereotyped domestic violence so that we think of very specific things. It’s very straight, very white, big man/ tiny woman.

And we’re encoded to mind our own business, and when to intervene and say something, and how to help survivors. But most people don’t have the tools they need to have those conversations, so then you end up with a community that doesn’t know how to ask the right questions.

In your story “The Husband Stitch,” from Her Body and Other Parties, you write: “When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.” And in the prologue to In the

Dream House, you write, “I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.” Is this a callback to the imagery in your earlier story? How do you see these two ideas working together? I don’t think it was intentional, but that’s interesting. If you think about me throwing the stone into the crevice, and you imagine lots of other people throwing their stones in. But the difference is that with the raindrops, the stories become muddled and you can’t tell the difference. But with the crevice and people throwing the stones in, the sound changes as it gets filled, and it’ll sound less empty the more stones get thrown in.

I don’t want to get too lost in the metaphor, but I do feel like what’s

important is setting up narratives to help people understand what they’re looking at. So in the book I talk about when I was a teen. I was gay, but I didn’t understand I was gay because I didn’t know what that looked like. I was doing super gay things, but I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Maybe if I had a teacher who was gay, or narratives about gayness, that would have been much clearer to me.

This is true then for abusive relationships. I had never read anything about it, and it was very strange to me. I didn’t have the narrative to support me. So it changes because the more of those stories you put into the world, the more spaces you provide for people to have a sense of what they’re experiencing.

I think that’s why the play between the pond and the crevice is interesting. In some ways our stories do get muddled, and then there are other ways in which the differences are really, really important. This book is not just another book about domestic violence; it is a book about queer domestic violence.

That’s right. There are obviously a lot of narratives about domestic violence, but what’s so weird about it is in many ways, a lot of these stories—if you change the gender of the people involved or make the gender unclear—it would be the same kind of story. In some ways it’s deeply familiar, but in other ways it’s completely unique. The weirdest part of it was when I was thinking to myself, “Why was I struggling to figure out what I was looking at?” Even though, when I looked at lists about domestic violence, I recognized all of them.

There was something so interesting about this element of what it means when the person abusing you is another woman, and you’ve been taught that lesbian relationships are egalitarian and sort of a paradise. Or what are you looking at when the person abusing you is one hundred pounds lighter than you or six inches shorter than you?

It was only after the fact, when I was going back through it and talking to people, when they were like, “It feels like you’re describing an abusive relationship.”

I think people are in all kinds of abusive relationships. I’m sure there are relationships in which women are abusive to men, and they also have difficulty understanding it. But I do think that there is this real struggle to figure out how it is possible. And it’s further muddled by the fact that, while there was some physical violence, most of it was sexual and psychological. And we want a black eye—we need that clarity—but the fact is that most kinds of abuse aren’t that clear.

Do you think it is just harder for queer people to claim the word

abuse?

There’s this desire to put on a good face and present the best versions of ourselves. I think that’s true of a lot of groups that are repressed. I feel like people believe abuse is a straight-person problem, but it’s also a problem in our community. And if we don’t acknowledge that, we’re going to destroy ourselves.

That reminds me of the chapter about queer villains in which you write, “We 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.”

Right, exactly. And I think the sooner we not only acknowledge it, but respond and operate as if we understand that to be true, I think the better we’ll be as a community. And I think that’s true of all communities. That’s what this book is about.

There is so much research in the book. How much research did you do specifically for the book and how much coincided with your other projects and teaching?

Most of it was done for the book. It started off with me trying to find narratives, like certainly there must be a lot of writing about this. And there just wasn’t. There was sociological material and academic books, but there wasn’t a lot of memoir. And even the memoir that I found usually didn’t even use the words abuse or abusive; they were more nebulous than that.

So I was trying to figure out how to trace the way we’ve talked about this historically, and it was so difficult because the way that we talked about queerness and the recognition of domestic violence didn’t really happen until the late seventies.

Once I got to the eighties, there were all these great lesbian journals from that era and all of this great material when lawyers started writing about the topic—a lot of good legal stuff that was extensively footnoted—so they provided a lot of interesting other

“There’s this desire to put on a good face and present the best

versions of ourselves. I think that’s true of a lot of groups that are

repressed.”

reading. My understanding of gender and gender presentation, and also things like race, was clarified by all that research.

Did you do research about literary themes and cultural tropes as well?

That was stuff I already knew. There was a little bit that I had to look up, like certain fairy tales that involved voices being stolen, but most of the genre stuff I was already thinking about. I think about haunted houses constantly. But then all of the more historical material was more research-based, which is also not my normal way of writing.

Can you talk about deciding to use Thompson’s Motif-Index of

Folk-Literature in your footnotes?

There are a bunch of different folktale and fairy-tale taxonomies, and there are two that I use in the book. One of them has far fewer entries; it’s a simplified version. But there’s also a very complicated version that’s more than a thousand pages long. It’s a collection of the way we tell stories, and some of them are so beautiful.

So there’s a section where I talk about mystical pregnancy as a concept, and the footnote is an incomplete list [of circumstances under which one could get pregnant according to the MotifIndex of Folk-Literature]. I took a bunch of stuff out because it was way too long, but there is something really beautiful about the way you could move through them. Actually I did a reading recently where I read that footnote, and it was so fun to read out loud. In some other version of this book, in a parallel universe, I’d just use that framework because it’s so detailed and interesting.

As you unravel in your own story, the line between real and fantasy unravels as well. Late in the book there is a scene at the Art Institute of Chicago in which you shrink in front of Ivan Albright’s painting The Door and have a conversation with a mouse. Can you talk about the choice to introduce more fantastical scenes into the narrative?

When I was working on this book, I was thinking a lot about Kevin Brockmeier. His memoir, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade, came out five years ago. It’s this

really gorgeous, crystal-clear memoir about seventh grade. It’s chilling and wonderful to read, and it’s so carefully navigated. And there’s this scene right in the middle of the memoir where time freezes and his adult self comes and talks to his young self. And I was so startled when I read it, because I didn’t know you could do that.

It was so magical, and I was really swept away by it, so when I was working on this book, there were certain sections where I either wanted to devolve into the fantastic or introduce fictional elements. So the murder mystery, the fairy tale of the squid and the queen—these explicitly fictional sections are doing narrative work, but are obviously fictional.

And then I was interested in a scene changing midway. I was thinking a lot about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and that whole thing about crying the pool of tears, and I was like, I could put that in the art museum. That was a really interesting way of letting it just devolve in scene in a way that feels very emotionally true while being obviously onits-face fantastical.

You have said that you “think in short stories” and have yet to be ready for the longer form of a novel. Did the process of taking on the longer format in nonfiction prepare you or whet your appetite to tackle a novel?

No, not at all. I still can’t believe I wrote a full-length nonfiction book. Honestly, it may have scared me away from a novel even more. It was just so intense for a lot of reasons. It was an intense book, and also nonfiction is really intense. But also the length was hard. I kept thinking, “How do you keep track of all the pieces?” My hat is off to people who write novels because this is so difficult to navigate.

At some point I had these tiny chapters I had written, and my editor was like, “Can we at least have the order of the chapters?” And I tried to figure out the right order, and I spent days and days moving things around until I finally e-mailed him and said, “Can you please do this for me?” And he took it away from me and put all the pieces in an order. I moved a couple of things just for clarity’s sake, but I was like, “Thank you. I didn’t know how to do that. I was so overwhelmed by all the pieces that I couldn’t deal with it.” It’s made me wonder how does anyone do this ever?

Are you going to bring back anything you learned from nonfiction into your fiction writing?

I don’t know. I think I’m just really happy to go back to fiction in general. I think I’m not a natural nonfiction writer. I can write it, but fiction is my default mode. Even if you’re writing from a place of pain, fiction is a lubricant around the pain that is very useful. But with nonfiction, you don’t have that lubricant, and it just sucks. If you prefer fiction, then the process of writing nonfiction is especially painful and awful. So I’m ready to go back to fiction for sure.