Carmen Maria Machado: “I speak into the Silence”

When I heard Carmen Maria Machado had a forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House, I wondered if she would relate a supernatural experience, something strange and surreal, like in her acclaimed short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties. The book cover of her memoir suggested as much: a woman peers out of the attic of a creepy-looking house. Had Machado been raised by spirits? Hidden in the attic for misbehaving as a child? Was she a former ghost hunter or medium? But I also gathered from Machado’s social media, and the description on Graywolf’s publishing website, that Dream House was about her experience of intimate partner violence in a lesbian relationship. I wondered how the haunted cover art fit, and if there was, in fact, a connection. After reading the memoir, I discovered that this abusive and volatile relationship both took place in, and was signified by, a dilapidated house in a college town—a place Machado calls “the dream house.”

Over cocktails at a bar in Philadelphia in late August, I got the chance to ask Machado about this. While she sipped her soft-pink, candy-garnished tequila-watermelon cocktail with a caramel-corn-topped paper umbrella, Machado shared with me her thoughts about the connection between the supernatural, intimate partner violence, and her writing process for In the Dream House.

Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories, , was a finalist for theher second book-length work—relates, in fragmentary form, Machado’s seduction into and escape from an abusive queer relationship. She interweaves her personal narrative with the cultural, legal, and political structures that have traditionally silenced and erased stories like hers. Each chapter title invokes the dream house, and examines it next to other cultural tropes (e.g. “Dream House as Lesbian Pulp Novel;” “Dream House as Bluebeard”). Machado writes “that a common feature of domestic abuse is ‘dislocation.’” , then, is an act of claiming and incantation, a spell that relocates Machado’s voice in the place where she lost it. As she puts it in the book’s opening pages, “[t]he memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection…I speak into the silence.”