In the Dream House: Winner of The Rathbones Folio Prize 2021
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‘Ravishingly beautiful’ Observer
‘Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative’ Irish Times
‘Provocative and rich’ Economist
‘Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you’ve ever read’ Esquire
‘An absolute must-read’ Stylist
WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021
‘A masterpiece. Proceed with caution’ Phoebe Bridgers
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Serpent's Tail, Main edition (1 Oct. 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 304 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1788162250 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1788162258 |
| Dimensions | 12.9 x 1.8 x 19.8 cm |
by Josh F
Loved it so much
by Millie
First of all, please check the trigger warnings before reading this book. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado is on of my top books of the year by a long shot. This book was absolutely amazing and so emotive that I couldn’t get enough of it. The prose were gorgeous and the structure was really engaging. It is unlike any other book I have read before and anyone who is on the fence about reading this book please read it because you won’t regret it. I can’t explain the emotion that is evoked on every page of this book from anger, happiness and upset it is just different from every other book I’ve read and I can’t wait to read more books by Carmen Maria Machado in the future.
by lipsticklori
On telling a colleague that I’d loved Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, he recommended that I read this book. It’s a tough read in places, due to the subject matter, but the story is told in such a creative way that it holds your attention even through its most challenging moments. A powerful and important book that will no doubt stay with me for quite some time.
by Elsie Granthier
READ THIS IF… you like memoir, lyrical prose, and aren’t afraid to read about difficult topics.
THE STORY… Carmen narrates her experience of an abusive same sex relationship.
I WAS… intrigued by this memoir, as I loved Carmen’s short story collection enough to dedicate a chapter of my dissertation to it, and I wanted to see how her writing style translated to nonfiction. Her writing retained its beauty, and blended seamlessly with her ideas, and the academic sources that she cited. It was illuminating to learn more about the history of domestic abuse, and by placing this within her story Carmen made this so much more meaningful.
One of my favourite chapters discussed the concept of queer villainy, and Carmen perfectly summed up the problem with marking all queer villains as harmful stereotypes by saying ‘when we refuse wrongdoing for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.’ Each chapter had a, for lack of a better term, mic drop moment – where I either learnt something, or another layer of the story was revealed. I loved this book, and I can honestly say that Carmen Maria Machado is one of the most talented authors that I’ve encountered.
It goes without saying that this book dealt with very serious topics and was genuinely upsetting – I would advise caution if depiction of abusive relationships could trigger or upset you. However, if this is something you feel able to read, you will not regret picking it up.
NOW… I would recommend this to everyone – it’s so relevant, so beautifully written, and so emotive. I definitely want to re-read Carmen’s short story collection ‘Her Body and Other Parties’, and I need to get my hands on her comic book series ‘The Low, Low Woods’.
by Rachel Matthews
I read Her Body & Other Parties last year and struggled with Machado’s magical realism writing style. I enjoyed a few of the stories but for the most part found them just a little too weird for my liking. In the Dream House, however, presented no such issues for me.
This account of domestic violence within a female-female relationship is told in an unconventional way. The relationship is presented as a dream house but the life lived within this dream house is far from dreamlike, it’s much closer to a nightmare.
There is a sinister presence throughout the book – the woman from the dream house who is the abuser. She is never named perhaps to protect her, perhaps to protect Machado, perhaps to protect them both but her influence is felt throughout. The book is split into a number of vignettes each depicting a different aspect of the relationship. These vignettes are beautifully written, there is a section towards the end that is written in the style of a choose your own adventure story and it perfectly summarised the cyclical nature of domestic abuse and the feeling of powerlessness for the abused who feels that no matter what decision they make, the outcome will always be anger, frustration and pain.
Machado also highlights how little information is out there about female-female domestic abuse. Thinking about it, I realised I also made assumptions that female-female relationships couldn’t be abusive because women would never act in that way towards each other which is of course a naïve and ignorant view to take. In the Dream House goes some way to opening up the conversation on domestic violence and I am glad that it exists, let’s hope it encourages more women to come forward and share their experiences to remove the stigma and start to address the underlying issues that have allowed this type of abuse to continue, disguised, in our communities.