And when I began my rewrites, I was looking for the history of the way we’ve talked about queer domestic violence. I knew I wanted to do a heavy research element, but I didn’t know what exactly. When I first sold the book to Graywolf, it was mostly just the memoir pieces. If you fear you failed at something, what is it that you were hoping to achieve? I’d love, also, to hear more about your research process. Of course, I worry about what I missed and I worry about how the book has failed and it gives me a lot of anxiety. You write in the prologue about Saidiya Hartman’s concept of archival silence, how some stories are “missing from our collective histories.” What is it like to write from within this silence? To tell a story that has a history, but which has not been entered into the collective archive because it is a queer history? Her frank speech carries a sort of bracing wakefulness, similar to how I felt that early morning-eager for the light of yet another perilous day.

Even after a long day of teaching, she was a lively and generous interlocutor. Machado and I spoke over the phone a few weeks ago. That tells a story which has yet to be heard. And perhaps most of all, it is an utterance that emerges from within deafening silence. This book is bold yet nuanced, expansive yet specific. The book is centered around the narrative of an abusive relationship, and each chapter offers a new, illuminating metaphor: “ Dream House as Omen,” “ Dream House as Lost in Translation,” “ Dream House as Exercise in Style.” These riveting fragments weave together folklore, fiction, and scholarship on queer domestic abuse. In the Dream House is billed as a memoir, but the word hardly captures the variety within its pages. When I picked up her new book, In the Dream House, I was hoping, instead, for someone to sit with me in the dark of the night. I turned the final page just as the birds outside my window began to chirp. She is not a writer who will sing you to sleep. Her debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties , conveyed the horrors of living in the world and inhabiting a body so vividly that it made her a finalist for the National Book Award. Nothing, it seemed, could put my mind at rest.Ĭarmen Maria Machado might seem a strange companion for such a night. Those who have wronged me and those whom I have wronged. These small irritations distracted me from sleep just long enough for all the big, looming concerns to descend. The sheets scratched, the cats in the empty lot next door screeched. Late one evening early in October, I struggled to fall asleep.

Machado in the dreamhouse