In this brainy, playful, shattering account, Machado ultimately tells her own singular tale. Love that dare not speak its name.” Elsewhere, she imagines they are characters in I Love Lucy and Star Trek. In one chapter, she compares her torrid romance to a lesbian pulp novel: “Depraved inversion. Her dazzling autobiography drags that discussion into the light, examining her experience through the prism of different tropes and genres in search of answers to her traumatic past. And by “the silence,” she means a dearth of similar stories: Seldom is domestic abuse in same-sex relationships summoned from the shadows. “I speak into the silence,” Machado writes. When Machado was a grad student in Iowa, she met her first girlfriend it made her feel like “a child buying something with her own money for the first time.” That woman would become her abuser. Now, with her inventive memoir, In the Dream House, Machado continues this thrilling amalgamation of narratives to lay bare the emotional toll of her own real-life horror story. In 2016’s genre-bending short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, she melted the raw materials of literary fiction and fantasy-horror and melded them into an uncannily original assemblage of feminist fairy tales. Carmen Maria Machado is as much alchemist as author.
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