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Defying Genre in The Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado’s New Speculative Memoir Adds to the Queer Archive
Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean.
— Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
A book is not an idea. A book is a story — if done right. Ideas themselves are not original. There are a thousand ideas and every single one of them is informed by human consciousness and experience. Idea does not equal story. What makes a book original is the writer’s voice, the details that they capture and catalyze, the way they tell the story.
In no book has this been as evident to me as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, November 2019). Machado’s first full-length published work is a speculative memoir. For those that are unfamiliar with this new genre, it is the combination of memoir (personal stories based on fact or experience) with elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and/or other speculative genres. The book is also a queer abuse narrative, a topic…
