“I feel like my first book - which was fiction! - loosened something up in people,” she says. “When that happens and you write towards something that’s untapped or doesn’t have art dedicated to it, it creates this new way for people to respond.” Anticipating reader reactions, Machado feels both excited and scared. “I wrote this book because I was looking for something that didn’t exist,” Machado tells me over lunch and rosé at a Philadelphia wine bar in an interview over the summer. Even the content of the dedication page gives readers permission to use as needed: “If you need this book, it is for you.” But her brutally honest depiction is also bound to hit home, especially for readers who may very well be familiar with the experiences Machado depicts. In describing her year with an unnamed woman who first thrilled and later baffled her, Machado creates an oft-ignored space in the discourse around queer domestic violence. It’s important to have a disclaimer right up front because with her new memoir, In the Dream House, Machado creates a portrait of an abusive relationship that is precise and stylized, but also raw and messy and scary. She is known as a genre annihilator who makes the mere act of trying to distinguish between horror and sci-fi/fantasy and literary writing feel petty and irrelevant. She is many other things: she’s the writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, she’s recently made her debut as a comic book writer for DC Comics, she’s a 2019 Guggenheim fellow, and she’s the bestselling author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a National Book Award for Fiction finalist and is being adapted into a television series. Carmen Maria Machado is not a licensed therapist or a life coach or a mental health professional of any sort.
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