(affiliate link)
A blurb that promises a book “revolutionises” a genre, especially one as saturated as memoir, seems quite literally unbelievable. But I’m here to tell you the truth: Carmen Maria Machado has done it with In The Dream House.
It is an intimate, horrifying, beautiful, defiant, heartfelt, multi-dimensional account of her formative – and abusive – love affair with a partner she calls only “the woman in the Dream House”. I am extremely grateful to the fine folks at Serpent’s Tail and Allen & Unwin for sending me this copy to review.
This is a Rubik’s cube of a book, examining the subject from every possible angle, twisting and turning upon itself until all the edges line up.
Some of the chapters are fragments, some are longer recollections, some mine the depths of pop culture and literature and art and critical theory in search of representation.
I gulped this book down greedily, like a strong drink at the end of a particularly hard day.
Buy In The Dream House on Booktopia here. (affiliate link)
Leave a Reply