Carmen Maria Machado isnât teaching this year. In the spring of 2019 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, so sheâs taking the year to work on a new project. That didnât stop her from teaching me, as we discussed In the Dream House, her new memoir focused on the dynamics of a relationship she was in while pursuing a masterâs degree from the Iowa Writersâ Workshop. The book is groundbreakingâwe would expect nothing less from the author of the outstanding 2017 short story collection Her Body and Other Partiesâin its exploration of romance that gradually descends from cautious bliss into gaslighting and abusive control. Despite the bookâs heavy material, Machado is full of laughter on the phone and patiently professorial as she schooled me on the Gothic genres.
PORTLAND MERCURY: Is it difficult to discuss In the Dream House without feeling on trial for the romantic relationship it describes?
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: People have been really interested in talking about the relationship and talking about my ex. And obviously thatâs an element of it. But for obvious reasons, I am least interested in talking about that part. I feel like thatâs the most boring element of the book.
What would you like people to focus on?
The formal play of the book. The conversation about why itâs important to tell certain stories and give certain stories space to exist. That seems far more interesting.
Like the bookâs structure being broken up into fragments? Or the house as a metaphorical site for the story?
When it comes to houses, and the idea of the home, houses donât have inherent values. You can talk about a house however you want, and the home is big enoughâitâs capacious enoughâthat it permits a lot of different kinds of metaphor.
Houses are places of great pleasure and happiness: hearth, contentment, and the domestic. And that can look like a lot of different things to a lot of different people. That can also be a trap, and traditionally, who gets trapped by the domestic sphere? Women.
Dream House flies in the face of a common perception that womenâin this case, a petite blonde womanâare incapable of perpetrating abuse. Some people seem excited to talk about that in a way that makes me uncomfortable, and some people dismiss it as impossible.
People love to learn exactly the wrong lesson from things. Theyâre very excited to learn precisely the opposite of what theyâre supposed to take away from something. Itâs very stressful to me.
This book talks about a few relationships that are incredibly painfulânot only with your ex-partner, but with the pastor in your church when you were young. Did you reach out to run things by these people? Was that possible?
No. The chapter about the pastor was actually drawn from an essay I wrote many years ago. This one is better because Iâm a better writer now, but I did talk to other people who remembered that time.
I wasnât interested in having a person who did something fucked up have a space to justify what they did. That is just not interesting to me. Iâm not a journalist. Iâm a memoirist. Itâs not my responsibility to give peopleâmy abuser, for example, or this pastorâspace to create their own narrative.
Thank you for answering. I wasnât sure if that question was a bridge too far.
No, itâs a fine question. There are people who might feel like the fact that I donât talk to my abuser is ethically complicated. That was just a choice I had to make, as a writer, and I made it.
Dream Houseâs narrative trajectory and ending are so unusual that the story feels borderline mythical. Do you feel like your life has a mythical quality?
Donât we all feel like our lives have mythical qualities? Iâve been very lucky in my lifeâin terms of privilege, but also Iâve always made really good friends. Iâve always found the people that I needed at the right time. But I donât think that means anything. The word âmythicalâ suggests a higher organizing principle at work. Iâm not religious. But itâs certainly a story. Itâs an interesting bit of my life.
Is the interesting bit the story, or the idea that your life occasionally takes on, like, Southern Gothic style horror elements?
Southern Gothic is a very specific tradition. I certainly occupy Gothic. Southern Gothic has a sense of grotesquenessâlike Flannery OâConnorâs work. Shirley Jackson was considered American Gothic, and I feel a little stylistically closer to Shirley Jackson than Flannery OâConnor for sure.
Speaking of Shirley Jackson, Iâm always marveling that her collection The Lottery isnât a core teaching text. Youâve talked about how difficult it was to get Her Body and Other Parties publishedâa book that Iâve described as so good âit lit me on fire.â Since this book is so fragmented, could it be seen as a short story collection masquerading as a memoir?
Oh, interesting. I find something very interesting about the short story collection and also the fragmented form in general. Lots of little things to tell one big thing. Dream House is nonfiction, but it does have that similar sensibility: fragmentation, telling one story through many stories or many modes.
As for why itâs so difficult to get short story collections published, I actually have a theory: The reason they donât sell well is that, in the US, we donât teach them well. We read âThe Lotteryâ the story, and we never talk about The Lottery the book as an entire thing.
One of my favorite fragments in Dream House is the Choose Your Own Adventure format. Can you talk about what inspired that?
Early on, my editor said, âYou have to be playful. There has to be some levity in the book or it risks becoming entirely unreadable.â And I agreed. It would have been really hardâjust ruthless and relentlessâto try to tell it in a single mode.
I had an idea fairly early on. In a notebook, I wrote, âGaslight the reader?â I wanted to create an effect where the reader would sense that the text was hostile in some way. I thought about introducing ideas as if Iâd already talked about them, but people might just think that I was confused. So the goal was to create that effect while also letting the reader know I was creating that effect.
The Choose Your Own Adventure aspect is meant to make you feel like you have choices when, in fact, you have no choices. Most of the paths that you can choose are the incorrect path. And even the right path isnât much of anything.
Itâs very harrowing.
Iâm glad. Itâs supposed to be.