I wasn’t sure if that question was a bridge too far. It’s not my responsibility to give people-my abuser, for example, or this pastor-space to create their own narrative. I wasn’t interested in having a person who did something fucked up have a space to justify what they did. This one is better because I’m a better writer now, but I did talk to other people who remembered that time. The chapter about the pastor was actually drawn from an essay I wrote many years ago. Did you reach out to run things by these people? Was that possible? This book talks about a few relationships that are incredibly painful-not only with your ex-partner, but with the pastor in your church when you were young. They’re very excited to learn precisely the opposite of what they’re supposed to take away from something. People love to learn exactly the wrong lesson from things. Some people seem excited to talk about that in a way that makes me uncomfortable, and some people dismiss it as impossible. In the Dream House flies in the face of a common perception that women-in this case, a petite blonde woman-are incapable of perpetrating abuse. That can also be a trap, and traditionally, who gets trapped by the domestic sphere? Women. And that can look like a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Houses are places of great pleasure and happiness: hearth, contentment, and the domestic.
I feel like that’s the most boring element of the book. But for obvious reasons, I am least interested in talking about that part. People have been really interested in talking about the relationship and talking about my ex. Is it difficult to discuss In the Dream House without feeling on trial for the romantic relationship it describes? Despite the book’s heavy material, Machado is full of laughter on the phone and patiently professorial as she schooled me on the Gothic genres. The book is groundbreaking-we would expect nothing less from the author of the outstanding 2017 short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties-in its exploration of romance that gradually descends from cautious bliss into gaslighting and abusive control.
That didn’t 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 master’s degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In the spring of 2019 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, so she’s taking the year to work on a new project. Carmen Maria Machado isn’t teaching this year.
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