So I was looking and just couldn’t find anything and this essay was really beautiful. The same way if I want to read a creative nonfiction piece about a cancer survivor, I could find that in a second - you’ll find 50 books like that.

I kept looking for stuff about this, about queer domestic violence, and I’m finding a lot of statistics and a lot of articles that are like, “this is a thing that happens,” but no accounts, or creative nonfiction. Hope Reese: When did you first notice a lack of stories about abuse in queer relationships? And what happened when you began digging for more?Ĭarmen Maria Machado: I was in San Diego for the summer and a friend of mine sent me this beautiful essay by Conner Habib, If you ever did write anything about me, I’d want it to be about love, about his relationship with an abusive man who put him in the hospital.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I spoke with Machado, currently the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, ahead of her book launch, discussing the dearth of literature about abuse in queer relationships and how we think about women as perpetrators of abuse, among other topics. Her partner is, simply, “the woman in the dream house.” And Machado’s use of footnotes from the Motif Index of Folk Literature is uniquely striking. “The Dream House” - although entirely real - is a bit fantastical, and Machado writes in the second person to turn the lens around. In her elegant and piercing story, Machado, whose 2017 collection Her Body And Other Parties was a finalist for the National Book Award, fits fragmented memories together to tell her own story of abuse (chapters appear as vignettes, with titles such as “The Dream House as Utopia,” or “The Dream House as Diagnosis”). “We see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.” In this new book, which draws attention to the rarely-written issue of abuse in queer relationships, she hopes to provide an antidote to the problem. “The nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her memoir In the Dream House. Hope Reese | Longreads | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,125 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Carmen maria machado in the dreamhouse