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Carmen Maria Machados second book,In the Dream Houseis unlikely to resemble anything youve read before.
Some read like fairy tales, others like horror stories; theres a choose-your-own-adventure section.
Machado is well aware of this.
Its inevitable, she told me.
I speak into the silence, she writes in the new book.
I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.
The success of the book really surprised me.
It gave me space to be an artist.
It got me to a place that I thought I would not be in for a long time.
It made me able to live a life I want to live.
Why did you want to do a memoir as your second book?
[Laughs dryly.]
I dont know that I necessarily did.
He could see the finished thing in the skeletal draft.
The book is such a wild mixture of genres and forms.
Its grounded in your memories, but also weaves in historical episodes of queer domestic violence and fairy-tale tropes.
The personal material was in a rough chronological arc, but that was about it.
I would just go off on these kicks, like, Heres a huge chunk of historical material.
I knew it needed to be spread out, but I didnt even know how to begin.
Eventually, I just asked my editor if he could do it for me, and he did.
Why do you think you couldnt put it into order?I was really exhausted and sad.
I [had] also never worked on a full-length book before.
It made me more depressed and kind of killed a little part of me.
If I said it was a good experience, Id be lying.
It was not a good experience at all.
How did you keep going?I didnt want to give the money back.
Practical.I also thought,Well, I could have taken more time with it.
But then I wouldve spent more time with it, and I wanted the work to be done.
I had a foot surgery this summer, and I had to do one on the other foot too.
I asked my doctors, Can you do both feet at the same time?
They were like, No, that would be terrible.
Im proud of this book, but it also made me think about stuff I could have done differently.
In that sense, Im not exorcised, because the ghost is still there.
Its still present, its just contained.
I dont know, the metaphors getting away from me.
Queer domestic violence is not a topic thats been written about a lot.
People really struggle because they want these super-concrete examples.
Its way more complicated to say, what does it mean for somebody to psychologically torture?
Can women abuse other women?
Youvealways been interestedin the murkier regions of #MeToo.That is always my project.
How do we think about coercion and sexism as it exists in more subtle ways?
We like to think of #MeToo as these perfect open-and-shut cases of, like,Aha!
Im more interested in the stuff thats not so easy to name.
Is it the most noble of pursuits?
Has anyone challenged the idea that your emotional suffering was abuse?Not yet.
I feel like its inevitable.
People have already said that to me about the experience itself people that I actually cared about.
Or people who were supposed to protect me and help me.
She told me, Sometimes relationships are just bad.
Maybe that did play into why I decided to write the book.
This feeling that if I dont, nobody will ever understand.
What do you think you wanted from that administrator?I dont know if I know what I wanted.
What I didnt realize was that thats not what institutions are for.
Ive learned better now.
Institutions are not designed to help individual people.
Theyre designed to maintain their own longevity.
How do your students receive that information from you?They laugh nervously.
I want to save all of them from something, and I cant.
But I cant walk around saying that to everybody, so I wrote a book.
No one had made me feel that way before.
Like Youre beautiful and special and I love you and I wanna have sex with you.
Theres no point in denying that its really intoxicating.
Especially when youre a fat chick whos been told, maybe implicitly, that youre not somebody worth desiring.
I was like,Wow, I can havethat, this thing Ive always wanted.
It was a perfectly Carmen-shaped hole, and I fell right into it.
I think about my own naked desire.
Thats humiliating to think about; its humiliating to write that; its humiliating to remember it.
Why do you think its humiliating to think about that desire?
[Long pause.]
Have you had you had any contact with her?
I wrote the book, you know?
Ive had my half of the conversation.
Besides, by now, theres nothing anyone could say that I have never thought.
In the Dream Houseby Carmen Maria Machado is out November 5 onGraywolf Press.
