There is no reason that if Cinderella stays at the ball past midnight, her magic gown and carriage and glass shippers should disappear. A post-coital daze is marked, “Weakness from seeing woman (fairy) naked.” When after their breakup Machado has trouble getting herself off, she duly footnotes the text, “Magic power lost by breaking taboo.”įairy tales are in many ways about the making and breaking of taboos - leave the ball before midnight, don’t steal from the witch’s garden, don’t neglect to invite certain fairies to your child’s christening - and their stringent yet arbitrary lists of rules make them a perfect metaphor for talking through an abusive relationship. So throughout In the Dream House, no matter what narrative trope or genre is framing the chapter at hand, she uses footnotes to mark off fairy tale motifs as they occur. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markīut while Machado is fluent in many genres, her native tongue is the fairy tale, and specifically the dark and bloody Angela Carter kind. In the Dream House skips between genres less playfully, but revolves around a variation on the same theme: Machado herself, her body - as well as her mind and emotions, with the titular “dream house” acting as a metaphor for Machado’s body - and the woman in that dream house, who believes herself to be entitled to control over Machado. That book was an anthology, a collection of short stories that skipped playfully between genres but revolved around a single theme: women, their bodies, and other parties who believe themselves to be entitled to those bodies. In many ways, this format is an echo of Machado’s much-celebrated debut, Her Body and Other Parties. She chases her from room to room and then, when Machado finally emerges, asks sweetly, “Why are you crying?”Īs Machado retells the story of their relationship, she spends each brief chapter playing with a different narrative trope: noir, erotica, folklore taxonomy. The woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of infidelity, of flakiness, of being inconsiderate. Over the course of the memoir, Machado meets her girlfriend - referred to only as “the woman in the Dream House” - and finds herself rapidly infatuated, wooed, love bombed. Specifically, In the Dream House is a memoir of Machado’s abusive relationship with an ex-girlfriend. It has to be, because it is a memoir of trauma, and memories of trauma are fragmented. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is a memoir told in fragments, in shards.
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