Elsewhere in the basement, a Lovecraftian heating system reached long tentacles up into the rest of the house. There was a room in the basement-my roommates and I called it the murder room-with blood-red floors, walls, and ceiling, further improved by a secret hatch and a nonfunctional landline phone. The house was a mess: owned by a slumlord, slowly falling apart, full of eclectic, nightmarish details.

Dream House as Picaresqueīefore I met the woman from the Dream House, I lived in a tiny two-bedroom in Iowa City. If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying. I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions. The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Who is to say that there are only two bedrooms? Every room can be a bedroom: you only need a bed, or not even that. If you are assuming there are two bedrooms, you are both right and wrong. Most of your assumptions are correct: it has floors and walls and windows and a roof. In this brainy, playful, shattering account, Machado ultimately tells her own singular tale. Love that dare not speak its name.” Elsewhere, she imagines they are characters in I Love Lucy and Star Trek. In one chapter, she compares her torrid romance to a lesbian pulp novel: “Depraved inversion. Her dazzling autobiography drags that discussion into the light, examining her experience through the prism of different tropes and genres in search of answers to her traumatic past. And by “the silence,” she means a dearth of similar stories: Seldom is domestic abuse in same-sex relationships summoned from the shadows. “I speak into the silence,” Machado writes.

When Machado was a grad student in Iowa, she met her first girlfriend it made her feel like “a child buying something with her own money for the first time.” That woman would become her abuser.

Now, with her inventive memoir, In the Dream House, Machado continues this thrilling amalgamation of narratives to lay bare the emotional toll of her own real-life horror story. In 2016’s genre-bending short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, she melted the raw materials of literary fiction and fantasy-horror and melded them into an uncannily original assemblage of feminist fairy tales. Carmen Maria Machado is as much alchemist as author.

Carmen maria machado in the dreamhouse