Book Club Guide

In the Dream House

by Carmen Maria Machado · 2019 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The queer abusive relationship and the silence around it
Genre as a way of telling the unspeakable — horror, romance, choose-your-own-adventure
Archives, testimony and whose story gets believed

About this book

Machado recounts her abusive relationship with a girlfriend through a series of fragmented chapters, each named after a different narrative genre — romance, horror, fable. The memoir invents a form for the queer abusive relationship while also asking why such stories have been so hard to tell and so little believed.

Published in 2019, In the Dream House won the Lambda Literary Award, the Bram Stoker Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize. It is now widely taught in creative writing, gender studies and memoir courses.

Discussion questions

Machado uses dozens of different narrative genres — each chapter named after a different form — to tell the same story. What does this formal invention achieve — and what does it say about why the story is so hard to tell in a single register?
The book opens with a meditation on the lack of queer domestic abuse narratives in any archive. What is Machado arguing about why these stories disappear — and what does she intend her memoir to do?
The 'dream house' is both literal and psychological. How does Machado develop the house as a symbol — and what does it capture about the psychology of abusive relationships?
The abuser in the memoir is never named. What does this anonymity achieve — and what does it withhold?
In the Dream House is both a memoir and a critical essay. How does Machado manage these registers — and do they illuminate or compete with each other?