Carmen Maria Machado on 'In the Dream House'

Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir 'In the Dream House.'

'In the Dream House' is Machado's wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

That struggle gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles.