In the Dream House cover art

In the Dream House

A Memoir

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In the Dream House

By: Carmen Maria Machado
Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
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About this listen

Nominated for The Rathbones Folio Prize.

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

©2019 Carmen Maria Machado (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books LGBTQ+ Studies Lesbian Studies Mental Health Awareness Memoir Heartfelt Dream

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Critic reviews

"A dark jewel reflecting something startling - familiar and strange." (Guardian)

"Ravishingly beautiful." (Observer)

"Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative." (Irish Times)
All stars
Most relevant
Machado's writing and narration are both extraordinary, so to have them together is a special treat that cannot really be described, only spoken about in barely coherent shrieks because it is just that fucking good. listen to this book if you have broken heart. listen even if you haven't. listen for the exquisite, clever, sad, funny, terrifying prose. listen for yourself.

The best audiobook you will ever buy

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I absolutely adored Machado's story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, and her memoir and discussion of abuse in lesbian relationships is incredibly important, moving, and inspiring.

Haunting, Beautiful, and Heartbreaking

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I feel like the author must write or perform a lot of poetry. Hearing her read her own words brought a poetics to it that I'm not sure I would have picked up reading it myself - a beautiful and unique experience. Others have noted that the narrated intonation can be a bit flat at times but this didn't take away from it for me. As a survivor of trauma myself, I imagine it's hard to write a book like this, let alone read my experiences aloud for an audience. Brave, beautiful and brilliant - from one traumatised lesbian to another!

Fascinating structure and poetic writing

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This is a really good reading by the author of a book that, as you can see from my ratings, I thought was excellent. But I was very glad that I also had a physical copy of the book, because there are certain aspects that don't come over well (or at all) in the audio.

First, the book has fairly frequent footnotes. Some of these give further details relating to the text, interesting back stories to people and events mentioned, etc., but most of these notes relate to Thompson's _Motif Index of Folk Literature_. Losing these means that one of the points of the narrative is lost: the narrator/author says she 'wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique' but then she discovers, in researching it, that it is a common story (p.266). The commonality has in fact been foreshadowed throughout by the footnote references to a motif taxonomy, which is entirely absent from the audio.

Second, the book has a chapter called 'Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure'. In the audio, the reading takes the most direct path through this, which means that that recursive nature of the 'adventure' (the way that the choice is not much of a choice at all) is lost, as are several entries which are on pages that you can't legitimately get to in the choose your own adventure numbering (these pages berate the reader for reading linearly, as if they're trying to break out of the cycle of abuse).

These are relatively minor things to be missing, but they are both innovative and creative features of the book, so it's a shame that neither are present in the audio. My recommendation is to buy the physical book and the audio and enjoy both!

Great, but missing elements of the written text

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Fantastic plot and beautifully written book. But the vocal fry and the reading cadence always with the same intonation at the end of every sentence made it impossible for me to listen to it. I'll pay for the paper version and I'll read it. I know every penny will be worth it, as it is, no doubt, a tremendous book.

Read, don't listen

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