In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
A queer relationship. Abuse with no language for it. She names it.
For you if
you want to understand how abuse works inside relationships that aren't supposed to have it — and why the silence around it is part of the abuse
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Machado structures this memoir of queer domestic abuse as a series of genre conventions — the haunted house, the choose your own adventure, the fairy tale, the staircase wit — because the experience she is describing had almost no literary precedent: queer women abusing queer women, a form of violence that the community had no language for and that the broader culture refused to acknowledge existed. She writes in second person — you entered the dream house, you stayed, you left — which places the reader inside the experience rather than outside it observing. Was challenged and banned. The most formally radical memoir on this shelf and the one that most precisely shows how the absence of language for something is itself a form of harm — that you cannot protect yourself from what has no name. For readers ready for a book that uses every formal tool available to describe something that resisted description.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Fahrenheit 451(1966)
dir. François Truffaut
Burning books to keep everyone happy.
In a future where books are outlawed, fireman Guy Montag burns forbidden literature for a living until a young woman's curiosity about reading unsettles his loyalty to the system. Truffaut's only English-language film, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in imagining resistance as an act of memory — the "book people" who become the books they refuse to let die. Pedagogical in showing censorship dressed up as compassion, a government that burns literature "for everyone's peace of mind."
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
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Knowledge was always the target.
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Forever...
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The teen novel they banned for telling the truth.
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milk and honey
Rupi Kaur
The poems that gave survivors their words.
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Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult
The novel that asks who made the shooter.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
A reservation kid goes to the white school. Everyone loses.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
P is for Palestine
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An alphabet book about Palestine. They tried to ban it.
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Last Exit to Brooklyn
Hubert Selby Jr.
Brooklyn's underworld. No exits. No comfort. All true.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
This Book Is Banned
Raj Haldar
Banned? Perfect. Now they'll definitely read it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST