Gay Reads Book Club: In the Dream House
Join the Gay Reads book club to discuss classic and contemporary literature by LGBTQ2IA+ authors. We’ll read across genres to uncover queer sensibilities, alternative canons, and exciting new voices. The club meets every two months at La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly with host Kathleen Fraser, and is open to all.
At our next meeting February 4th, at 7 PM, we’ll discuss Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House.
**We offer a 20% discount on In the Dream House from now until the meeting date.**
By purchasing your book at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly you help support free events like this one, independent publishing and retailing, our neighborhood, and authors both local and from around the world who depend on independent bookstores for their livelihood. You also get to take advantage of a great discount! Your support is appreciated.
///////////////////////////////////////////
THE BOOK
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and 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 with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope–haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman–in which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations about the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.