{"id":140639,"date":"2019-11-05T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2019-11-05T14:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140639"},"modified":"2019-11-05T09:48:39","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T14:48:39","slug":"fantasy-is-the-ultimate-queer-cliche-an-interview-with-carmen-maria-machado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/05\/fantasy-is-the-ultimate-queer-cliche-an-interview-with-carmen-maria-machado\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantasy Is the Ultimate Queer Clich\u00e9: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Late one evening early in October, I struggled to fall asleep. The sheets scratched, the cats in the empty lot next door screeched. These small irritations distracted me from sleep just long enough for all the big, looming concerns to descend. The presidency, the planet. Those who have wronged me and those whom I have wronged. Nothing, it seemed, could put my mind at rest.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Carmen Maria Machado might seem a strange companion for such a night. Her debut collection, <\/span>\u200b<\/span><\/em>Her Body and Other Parties<\/span>\u200b, conveyed the horrors of living in the world and inhabiting a body so vividly that it made her a finalist for the National Book Award. She is not a writer who will sing you to sleep. When I picked up her new book,<\/span><\/em> In the Dream House,<\/em><\/span> I was hoping, instead, for someone to sit with me in the dark of the night.\u200b \u200bI turned the final page just as the birds outside my window began to chirp.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

In the Dream House<\/span> \u200bis billed as a memoir, but the word hardly captures the variety within its pages. The book is centered around the narrative of an abusive relationship, and each chapter offers a new, illuminating metaphor: \u201c<\/span>\u200b<\/span><\/em>Dream Hous\u200be<\/span> as Omen,\u201d \u201c<\/span><\/em>\u200bDream House<\/span> \u200bas<\/span> Lost in Translation,\u201d \u201c\u200b<\/span><\/em>Dream House<\/span> \u200bas <\/span>Exercise in Style.\u201d These riveting fragments weave together folklore, fiction, and scholarship on queer domestic abuse. This book is bold yet nuanced, expansive yet specific. And perhaps most of all, it is an utterance that emerges from within deafening silence. That tells a story which has yet to be heard.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Machado and I spoke over the phone a few weeks ago. Even after a long day of teaching, she was a lively and generous interlocutor. Her frank speech carries a sort of bracing wakefulness, similar to how I felt that early morning\u2014eager for the light of yet another perilous day.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You write in the prologue about Saidiya Hartman\u2019s concept of archival silence, how some stories are \u201cmissing from our collective histories.\u201d What is it like to write from within this silence? To tell a story that has a history, but which has not been entered into the collective archive because it is a queer history?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very lonely. It\u2019s lonely and strange and special. I wish I had a more exciting answer. It\u2019s really hard. Of course, I worry about what I missed and I worry about how the book has failed and it gives me a lot of anxiety. It\u2019s a very stressful place to be in.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I imagine. If you fear you failed at something, what is it that you were hoping to achieve? I\u2019d love, also, to hear more about your research process.<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

When I first sold the book to Graywolf, it was mostly just the memoir pieces. I knew I wanted to do a heavy research element, but I didn\u2019t know what exactly. And when I began my rewrites, I was looking for the history of the way we\u2019ve talked about queer domestic violence. I was also looking for places where this conversation existed, but where it wouldn\u2019t necessarily have been called that. The former part was a little easier. I managed to trace, as you saw in the book, this timeline of the way that the conversation evolved and devolved and moved in interesting ways within the community in the eighties and nineties, and into today.<\/p>\n

But the latter part was much harder. I found myself researching a lot of woman-on-woman violence. As I was researching, it seemed people would really notice only when the violence was really salacious, like when one girl killed another and people would say: Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness, what is that all about?<\/p>\n

I kept thinking about how many things happen behind closed doors. Domestic violence almost by definition happens in the home, and so you\u2019re always reading between the lines. I\u2019m not a professional historian, so it was difficult. This is not my area of expertise. But I wanted to create some context because just saying, This happened to me, wasn\u2019t good enough. I wanted to try and figure out the framework around this thing that happened to me. How can I understand it as not just a thing that happened to me, a discrete thing, but also in the context of history and in queer history, and in the history of gender?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You acknowledge at several points how the language we use to discuss domestic violence has often lacked nuance. The legal term battered women<\/em>, for example, was used for decades, despite its failure to address queer realities, which you wrote \u201cdiscourag[ed] useful subtlety.\u201d How can subtlety be useful, particularly when working in pursuit of justice?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

I think the problem is that we crave order and we crave clarity. For example, #MeToo\u2014while a useful movement in many ways\u2014fails in really basic ways when it comes to everything that is not rape. We have developed this language that seems to say: There\u2019s this thing and it\u2019s really bad. And it is really bad!<\/p>\n

But when it comes to things that are a little less obvious\u2014like not rape but, oh, for example, a male boss steals a female employee\u2019s ideas for her entire career and then eventually fires her. What is that? That\u2019s not rape. It\u2019s not sexual harassment per se. But it creates something and it destroys something, and I feel like we just don\u2019t know how to deal with it.<\/p>\n

My book hasn\u2019t come out yet but even in some early reviews, reviewers don\u2019t agree about whether the abuse I experienced was physical. We prioritize certain kinds of abuse and not others. And there\u2019s just something\u2014there\u2019s something really gross about the way that we shut out people\u2019s experiences. We want everything to be very clear.<\/p>\n

We also often confuse right and legal. We think that if something is legal, then it must be okay. But a thing can be legal and also be fucked up. Those things are not the same. The legal system is only one avenue by which we define our grievances and define our experiences. But it\u2019s definitely not the best and it\u2019s definitely not the only one, right?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve brought up clarity, and I agree that the pursuit of clarity can be very reductive. But you also write, \u201cClarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you\u2019ve wanted anything.\u201d Throughout writing In the Dream House<\/em>, did you find yourself working more in pursuit of clarity or in resistance to it?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear in my own head. Which is not the problem, right? My own head is my own head. What I wanted was something that was clear so that other people could understand. And maybe this book was my attempt to say, Okay, you didn\u2019t understand it when I tried to explain it to you in a handful of sentences\u2014here\u2019s an entire book. Maybe now you\u2019ll understand. Maybe this will be clearer for you.<\/p>\n

But, of course, I wish I didn\u2019t have to do that\u2014to write an entire book trying to articulate it\u2014I wish it had just been simpler. Or at least, I don\u2019t wish it, but it would have been nice, in a way. Having to fight to have your experience recognized is really difficult. It\u2019s stressful. It\u2019s stressful in this persistent, nonstop way and that clarity would have been really intoxicating. Obviously, it\u2019s fucked up to say, I wish she had just hit me. That would have been way easier. But it\u2019s true. I wish she\u2019d been a man. That would have been easier, it would have fit better into our preexisting narratives. There are all these things that I wish could have been true, because it would have made my experience clearer and simpler to understand, and the fact that I don\u2019t have that simplicity is quite painful. It feels fucked up to say both of those things. But there\u2019s just something about that simplicity that is very intoxicating, and if I said I didn\u2019t want it, I would be lying. If I said it wouldn\u2019t be useful to me, I would be lying.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019re known for working across genres in your fiction, but it is particularly interesting to watch you do the same thing in a work of nonfiction. What did writing a memoir through a multitude of genres and narrative constraints make possible?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

I tried to tell it in a straightforward way. I tried to write that way for years and it never caught fire. I would just read it back to myself and think: Oh, this is dreadful, this is dreadful. And I put it aside. It wasn\u2019t until I thought of this structure that the whole thing opened up. It just felt right. I\u2019m not describing it in a very technical way, I wish I could, but I literally thought: Oh, this is the shape it has to take. The experience was so complicated that trying to describe it in a straightforward way would be impossible. It feels more symphonic than that. It feels more scattered.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did filtering these experiences through the constraints of genre change\u2014if it did\u2014how you understood those experiences?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

The sections that are more analytical, where I am parsing something apart or playing around with an idea\u2014a lot of those came from the titles themselves. I came up with them before they had content. For example, \u201cSpy Thriller.\u201d With \u201cSpy Thriller,\u201d I was thinking about the genre and the things that defined it for me. I realized a spy thriller is when someone has a secret and everything they do is infused with that secret. And that helped me to remember things. I don\u2019t know that I would have ended up writing about that dynamic if I hadn\u2019t had that prompt to set my brain into a certain place. These genre ideas gave me something to hold on to, to get myself into some different part of my memory and come out with something interesting.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One section I was particularly enamored with was \u201cDream House <\/em>as Choose Your Own Adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

I was thinking a lot about an author who is really important to me, Kevin Brockmeier. He was my teacher at Iowa. He has a really incredible short story called \u201cThe Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device\u201d and it\u2019s a choose-your-own-adventure story. It operates in a very different way, but he uses the form to very good effect. I remember reading it in grad school and then trying to write my own choose-your-own-adventure. I wrote a horror story about a woman in an art museum and it wasn\u2019t very good.<\/p>\n

So, I was thinking about what purpose a choose-your-own-adventure serves. Often it traps you in a cycle, right? There are all these different options, but a lot of the options are sort of fake. You\u2019re making choices but according to a pre-prescribed set of options. You can end up at the same place over and over again.<\/p>\n

I was interested in the form and I kept thinking about these moments\u2014these mornings with my ex where she would scream at me for moving in the night while I was sleeping. And I did feel like it was this weird cycle I was trapped in, where no matter what I did or what choice I made, I would always end up in the same place. I wanted to use the structure to create a certain effect. I wanted a section where the book kind of gaslit the reader. This was my attempt at that, or my way of sort of fucking with the reader by inviting them to make decisions, but the decisions are completely pointless.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Yeah, I mean, I definitely felt fucked with.<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

That was my intention.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The words dream house<\/em> conjure up many different associations\u2014House Hunters<\/em>, MASH<\/em>, a beautiful future with some perfect future spouse, a queer utopia. But you also demonstrate how that dream can become a nightmare. How do our dreams come to betray us?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

I talk in the book about fantasy, and the way in which fantasy is the ultimate clich\u00e9 of queerness. How can we get so lost in fantasy that we can\u2019t see the reality right in front of us? That sounds so cynical\u2014I believe in dreams and fantasy and pleasure. But I didn\u2019t understand the cost at which that could come. Part of the experience of writing this book was coming face to face with that young version of myself. And having to talk to her in this way and try to understand where it all went wrong.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is that how you came to use the second person?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

The initial draft was entirely in the second person. That\u2019s how I wrote it. When Graywolf bought it, they told me we would need to talk about the second person: I\u2019m not necessarily opposed to it, but sometimes it\u2019s used as a distancing technique, and I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s right for this project. <\/em><\/p>\n

When we went back, I thought I\u2019d just turn it all to first person. And I tried, but a lot of it really resisted the first person. I was thinking a lot about We the Animals<\/em>, by Justin Torres, which is told in the first-person plural. So it\u2019s initially told in the \u201cwe\u201d voice, and then there are these traumas that happen. The voice shatters and breaks into second and into first. That really moved me when I first read it. It was really devastating. I thought, Oh, I wonder if I could do that as well. I could sort of gesture to this fragmentation and then once I did, I thought, Oh, I see the second-person present is the one who is trapped in these cycles and the first-person past is me everywhere else. And that felt real and right. I needed to establish that break.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In some early interviews around Her Body and Other Parties<\/em> you were referring to this book as \u201cThe House in Indiana,\u201d which I assume was a working title. But it feels very different, conceptually, from In the Dream House. <\/em>Is there a story behind that?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

Yeah, \u201cThe House in Indiana\u201d was what I was calling it for a really long time. It was what I called it when I came up with the idea for all the different genre bits. I actually changed the title because whenever it would get brought up in interviews or events, people would be like, Are you from Indiana? I\u2019m from Indiana! My cousin\u2019s from Indiana! Everyone wanted to talk about Indiana and I know nothing about Indiana.<\/p>\n

But I knew I needed a title, and it needed to translate into this \u201cblank as blank\u201d format. Basically, I spent two days last summer when I was finishing up this book typing out every possible title\u2014I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of titles. Then I found \u201cDream House.\u201d But it turned out that my publisher, many years ago in her career, had also published a book called \u201cDream House.\u201d And then they offered \u201cIn the Dream House,\u201d and I thought, Okay, yes. All right. Done. And now, of course, as I\u2019ve started googling the title, I\u2019ve found that it is also the name of a Barbie show. There is a show called Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse<\/em>, or something like that, and so I get results for my own book and also results about Barbie. Which is weird and funny.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did you think about Barbie\u2019s Dreamhouse at all?<\/p>\n

MACHADO<\/p>\n

I did not for one second. No. It did not even cross my mind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Noor Qasim is a writer who lives in New York City. She is an editorial intern at\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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