Recommendations
Books Like In the Dream House
Best books to read after In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
In the Dream House uses genre conventions as a kaleidoscope to examine abuse from every angle, breaking formal rules in service of an experience that resists conventional narration. These 8 books share its formal invention, its willingness to confront painful truths about intimacy, and its use of fiction's tools in memoir.
- 1Buy
Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's 2017 debut story collection — eight stories using horror, science fiction, and fantasy to explore female embodiment, desire, and violence — is the natural companion to In the Dream House; both use genre conventions to approach female experience from angles that realism can't reach.
- 2Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 2015 autotheory memoir about queer family formation uses the same hybrid of autobiography and theory that structures In the Dream House, and is its natural companion in the tradition of LGBTQ memoir that refuses conventional form in order to capture experience that conventional form can't hold.
- 3Buy
Bluets
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 240 numbered propositions about blue and heartbreak uses the same fragmentary, multiply-angled approach to intimate experience that Machado uses in In the Dream House — both books argue by accumulation rather than by linear argument, and both are as much literary performance as memoir.
- 4Buy
Redefining Realness
by Janet Mock
Mock's 2014 memoir about her path to womanhood shares In the Dream House's insistence on the body as a site of both vulnerability and agency, its centering of experiences that mainstream culture has refused to see clearly, and its structural refusal of the narrative of victimhood without redemption.
- 5Buy
Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2014 essay collection and her 2017 memoir Hunger together create the closest literary context for In the Dream House — Gay writes about the female body, about sexual violence, and about the contradictions of contemporary feminism with the same directness and formal self-awareness that Machado brings to abuse.
- 6Buy
We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
Shriver's 2003 epistolary novel — in which Eva writes letters to her absent husband working through her feelings about their son Kevin, who has committed a school shooting — uses the same device of genre (here the epistolary novel, which conventionally implies an intimate trust) to approach an experience that cannot be approached directly.
- 7Buy
The Empathy Exams
by Leslie Jamison
Jamison's 2014 essay collection is the most formally comparable companion to In the Dream House in the essay tradition — both use the self as a laboratory for thinking about pain, both refuse the comfort of resolution, and both make the act of paying attention to experience into a form of intellectual and artistic argument.
- 8Buy
Outline
by Rachel Cusk
Cusk's 2014 novel — told almost entirely through what others say to the narrator, who barely appears — is a radically different formal approach to the same territory as In the Dream House: the question of how identity is constructed through and against intimate relationships, and what it means to narrate a self that has been shaped by damage.
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