Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): Welcome to Story Behind the Story. I’m your host Clara Sherley-Appel. Today I’m sharing a recording of a live conversation I had with Carmen Maria Machado at Kepler’s books on February 1st. This event was hosted by Kepler’s  Literary Foundation and produced by Amber Clark. 

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO is the author of the sparklingly surreal short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her memoir, In the Dream House, was named “Best Book of the Year” in 2019 by just about every major media outlet, including The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Vogue. It is a bold, captivating account of the violence and abuse Machado endured in her first relationship with another woman, told in her inimitable voice, and it’s the subject of our conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, here’s Carmen Maria Machado!

Carmen Maria Machado (CMM): Hello Everybody! Hi. Um, alright, I guess I’ll just read, and then we’ll talk, which is what you just said. (crowd chuckles)
“Dream House, As Luck of the Draw
Part of the problem was, as a weird fat girl, you felt lucky. She did what you'd wished a million others had done: looked past arbitrary markers of social currency, and seen your brain and ferocious talent, and quick wit, and pugnacious approach to assholes. When you first started writing about fatness a long time ago in your live journal, a commenter said to you that you were pretty and smart and charming, but as long as you were zaftig, you would never have your choice of lovers. You remember feeling outrage, and then processing the reality, the practicality of what he'd said. You were so angry at the world. You wondered when she came along if this is what most people got to experience in their lives — a straight line from want to satisfaction, desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before. It had always been fraught. How many times had you said, “if I just looked a little different, I'd be drowning in love”? Now you get to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

Dream House, As Blue Beard
Blue Beard's greatest lie was that there was only one rule. The newest wife could do anything she wanted, anything, as long as she didn't do that single arbitrary thing. Didn't stick that tiny inconsequential key into that tiny inconsequential lock. But we all know that was just the beginning. A test. She failed, and lived to tell the tale as I have. But even if she’d passed, even if she'd listened, there’d have been some other request — a little larger, a little stranger, and if she kept going, kept allowing herself to be trained like a corset fanatic pinching her waist smaller and smaller, there’d have been a scene where Blue Beard danced around with the rotting corpses of his past wives clasped in his arms, and the newest wife would have sat there mutely. Suppressing growing horror. Swallowing the egg of vomit that bobbed behind her breast bone. And then later another scene in which he did unspeakable things to the bodies. Women. They'd once been women, and she just stared dead into the middle distance seeking a purgatory where she could live forever. Some scholars believe that Blue Beard’s blue beard is a symbol of his supernatural nature, easier to accept than being brought to heal by a simple man. But isn't that the joke? He can be simple, and he doesn't have to be a man. Because she hadn't blinked at the key and it's conditions, hadn't paused when he told her her foot falls were too heavy for his liking, hadn't protested when he fucked her while she wept, hadn't declined when he suggested that she stopped speaking, hadn't said a word when he left bruises on her arms, hadn't scolded him for speaking to her like she was a dog or a child, hadn't run screaming down the path from the castle into the village pleading with someone to help, help, help, it made logical sense that she sat there and watched him spinning around the body of wife number four. It's decaying head flapping backward on a hinge of flesh. ‘This is how you are toughened,’ the newest wife reasoned. This is where the tenacity of love is practiced. It's tensile strength, it's durability. You are being tested, and you are passing the test, sweet girl, sweet self — look how good you are. Look how loyal. Look how loved.

Dream House as Appetite
You make a mistake early on, though you don't know it at the time. You admit to her that you are constantly nursing low-grade crushes on many people in your life. Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart and funny minds, and the result is a gooey lovely space somewhere between philia and Eros. You've been this way as long as you can remember. You've always found this quirk of your personality to be just that — a quirk — and she laughs and says she's charmed by it. Over the course of your relationship she will accuse you of fucking, or wanting to fuck, or planning to fuck, the following people: Your roommate, your roommate's girlfriend, dozens of your friends, the Clarion class you haven't even met yet, a dozen of her friends, then a few of her colleagues at Indiana, her ex-girlfriend, her ex-boyfriend, your ex-boyfriends, several of your teachers, the director of your MFA program, several of your students, one of your doctors, and then perhaps the most demented moment of this exercise — her father. Also an untold litany of strangers, people on the subway and in coffee shops, waiters at restaurants, store clerks, and grocery store cashiers and librarians and ticket takers and janitors and museum goers and beach sleepers. The problems of denial sounds like confessions to her, and so the burden of proof is forced upon you. To show that you have not been fucking those people you become adept at doing searches on your phone providing evidence that you haven't been in contact with anyone. You stop talking about a promising student in one of your classes because she becomes fixated on the idea that you have a crush on a 19-year-old who has just learned how to balance exposition and scene. One day that she rubs her fingers over you and you close your eyes and pleasure, she grabs your face and twists it toward her. She gets so close to you that you can smell something sour on her breath. “Who are you thinking about,” she says. It's phrased like a question, but it isn't. Your mouth moves but nothing comes out, and she squeezes your jaw a little harder, “Look at me when I fuck you,” she says. You pretend to come.

Dream House As the River Lethe
Later that fall, she asks you to join her at the Harvard-Yale football game. It is a favorite tradition of hers, and she has flown there for the occasion, but has to be back in Indiana earlier than expected. “If you drive there, you can bring me back,” she says. And so you drive from Iowa to Connecticut to meet her.
And so after a day of autumn temperatures and flask sips and people in furs and bottles of Champagne rolling around on the muddy ground like Budweiser cans, you sleep hard in an uncomfortable hotel bed. The next afternoon, you prepare to leave. She is a reckless driver — nothing has changed since that trip to Savannah — so you get behind the wheel of your car without asking.
You pull away from New Haven, alternating between the radio, conversation, and silence. You scoot down through Connecticut and New York. In Pennsylvania the light drops away early, and rain glosses the pavement. Somewhere in the middle of the endless, hilly length of this state, the one you’d grown up in, she interrupts herself midsentence.
“Why won’t you let me drive?” she asks. Her voice is controlled, measured, like a dog whose tail has gone rigid; nothing is happening, but something is wrong.
“I’m okay driving,” you say.
“You’re tired,” she says. “Too tired to drive.”
“I’m not,” you say, and you aren’t.
“You’re too tired, and you’re going to kill us,” she says. “You hate me. You want me to die.”
“I don’t hate you,” you say. “I don’t want you to die.”
“You hate me,” she says, her voice going up half an octave with every syllable.
“You’re going to kill us and you don’t even care, you selfish bitch.” 
“I —”
“You selfish bitch.” She begins to pound the dashboard. “You selfish bitch, you selfish bitch, you selfish —”
You pull off at the next exit and park at a gas station. She throws open the passenger door even before the car stops moving, and stalks around the parking lot like a teenage boy who is trying to cool down before he punches a wall. You sit in the driver’s seat, watching her pace. The urge to cry is present, but far off, like you’re high. When she starts walking back toward the car, her eyes fixed on you, you hastily unbuckle your seat belt and run to the passenger side. You don’t want her to leave without you, and you’re not sure she won’t.
Afterward, the drive is framed by wet, dark mountains. You remember going through Pennsylvania around Christmas the year before and seeing 18-wheelers overturned on the side of these same roads, their engine blocks blackened by extinguished fires. And cars, too, on the highway’s shoulder, casually burning. She goes 80, 90 miles per hour, and you have to look away from the climbing needle. The shadowy shapes of deer pass in front of you through curtains of rain. ‘I am going to die,’ you think. You pray for a cop to pull you over, watching the side mirror for blue and red lights that never appear. You clutch the door when she accelerates, and when the car whips weightlessly over a hill. “Stop that,” she says, and goes even faster. “Sleep,” she commands, but you cannot sleep.
Midnight comes. You enter Ohio, a state you’ve always found very boring to drive across, but now your adrenaline makes your hands tremble in your lap. You drive past dead animals by the dozens: raccoons blasted apart by speeding tires, deer whose muscular animal bodies are contorted like that of fallen dancers.
The rain slows, then stops, and you enter Indiana.
In the final stretch, when she exits the main highway and takes a two-lane country road south to Bloomington, the car begins to yawn to the left, kissing the double line, surpassing it, and then to the right, where the door passes within inches of a metal barrier. When you look over, the back of her skull is touching the headrest, her eyes closed. You bark her name, and the car rights itself.
“Now you’re too tired,” you say. “You’re falling asleep. Please, let me do it, we’re almost there.” You have never been so awake.
“I’m fine,” she says. “My body is my bitch. I can make it do whatever I want.”
“Please pull over.”
She curls her lip, but doesn’t say anything else and doesn’t stop. Every so often, the car swerves. You pass a religious billboard that asks you if you know where you’ll go after death. In full daylight, this sort of propaganda would make you roll your eyes, but now it tugs on an old childhood fear, and you whimper and then try, too late, to swallow the sound.
When you first came to Bloomington — when you helped her find the Dream House — it was impossibly bright. It was late spring, and the trees were electric, new-growth neon green. Now the leaves burn in red and orange, and brown ones spiral away from the branches. The season is dying and you will die too, you are certain, this night.
The car pulls into the driveway around four in the morning and sits there in silence. You feel like you are going to throw up. The leaves drop onto the car’s roof and the wind snatches them away with a papery scrape. Finally she reaches to unbuckle her seat belt, but you are watching the lawn. Two dark shapes are crossing it, like dogs, but not. Coyotes? It would have been a lovely sight at any time, but in contrast to this night’s terrors it is so beautiful your face tingles.
“Look,” you say softly, pointing.
She starts as if you’ve struck her. Then she sees what you see. You wait for her coo, for her sweetness.
“Fuck you,” she says. She leans toward you and speaks directly into your ear. “You say ‘look’ without saying anything else, I think you’re fucking pointing out someone who’s going to fucking kill us. It’s the middle of the night. What the fuck is wrong with you?” She kicks open the car door; the coyotes bolt for the trees. You watch her stomp through the Dream House. Her silhouette is thrown up against a series of illuminated windows — kitchen, bathroom, bedroom — and then all the lights go out.
You get out of the car and sit against the side of the house, putting on your winter coat backward like a smock. The coyotes come back, after a while, trotting casually across the lawn. Deer too, and foxes, all paying you no mind, as if you are part of the scenery, as if you aren’t there at all.
You could go to bed too. Or, you could sit at the table in the kitchen and watch the scene from behind the windowpane. But that, you think, would be like putting this night in a museum — removed, too-soon forgotten. Sit with this, you think. Do not forget this is happening. Tomorrow, you are going to push this away. But here, remember.
Your butt goes numb in the grass. The lawn is a theater of wildlife. Your little car, stalwart as any stallion, sits silent and bright in the driveway, finally cooling down after her long drive. Birds titter early-morning Morse code from the trees. A gaggle of drunk students crests the hill at the edge of the golf course and stand there looking at you, perhaps believing you to be a ghost, before shuffling down onto the street. 
And in the same way the wrist rotates faster, just before the door latch is about to release, the predawn night speeds up a little before the day comes. And though it would not be until the next summer solstice that you’d be free from her, though you would spend the season’s precipitous drop into darkness alongside her, on this morning, light seeps into the sky and you are present with your body and mind and you do not forget.
In the morning, the woman who made you ill with fear brews a pot of coffee and jokes with you and kisses you, and sweetly scratches your scalp like nothing has happened. And, as though you’d slept, a new day begins again.”
I just got one more…

“Dream House as Natural Disaster
I get bad heartburn. It's the Zoloft which takes the edge of my anxiety but brings along a bunch of awful side effects, like a good friend who can't shed a bad lover. Every so often I take my nightly meds and within a few minutes feel as though a hot poker has been shoved down my esophagus. I chew antacids and walk to the bathroom. Often the pain or the force of the neutralization makes me vomit. I become functionally everyone's favorite science fair project. When I bend over the toilet, I think a lot about how my heart is a volcano, like that quote from Khalil Gibran. It's dumb but it moved me, and I wrote it down on a post-it note stuck on my desk: ‘If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom in your hands?’ It stayed there until a bad day, working on this book, when I suddenly loathed the quote with every ember of my being and crumpled it up and threw it away.
Reader, do you remember that ridiculous movie, Volcano? The one with Tommy Lee Jones? Do you remember how they stopped the eruption in the middle of downtown Los Angeles?”

Do you guys remember this movie? Have you seen this movie? (crowd laughs in agreement) 

“They divert it with cement roadblocks and pointed fire hoses at it and rerouted the lava to the ocean, and everything was fine. Sweet reader, that is not how lava works. Anyone can tell you that. Here's the truth: I keep waiting for my anger to go dormant but it won't. I keep waiting for someone to reroute my anger into the ocean, but no one can. My heart is closer to Dante's Peak of Dante's Peak. My anger dissolves grandmas and acid legs and raises quaint Pacific Northwest towns with ash and asphyxiates jet engines with its grit. Lava keeps leaking down my slopes. You should have listened to the scientist. You should have evacuated earlier. So Khalil Gibran, I know what he's saying but even rhetorically he's making exactly the wrong point; The fact is people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary. Dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is there's no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful furious mountain.”

Thanks. (crowd applauds)

(CSA): So I think we can all agree that you've done something amazing with the experiences that you have, but before we start and ask all sorts of questions about that, I just want to say I'm so sorry for everything she did to you. One of the things that caught my attention, which is in the passage in Dream House as the River Lethe — but I think you sort of glossed over briefly so if it doesn't sound familiar, I'm sorry — Is the way that you annotate your story with motifs from fairy tales and myths.

(CMM): Oh yeah I don't I don't read the foot when I read out loud, Oh yeah.

(CSA): In addition to the chapter titles, there are these footnotes sprinkled throughout which reference these familiar genre tropes. Did seeing your experiences mirrored in folklore help you process what happened to you?

(CMM): No, is the short version. Nothing that I did writing this book helped me process anything that happened to me. I actually don't… I did not find writing this book cathartic in any way, but I did find that the using folktale taxonomy as a way of sort of dividing up or sort of labeling a lot of the events of the book, I found it useful in the sense that one of the really hard things about writing about domestic violence is that when you strip away the details that make each person who they are, unfortunately it follows a very predictable script. And when you know what you're looking for, it actually is very easy to identify and  predict how things are going to unfold. And so the challenge then becomes how do you write… cuz, you know, writing a memoir isn't just like recording what happened to you. It's turning something that happened to you into something beautiful and interesting, right? And then… so the question is how do you make what is essentially a cliche — like a large, narrative cliche of the way that abusers function — How do you turn that into something interesting? When it's by itself, it's this trope, right? And so I was thinking a lot about that and was struggling with that; I mean, I write about it explicitly in the book, but also there was a moment where I was thinking a lot about photo taxonomy and the way in which we label folktales and fairy tales and stories that have been told across human history, and how even amongst those stories which have been passed from person to person, and everyone leaves all their fingerprints all over them, and it is just these repeating tropes, these repeating ideas. Those stories have a lot to show us, a lot to tell us about our cells and who we have been and who we are going to become. And so it actually became a sort of way of encouraging myself a little bit. Like, I found them very promising in this interesting way that even stories that are told over and over again have their own value. So yeah, I just… and also just like a lot of them read… like, I loved reading these, this book that's just Thompson index, and it was really interesting and really beautiful and really fun.

(CSA): You talk in the book about the way that our expectations or preconceptions about queer relationships, and particularly relationships between women, contribute to the silencing of narratives of domestic violence in those… among those people and among those parties. What are those preconceptions and how do they prevent us from seeing the type of abuse that you experienced?

(CMM): Well, I mean, there's a bunch. So one of the big ones that I talk about in the book, sort of the myth of the lesbian utopia, and the way that I describe it is… so I am a queer woman, I am married to another woman. My… I… obviously, patriarchy affects me a lot of ways, but it's not in my house. Like when I have my coffee in the morning, it's not in my coffee. It's like I can drink coffee without the patriarchy being called in any way, which is really nice and it's a thing about being in a relationship with a woman that's actually kind of lovely. Sorry, there's more to that thought…
But so… and there's something about that… so when you're experiencing that for the first time, if you are somebody who you’ve either already dated men, or just you just a person who's in the world with men, and then you suddenly realize that you can have this thing that, it's not in your house, right? I think it's this moment of joy. It's your ability to just have your coffee with no patriarchy in it. Just a moment of peace. And I think there's a lot of language around queer utopia, where it's like, “oh it's so perfect. We’ve found this perfect place.” And when I was doing research about the history of the conversation about domestic violence in lesbian communities, the language that was used was often “the punctured dream,” “the failed Utopia.” That was the language that kept getting used, and so for me, part of it is this idea that like lesbian relationships are by definition egalitarian, which of course they're not. They are in some ways, and they aren't in others. So I feel like there's just this language that has been built up around especially lesbian relationships, but I think queer relationships in general that actually ignores how human power dynamics exist in those relationships. Or other intersections of things like race and all kinds of other stuff like that. So that's one of them.
And also just the inability for us to conceive women as violent or as being potentially able to commit violence. It was really interesting I found a lot of historical accounts; There's this case I talk about… Oh my God… Alice and Freda, who are these young women around the late 19th century who were a couple, and who were going to run away and get married. And then one of them, her mother intercepted a letter and cut them off. And one day, while she was in the carriage with her family, Freda was riding the horse with her family and Alice just showed up and slit her throat and killed her. And when they interviewed her, the media didn't know what to do with itself. The media was like, “it's like those romantic murders, but…” They were sort of like, “but…. Uh…”

(CSA): Shruggies?

(CMM):  Yeah, yeah. There was a lot of confusion about, how do we think about this? How do we…and trying to put language to a thing at the time that there wasn't really a lot of structured language around it. But just the idea of a woman committing that kind of violence, and done so publicly — It wasn't even a question of if she had done it or not. There were like, eight witnesses! And I think that there's this way that violence unmores women from their gender identity, in the same way that queerness has historically, where people have been like, queer women.. well they're not quite women exactly. And violence, sexually, has been treated similar historically. And so It's a lot of stuff like that, where it was unmooring from gender identity, and this idea of the Utopia that makes other conversation weirdly hard and difficult to articulate.

(CSA): And you brought something up that I was very interested in, because of course, aside from the fact that you shared a gender identity, there were other power dynamics at play in your relationship with the woman from the dream house. She was experienced in relationships with women, and you were inexperienced. She was white, you are Latina. The world treats your bodies differently, and she used many of those things against you. Can you talk about that and how that played in?

(CMM): Yeah, I mean the first thing in particular was a big part of it, and again is one of those things where it feels very clear in retrospect, and it feels clear as a person who's now in her thirties looking back on this; like, if someone was telling me this now, I'd be like, “Ah, I understand this perfectly.” But she was my first girlfriend. She's dated a lot of people and she’s usually their first girlfriend, which is not a coincidence. That's actually very traditional, very classic because it creates a power dynamic. You have people who are newly out of the closet or people who just don’t have a lot of experience in that area, and she would tell me — like, we would get into these really big blowout fights that were so intense, and she would say to me, “You're new to this. This is what it's like to date a woman. You’re just new, you don't know.” Cuz I've never fought with anybody like this before, and she was like, “this is what it's like. I know. You wouldn't know, but I know.” And I had grown up… my father used to say stuff to me like, “Women are so emotional,” and that sort of language, that language we give, that people put to women. And I used to tell him that he was full of shit, but I had actually internalized a lot of it, I think. Way more than I actually expected that I had. And so I began to think, maybe she's right. I just don't understand. I am new to this, maybe they're just really different. The sex is better, so why wouldn't the fighting be worse? Or some weird… And that makes no sense, right? Looking at it from the perssepctive… it's like, ah, she was just using that as a sort of leverage, and banking on the fact that I wouldn't know the difference, or I wouldn't be able to tell, or that I would believe her.

(CSA): At one point in the book you say that abuse in queer relationships is often a reflection of internalized homophobia, and in analogous way to abuse in heterosexual relationships as a reflection of sexism. How did you come to that understanding?

(CMM): Well I was thinking a lot about how in… so, talking in the book a lot about how sort of classic… the way we clasically think of domestic violence is happening, which is usually heterosexual, like the people involved are straight, white. The victim is female, the perpetrator is male. And part of that stereotype or part of that understanding involves a level of sexism. There's a kind of power structure that's being ridden in order to get to the goal, or the point. And so when I was reading up about what made queer DV different, it was interesting cuz one of the things that I was reading a lot was that there's this added threat, and like a thing — and this did not apply me as I was like already out when I was dating my girlfriend — but if you are a person who is trans or queer and in the closet, and your employer finding out or someone else finding out like your family — that's a risk, right? That a thing that will often happen is queer abusers will say to their victims, ‘I'm going to tell people, I'm going to out you. I'm going to make a lot of trouble for you.’ This also happens with undocumented people, so there's an entire branch of DV that involves people who use the immigration status of their partner against them. I mean, it's very, very bad. So people who just learn how to leverage what they can, and so that can look like racism. or is racism. It is homophobia. It's leveraging these… even if the person themselves also belongs to that category, I still believe it's leveraging that prejudice, or leveraging that against the victim. 

(CSA): I have an audience question here. Says, “I underlined your note about Bay Area biphobia with a shout of recognition. Can you talk about your experiences here?”

(CMM): Oh my God, Yeah, I can. I lived here from 2008 to 2010. I mention in the book very, very briefly that… yeah I thought to myself… because I came here, I was so little — I was 22 when I moved here. And I was like, I'm going to go to the Bay Area and I'm going to date ladies. And I was so excited, I was just beside myself. Cuz I was kind of a late bloomer in that way, and was feeling very excited. And then I got here, and every lesbian, every person, every lesbian I met was like, “oh you also like dudes? Absolutely not.” And it drove me to the arms of (she whispers) tech bros!

(CSA): Oh no!

(CMM): Three of them in a row!

(CSA): I'm so sorry.

(CMM): It was a bad time, bad time in my life. Yeah, so anyway, so it was a dark time. I hope it's not still like that, I very much hope so, cuz I’ve told some people that and they’re like, ‘Oh I never had the experience!’ And I was like, well in 2009 on OkCupid… I guess one's choices were… I don't know. Anyway. And that's what happens: when you're biphobic, you drive perfectly nice queer ladies into the arms of terrible tech Bros. It's terrible, It's terrible. (crowd and Clara laughing empathetically)

(CSA): Okay, odd transitions… (CMM laughs) Som in the narratives about queerness and queer rights that we so often see in the dominant heteronormative culture, the focus is often on the right of queer people to marry, or at least it was before 2015, and there's still a lot of that around. And yet so many other more fundamental rights — ones that protect us from violence both at the institutional and individual level — are left out of the discussion. Do you think there's a relationship between the focus on these positive freedoms — the freedom to love, to marry — and the absence of resources on and information about queer domestic violence?

(CMM): That's a really good question. I mean, I'm sure there's a connection. I mean, I think it also depends like which sort of way, because I feel like the way that straight people don't think about queer DV is because straight people don't think about queer people very much at all. And there's a lack of caring or understanding about an issue that doesn't directly affect you. So, that I feel. But within the queer community, I feel like… I mean, I talk in the book about, because all this was happening to me while sort of marriage equality… I had actually lived in Bay Area when Prop 8 was passed, then I moved to Iowa where gay marriage was legal, which is very confusing, and then I remember this conversation happening. In the book, the day that I finally broke up with my with my ex in the book is the day that Obama was like, ‘Actually, I think people should be able to get married.’ Because Biden had said it kind of by accident, and then Obama said it. Anyway… So I was thinking a lot about how this was going on while I was negotiating all of this stuff in my life, and thinking about how, on some level I think I had internalized this idea that you can't say bad things about your particular specific gay relationship while lots of people are trying to get this thing that's precariously hovering on the edge of a knife, or whatever. And I think this desire for respectability, this desire to show, not even just that like… cuz it should never be about that, right? It should be like, we're human beings, we deserve human rights, nothing else is relevant. But people want to say, ‘We're the best. We're not even just okay, we're better than straight people.’ We have a thing that people talk about a lot, how there are fewer instances of child abuse in queer families who adopted children than straight families, and that I think is true. But also then, when that lesbian couple two years ago killed their five black adopted children, a white couple, people really got themselves tied into knots over that because we had for so long internalized this narrative of ‘gay parents are perfect.’ When in fact it’s like, no! They can still be racist, they can still be bad parents, they can still be a lot of things. Just because... The point is that, of course it doesn’t matter. You should be able to marry regardless, or adopt children regardless of how you've proven yourself to be better or superior in some way. It’s enough to be like, I'm a human being, I deserve human rights. I don't need to be perfect or even good, right? Sorry, I don't know if I actually answered your question. Did I answer your question?

(CSA):  You gave a good answer.

(CMM): Great! Fabulous. Fabulous. Excellent. (crowd laughs)

(CSA): Well, I mean I think this is… I found myself so fascinated, as a bisexual woman myself, in a lot of these issues about how we fail each other as queer people. And I actually… I was talking to Amber beforehand about the fact that I was introducing that question with, ‘as a bisexual woman myself’, because you feel this need to defend yourself and to defend your… I felt this need, at least, to defend myself and my interest in this topic because we are so sensitive to how the outside world proceeds us, and to the ways in which any flaws or faults are going to be weaponized against us. And it prevents us from acknowledging them and protects abusers within our community.

(CMM): And, I should also say, I've also had multiple people… I've done interviews and I've had more than one person who belongs to community that I am not a part of say like, ‘oh this exact thing happens in my community,’ about like sexual violence, or whatever. So this is not just a problem in the queer community, this is a problem across, because…right. If you're in a community that is constantly being marginalized or threatened or oppressed, you want to be like, ‘we are perfect. We just… please, please, let us live! Please let us have rights! Please let us do the things!’ But then people get away with really bad behavior because everyone is so desperate to keep a straight face and be respectable, and it really creates a lot of victims that are twice victimized, right? They're already suffering from whatever the dominant culture is doing, and then they also have been hurt by somebody and they have no recourse, they have no way of handling it.

(CSA):  And I mean for you, writing this book, were you anxious about confronting that truth, about addressing it?

(CMM): Oh yeah. It kept me awake every night. Yeah yeah 

(CSA): Do you see a way out? (CSA, CMM and crowd all laugh)

(CMM): Wow, Thanks for that softball of a question. I really appreciate it. (all laugh) Um, Do I see a way out of this terrible bind that was created in the centuries before my birth? Great… I truly have no idea. I mean, I think…. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I am a generally actually a fairly cynical person about the state of the world right now…

(CSA): Hard not to be

(CMM): Well, yeah. Actually, I did an event recently where someone asked how I felt about… did I think that Me Too was going to change things, and I said No, but over 15 minutes while cursing a lot. Afterwards this woman came up to me and she was like, ‘I'm really distressed cuz you're so young, but you're so pessimistic.’ And I was like, yeah, but like the world has given me absolutely no reason to believe that I'm incorrect. I think that people who have power don't want to give that power up. I think that there are always going to be ways in which groups are… I mean, when the bootis on your neck, you might be able to get it off in a short-term, or get it off for something, but it's always going to come down for something else. Whether you're a person of color or a woman or a queer person or a trans person, there's always going to be people with power trying to tell you what your experiences are, and tell you what you need and don't need, and what you don't deserve. And I don't think that's ever going to change, and so I feel like this dynamic is entrenched. I don't, I can't imagine it changing. I can imagine for individual people maybe, but not for a large scale cultural way.

(CSA):  Can we talk about queer villains?
 
(CMM): Sure.

(CSA): So there's a section where you talk about problem and pleasure and audacity of queer villains, which I love that phrase. Can you expand on the way that this sort of notion of queer villainy and the problematization of it in the queer community played in your experiences?

(CMM): Yeah. So as a lifelong Ursula lover, Ursula’s my absolute queen, I feel like the idea of the queer villain…like how often like watching movies, watching films, and seeing how often villains are coded queer in some way, and that's not just true in… I mean Disney, does it a lot, and sort of notoriously. But historically, it's sort of its own trope.


(CSA): There's a meme going around on twitter about the Grammys, where somebody had tweeted, “Why do all the Grammy winners look like look like Disney villains?” and someone else retweeted it and said, “Because you're used to queer coding villainy.”

(CMM): Oh I have not seen that, that’s so interesting! Yeah, so I feel like it's interesting because there's levels of critique you can have around that, so people can say it's fucked up that Disney makes all those villains then codes them all queer, and it's like, sure that's fucked up. Because when you have almost no… we have no queer characters anywhere, and the only queer characters that we’re ever getting, that the mainstream is ever giving you are these truly villainous characters, then yes, that creates a weird association that, if you're not thinking about it too hard, is actually quite hard to untangle and unpack. But I've always really loved queer villains. I actually find them quite inspiring and empowering, and really pleasurable and delightful, and they're so sinister and evil, and they always look real good.

(CSA): They own their power

(CMM): Yeah. And I really admire that and appreciate that. And so I talk in the book about how I'm really interested in… it becomes less of a problem when you have lots of queer characters. When you have lots of queer characters like, having a queer villain is just like… it's like, well, everyone's… there's so many of them, it’s not like the only queer person you ever see are going to be villains.I just find them really interesting and I think that returning to them, the potential… it does not remove their humanity for them to be evil. They actually are their own sort of… I don't know, I think it comes back to this question of, ‘isn't it okay to say people are human, and that's enough?’ And then letting them be whatever they…they can be whatever they're going to be, but they still deserve respect and… I don't know, I don't know... I'm like, bring on all the queer villains, I don't care. I want them to burn everything to the ground. I really, I truly do.

(CSA): So we're piling up audience questions here so I'm going to ask a few of them. That one we already asked…oh, I think this one's really interesting. So, you said that the process of writing this really wasn't cathartic. It was very hard and sort of wrenched out of you. What was the revision process like?

(CMM): I mean, it was more of the same. I mean, writing this book was…I wrote this book in a very weird way because I was writing it in bits, in bits and pieces, and then I sold a very, very skeletal draft to my publisher, and when I returned to the book I added 150 or 170 pages to it, and then cut a lot of things. So there was just many phases of adding and cutting and moving and slicing, and then I would feast and famine. I'd work for six months — the final push for this book was six months non-stop of working on it. Before that I was doing it in little bits and pieces. So it was sort of a weird process. But yeah, it was a difficult editorial process. It was difficult… you know, things would happen like… there was, at some point where I was going through the book — I had to put in an order, and I burst into tears and my editor had to do it for me because I was too upset. And then at some point I had this moment where I was editing the book and I realized there was a scene in the book where I was walking in a certain direction across the house, and it didn't affect what was happening in the scene, but I realized as I was rereading it that I suddenly was inverting the direction I was walking, and the fact that I couldn't remember… both seemed equally plausible, and I got myself worked up into a real frenzy, because I was like, ‘Why can I not remember what fucking direction I was walking in? Why does both of them feel potentially correct in my mind?’ And having to confront memory, and the way that memory functions, and how trauma effects memory and affects the brain. Or this other thing that happened where my my spouse read the book, and she was there for some of the events of the book, and so she read it and she said this thing, she said to me, ‘Oh I thought it was really interesting how you didn't include that time that we went to the Petco and we saw those ferrets and we made the joke with the ferrets,’ and she's telling me this story. And then as soon as she said it, I remembered it, but I had jettisoned it from my brain. If she had not said it, I would have never remembered that story as long as I lived. My brain had been like, cool, we're going to save either the entire plot and music of Space Jam, or this memory, which I still know because my brother loved Space Jam as a Child. Or, this memory of the ferrets. And my brain was just like, ferret memory gone. It just dismissed it, it sent it into the ether.

(CSA): Probably the right choice.

(CMM): Probably, I don't know. Yeah, so I feel like even editing it, I was like, the mind is so weird. Editing fiction is… you can just be like, ‘oh, this isn't working and I'm just going to snip snip, reap, stitch… do whatever.’ You can just do it. But with nonfiction, you just have this… you have fewer…. it's harder. I think nonfiction is more difficult because you just had this thing taken away from you, this ability to just make shit up, which is a pretty powerful tool that can fix a lot of problems. And when you aren't able to do that, you suddenly have to account for gaps. Like, if you don't remember what color the chair was, well you're shit out of luck, and what you going to do about that? Do you not mention the chair? Do you just say, ‘I don't remember the color’? There's all these sort of like… it's just very weird. It's just a very weird process. So yeah, the process editing it was emotionally difficult, technically difficult. It was horr— I don't know how anyone writes more than one nonfiction book by themselves. It's quite terrible.

(CSA): So you brought up memory, and the role of memory in abuse, and you were talking right now about the way that your experience of trauma caused you to forget things, but the woman from the Dream House would frequently also tell you that she didn't remember the horrific things that she had done, and yeah. What did that feel like?

(CMM): Well, I mean obviously terrible, but what I think is so interesting is, yeah there's a series of scenes in the book of these very violent, scary things, which would of be followed by her saying to me that she didn't remember them happening. And at the time I remember desperately searching for an explanation that would make her not accountable for what had happened. I kept thinking about how there's always that scene in a movie where somebody starts to get really… They start yelling and they collapse, and then they find out that they have a brain tumor or something, and you're like, oh it explains the thing that… oh, there's an explanation that is not their fault. That's like a very specific narrative trope that exists in the world. And I was looking for that. I was looking for an explanation for what had happened that absolved her of responsibility for what had happened, because all the alternatives were too terrible. And the question of, did she really not remember or did she just tell me she didn't remember… I'll never know the answer to that question. And for a long time I thought to myself that I needed to know, that I needed some way to to know the truth of it. But I think part of writing this book was realizing that there were a lot of things that I wanted to know, that I needed to come to peace with the fact that I would never have the answer and I would never know. Some things will always be inaccessible to me, and there was some things that I can only guess at and only posit, and that’s that. So I feel like there was a lot of process of both experiencing it — I was desperately trying to find a solution — and writing the book probably the healthiest thing I did; Most of me writing the book was not healthy at all, but probably the healthy thing I did was having this to come to this piece about what I could and could not know. I'm a writer. I want to know everything. That's my nature. I'm, you know, people are curious and you want to have explanations. You want to have… and it's maddening to not know.

(CSA): Well, and I think especially to have an experience like that, we want explanations.

(CMM): We want them for personal reasons, but also for ... We don't like a mystery. We want mysteries to be solved. Can you imagine if you started a mystery novel and someone got murdered, and you read the entire book and you never found out who the murderer is? I mean there is the sort of novel that will do that, and actually I sort of admire that very much, but if you’re reading a traditional mystery novel where that was the expectation and you reached the end and they were like, “sorry we don’t know,” you'd be like, “What the fuck?!” and you'd throw it across the room, right? I feel like that's... We want to know. We want an explanation. We want to know why things happen. But honestly, the question of why is kind of irrelevant in this case, because It's not about why. It's about what happened, what did that mean to me, what is the effect that it had on me. That's what’s relevant, not why did she do it, because it’s like, was it because it was easy? Was it because I was an easy mark? I have no, I mean… I don't know. I just don't know. And again in the book I posit, what was it? And I give lots of possibilities, but like, I don't know. I'll never know.

(CSA): Another audience question: How did you come up with the narrative structure that you land on, and did you ever consider alternatives?

(CMM): So when I try… when I first started writing the material in this book, or trying to write it, I was trying to do it in a fairly straightforward way and it was not working. Everything I wrote was really bad, and I remember a friend of mine who’s an editor reading something I had written that I said, ‘can you look at this?’ and I gave it to her and she got back to me a week later and she was like, ‘look, okay here's the thing,’ she's like, ‘You're a good writer. These sentences are really beautiful. You're a good writer. But the person in this essay... it's been a week since you've handed this to me, and you are already different than the person in this essay. You're moving through it. You're in the middle of the shit, and you're continuing, and so try to pin down what you're thinking. It is interesting, but is it good? No. Because you're just trying to… you're still figuring it out.’ And so I think that was actually a really valuable, a very valuable piece of advice. A really valuable observation. And yeah, if I had tried to write it in a straightforward way, it wouldn't work. And then one summer I was teaching. So Iowa City has this really awesome nerd youth writing camp that's phenomenal, and I would have murdered to have gone to as a child. It's for high schoolers. When I teach, I teach usually using genre as a lens because I'm really interested — not just genres, I mean genres also, but not just science fiction and fantasy and horror, but also how genre is a set of expectations that are established for readers. So if I say to you, ‘This book is realism,’ but then a dragon comes through the window, you'd be like… wait a minute, you said it was realism, but there's a dragon, and that wouldn't work. So genre is about what can a reader expect from a world? And so when those things are established then that gives the author the power to blow up the experience or invert it or play with it or tug on it or do something. And so I was talking a lot about genre with my students like every single day, and I was spending all my down time just walking around, and I remember walking around and thinking about genre. And also when you teach, you get to articulate stuff out loud that usually you don't get to say out loud. You just usually internalize it. And so I was thinking about what I had been talking about that day, and I was like, I wonder if a haunting, like a haunted house story would be actually the way to tell this. But nonfiction, not actually like a novel or something like that. And then I was like, well why not just… or the Gothic? Then I was like, well what about like science fiction, or like a generationship or epic fantasy or something. And then eventually I was like, oh I could just do all of them, and just use them as these lenses. And it was just the eureka moment I needed because then I just wrote a draft. It just came right out of me, which is usually a sign that I've hit upon either the correct form or the correct question for whatever it is I'm trying to figure out. I feel like whenever I'm in that zone, it means that I asked some correct… or I’ve lit upon something that was correct, and so in that case it was just the right form. And then after that, I was just… and then the book, I mean, that was it. That was the process.

(CSA): All right, so let's talk about the gothic novel.

(CMM): Sure

(CSA): And I was really excited cuz you talk a lot about Shirley Jackson who I love (cuz how can you not?), and I just was curious to hear you talk about any influence that her writing has had on yours.

(CMM): Oh so much. I'm a bit of a Shirley Jackson nut. I really love her. 

(CSA): Again how can you not?

(CMM): How can you not? If you haven't read her, you must. The Haunting of Hill House is a perfect novel, and it's so scary, it's so scary. Yeah, so Shirley Jackson, she's really interesting to me for a lot of reasons and one of them is that she wrote… I mean, her stories were about women in these specific circumstances. Like, women who were very dissatisfied, and it mirrored a lot of her own experiences in her life. And actually her biography, the biography that Ruth Franklin did a few years ago, was really excellent and I recommend it if you have any interest. This is how I know I'm getting older, cos I actually like biographies now. Before I was like never! And now I'm like, oh I want to read that biography on Shirley Jackson! So it's a really good biography, it's really beautifully written and thoroughly researched. But yeah… there's something about the way that she writes about women and their own dissatisfaction that I find very instructive, because it's one of those things where… I feel like sometimes people will say a thing that they think is a criticism of an author, which is like, ‘This book is just like her other book!’ or like, ‘It's the same book over and over again,’ or like, ‘My God, can't they just write a story that's not about whatever?” And it's like… no, cuz clearly that's the thing they're obsessed with, and that's the thing they're trying to get right over and over. And I feel like with Shirley Jackson, it's like you're just tracking this woman through her own anger and simmering, seething, very intelligent, very very intense dissatisfaction, and that's how I feel all the time, you know? Like I feel I'm mad a lot, and I feel like I spend a lot of my time having a lot of feelings and thoughts that I'm having difficulty putting language to, and then trying to put language to them. And I think that was a thing that she did as well. She's the master. I'll never ... She's an influence, I'll never Be Shirley Jackson. But I'm okay with that because she lived and she was great. And I do also have some very direct influences, like the Resident from my first book is a very strong Haunting of Hill House influence, and I have a short story blur that's not in a collection, it was in Tin House a few years ago that's probably going to be my next book, and that's actually a very direct… it's a conversation with my favorite short story of hers which is called The Tooth, which is this amazing short story that's in the Lottery, like the book that The Lottery is from, with the famous short story of hers. And it it's this really terrifying story about a woman who, her husband… she has an abscess tooth, and her husband puts her on a bus to go to New York City to get the abscess tooth removed, and she's on tons of painkillers and this man in a blue suit appears and begins to speak to her. And then she goes and has this dental surgery, and as soon as the tooth is taken out of her mouth, it's like her whole identity goes with it. And so right afterwards, she goes to a bathroom and she's washing her face, and there's all these other women at the sink, and then she stands up and she doesn't know which face is hers in the mirror. And she goes I hope it's not that dreadful woman in the corner who's all pale and drawn, and then she's like, Oh no it is! And then she dumps out her like purse with all her money and everything and she just  walks out. It's this really disturbing story, it's so good. And so I have… and so I wrote a short story about a woman who was on the way to visit her abusive girlfriend, she's on the road and she stops at a rest stop on the side of the road to wash her face and just take a break, and she's wearing glasses and she's very nearsighted (like me), and when she takes her glasses off and she washes her face and she goes to get her glasses, and her glasses are missing. And she's trapped in this rest stop, and this man in the blue suit appears and begins to speak to her. So instead of the tooth, it's the eyes. Anyway… but I fully ripped off poor Shirley, cuz that man in the blue suit was very interesting to me and he appears in a lot of her stories and is very creepy and so, felt interesting.

(CSA): Amber do we have time for one more? Okay, this is great because you're leading directly into all of my favorite questions.

(CMM): Oh great!

(CSA): So as I was reading In the Dream House, I kept thinking back to two stories from Her Body and Other Parties, Mothers, which is the story about an abusive relationship between two women that results in a child, and The Resident, in which past and present / real and imaginary start to merge for a writer at an artist’s residency, and she also gets very sick in ways that mirror the physical effects that you mentioned in one of the passages that you read. Can you talk about what it's like exploring the experience of abuse, and its effects in fiction versus nonfiction?

(CSA): Yeah. I mean, so this is actually a thing that isn't just centralized to abuse narratives. I actually find it much easier to write nonfiction about stories, about things I've already written fiction about. So it's true for this book there were a series of short stories and also moments in other stories that were me mentally prepping for the memoir. This is also true of this story that I have in the collection called Eight Bites which was the story I wrote about the fat body and about gastric bypass surgery, and it was a story that I had to write in order to write this essay of mine called The Trash Heap Has Spoken, which came out a couple years ago. It was like I needed to organize my thoughts about my feelings about the fat body in a short story where I had all these tools, and I could write a ghost story or do whatever I wanted, and then I could write the essay. So I actually find having… which is not a very efficient way to write nonfiction. It's like, I have to write this whole other thing that is not the thing, and then I can write the thing that I want to write, which is like, Jesus Christ. But that's just, apparently that’s my process. Because I write fiction very fast. I'm very, very fast. I'm insufferable, and if there are writers in this audience, I apologize. My friends tell me, ‘Carmen, Shut the fuck up,’ cuz fiction is easy for me! I do it really quickly. It's this very… I find it very playful and fun and never difficult or enraging in any way. I love it. But nonfiction makes me want to just break everything. It makes me want to just put my foot through a window. Nonfiction is difficult, it takes me forever. I write one good essay year, maybe? For me, nonfiction is such a different mental process and it requires an organization of my thoughts. Because I feel like fiction, it's a little more loose. You can kind of be like, ah there's no answer, but it's fine — it's fiction! It's not a big deal. But with nonfiction, I feel this need to really be getting everything pulled together in this really, really tight way, and that's hard. It's really hard. So yeah, I don't know. Not an efficient way of doing it but definitely I feel like, I'm guessing at the end of my career, any nonfiction that I write you able to trace directly to a story or a series of stories. I feel like some… if I'm very lucky some college student is going to be like, ‘ah ha! Look what I've done! I can track all of them!’ And they'll find a trace of this interview and they'll be like, ‘I knew it! I absolutely knew it!’

(CSA): Dissertation fodder

(CMM): Exactly exactly 

(CSA): Well, on that note, Thank you so much again. Carmen Maria Machado everyone!

Catch Story Behind the Story the first Friday of every month during the second hour of Talk of the Bay, 5-6p.m. on KSQD 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@ksqd.org. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me Clara Sherley-Appel. This episode features an in-conversation event produced by Amber Clark for Kepler's Literary Foundation, and engineered by Lanier Sammons who also wrote our theme Great KSQD thanks