Nonfiction

In the Dream House (Graywolf) 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, through which Machado examines the past from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado…