Barrio Dysmorphia

amy winehouse’s eye makeup

🌈 this one goes out to all you groovy gays 🖤

“On TV shows you get to see such a small percentage of somebody’s personality, because that’s what the audience wants to see - the norm, that something that they can rely on from week to week to week. But we all have many sides of our personalities, all of us have secrets. All of us have parts of ourselves that we don’t show to other people. All of us can go home and be depressed at night-and be smiling during the day. All of us can go home and binge and purge in the middle of the night and nobody would know. I don’t think that what I did here was out of character for Scully. The only thing different is that the audience hadn’t seen it before”

Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the most innovative memoir I’ve ever read. 

NPR

Many of us, now and in the future, need this book; it will be needed and recommended and read and reread for generations to come, and help some of us start to try to understand something it’s impossible to make sense of. 

Autostraddle

The dynamics Machado describes were familiar to me from personal experience, and once I’d finished the book, I pressed it into the hands of another queer woman, who had been in a relationship much like the one portrayed in the book. It was hard to believe that so few books have been available for us to describe that experience–the confusion, the invisibility, the anger, the grief, the warped sense of reality. In the Dream House begins to give a rich, vibrant language, a structure for understanding for that experience. And more than that: it made us feel seen.

Lambda Literary

What makes Machado’s memoir so distinctive is not just its inventiveness but its unflinching honesty – about the indignities of abuse, about the vulnerability of growing up feeling fat and therefore feeling “grateful for anything you can get” and also about bodily desires. “The diagnosis never changes,” she writes. “We will always be hungry, we will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognise it.”

For all the horror, In the Dream House is a ravishingly beautiful book, a tender, incandescent memoir like no other. There’s no doubt that Machado is one of the brightest literary talents around.

The Guardian

Instead of feeling disillusioned or constrained by the realization that queer people can enact the same harms on each other as people of other identities, Machado finds something else. What In the Dream House offers as a resource, as an expansion of a literary archive, is permission to unburden ourselves. “And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing,” she declares, “the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right.”

The Nation

The narrative is occasionally punctured by necessary reprieves that come in the form of a brief legal history of documented lesbian abuse, a cultural analysis of queer Disney characters, a sociological take on butchness and masculinity and a meditation on an inappropriate relationship Machado had with a priest in her adolescence. The chaos would drown you if it were not for her masterful ability to bring you up for air at precisely all the right times.

Remezcla

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado