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Carmen Maria Machado Biography

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“Was it the arc of the universe? The natural result of centuries, millenia of wrong headed politics? Was she trained to find you, or were you trained to be found? Was it the fact that you'd already been tenderized like a pork chop by: never having been properly in love, being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman, getting weird messages that relationships are about fighting and being at odds with each other? The fact that your heart had been broken that one time and you desperately wanted to feel it unbreak? That you felt complete with someone loving you? That you just straight-up loved being desired, desiring someone, coming all the time? That you got addicted to her smell, her voice, her body? That you figured this was what you deserved? The super predictable result of a religion that pathologized sex but never talked about relationships? Terrible sex ed? Bad timing? You feel as if there is a box you can open to find the answer, but with the lid closed, the answer is all of these things, all at once.”

HeartbreakTraumaAbusive RelationshipIntrusive Thoughts
Book:In the Dream House
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“You wondered, when she came along, if this was 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 got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.”

WantLoveDesireUnrequited LoveCarmen Maria MachadoIn The Dream HouseFraught
Book:In the Dream House
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“And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don't recognize it. And in the same way the dandelion's destruction tells us about ourselves, so does our own destruction: our bodies are ecosystems, and they shed and replace and repair until we die. And when we die, our bodies feed the hungry earth, our cells becoming part of other cells, and in the world of the living, where we used to be, people kiss and hold hands and fall in love and fuck and laugh and cry and hurt others and nurse broken hearts and start wars and pull sleeping children out of car seats and shout at each other. If you could harness that energy- that constant, roving hunger- you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.”

LifeHumanityEnergy
Book:In the Dream House
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“In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.”

PainGhostCarmen Maria MachadoLiving DeadIn The Dream HouseGhostly
Book:In the Dream House
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“Nostalgia (noun) 1. The unsettling sensation that you are never able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. 2. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”

Nostalgia
Author:Carmen Maria Machado
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“But it was "woman plus habitation," and she was a stranger. That is probably the truest and most gothic part; not because of war or because we'd only net with chaperones before marriage; rather because I didn't know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood-a flooded of what I realized I did not know. Afterward, I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together”

MemoirWlwBipoc
Book:In the Dream House
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“In it, I was sitting across from my wife, who was nude but wrapped in a gauzy fabric. She had a clipboard in her hand, and was moving a pencil down it as if ticking off entries on a list. "Where are you?" she asked. "Devil's Throat," I said. "What are you doing?" "Carrying a basket through the forest." "What's in the basket?" I looked down, and there they were: four beautiful spheres. "Two eggs," I counted. "Two figs." "Are you sure?" I did not look down again, afraid that the answer would change. "Yes." "And what is through the forest?" "I do not know." "And what is through the forest?" "I am not certain." "And what is through the forest?" "I cannot tell." "And what is through the forest?" "I don't remember." "And what is through the forest?" I woke up before I could answer.”

Her Body And Other Parties
Book:Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
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“The word archive Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek work “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I'm a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding whats worth recording of a child’s early life or---like Europe and its Stolpersteines, its “stumbling blocks’"---a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.”

HolocaustSilenced Voices
Book:In the Dream House
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“In her essay "Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the "violence of the archive.’’ This concept---also called “archival silence”---illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.”

Lost VoicesSilenced Women
Book:In the Dream House
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