In the Dream House

For a special Banned Books Week book club, we will read In the Dream House, 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. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. 

Book club will begin with a discussion of banned books using the American Library Association statistics, followed by a discussion of Machado’s book.

Free and open to all, registration required for Zoom link.