En la casa de los sueños

When she was a young aspiring writer, Carmen Maria Machado met a small, blonde, upper-class, Harvard graduate, sophisticated and fascinating girl with whom she began her first lesbian relationship, after several sexual experiences with men. The girl owned an idyllic cabin in Bloomington, Virginia: the dream house of the title. But the dreams turned into nightmares when Machado's girlfriend began to show jealous, controlling and paranoid, and then accuse her of cheating on her with everyone and ending up verbally and even physically assaulting her. This book is the testimony of a toxic relationship, which in this case does not have as its aggressor a heterosexual male with a patriarchal and macho mentality, but a lesbian. And this is the first element that gives value to the text: the denunciation of violence in the couple within the queer community. But the exceptional quality of Machado's proposal goes further: instead of remaining in a mere exercise of personal testimony, she uses the history lived -and suffered- to further explore the subject, playing literary games with it. And she does it through the manipulation of narrative genres -the romance novel, the erotic one, the initiation novel, the horror novel...- which allows her to tell her story and reflect on how we all tell stories at the same time ours.