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Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House has been on my radar since Amal raved about it in December. Memoir about queer domestic violence, told as though it were snippets of different fiction genres, sprinkled with a fair bit of historical and cultural context was something I was immensely here for.
And the interviews I've found have all reinforced the impression of the jacket copy: that she's thoughtful and thought-provoking, articulate both because she's confident in the areas she can rightfully take confidence in, and thoughtful and nuanced about how her sitting at the nexus of specific kinds of privilege and marginalization means she can't and shouldn't try to represent all marginalized communities.
I think my absolute fav of everything I've found is this NPR Code Switch conversation I'd been marginally aware of Code Switch, and it's a podcast I intend to keep more of an eye on: the producer and host were as incisive and thoughtful as their guest.
Interview runs the gambit of topics, providing us just enough book snippets to wet our appeetite, but clearly constructed by folks who'd read and so wanted to cover ground less trod. My GOD, the discussion about the trials of three-dimmensional representation. The show's thematic throughline really is that. Starting with how the word ~representation~ has become so bent, both by discourse but also by the dearth of work by marginalized folk, so that one person's work is expected to be all things to all people in that community. Moving through how exposing your dirty laundry both grants a gift to those in-community suffering similarly, and makes it a weapon to be turned against you. The pressure of creating in a space where one thing's expected to be everything, and trying to show that you've only hollowed out the first room, only opened a door for others to hollow out more and different ones behind you.
There's also some beautiful meditations on memoir: I'll never do Carmen's entire speech justice, but there's a line in the book about how her childhood "tenderized her like a porkchop" for the abuse. She uses that, within the interview's context, to discuss granting in-memoir glimpses of her childhood. How story never is simply the recounted situation: never exists in vacuum, and how teasing out the influence of what came before can almost be harder than recounting the travail itself.
Fuck, it's a phenomenal interview I can't rec highly enough.
And the interviews I've found have all reinforced the impression of the jacket copy: that she's thoughtful and thought-provoking, articulate both because she's confident in the areas she can rightfully take confidence in, and thoughtful and nuanced about how her sitting at the nexus of specific kinds of privilege and marginalization means she can't and shouldn't try to represent all marginalized communities.
I think my absolute fav of everything I've found is this NPR Code Switch conversation I'd been marginally aware of Code Switch, and it's a podcast I intend to keep more of an eye on: the producer and host were as incisive and thoughtful as their guest.
Interview runs the gambit of topics, providing us just enough book snippets to wet our appeetite, but clearly constructed by folks who'd read and so wanted to cover ground less trod. My GOD, the discussion about the trials of three-dimmensional representation. The show's thematic throughline really is that. Starting with how the word ~representation~ has become so bent, both by discourse but also by the dearth of work by marginalized folk, so that one person's work is expected to be all things to all people in that community. Moving through how exposing your dirty laundry both grants a gift to those in-community suffering similarly, and makes it a weapon to be turned against you. The pressure of creating in a space where one thing's expected to be everything, and trying to show that you've only hollowed out the first room, only opened a door for others to hollow out more and different ones behind you.
There's also some beautiful meditations on memoir: I'll never do Carmen's entire speech justice, but there's a line in the book about how her childhood "tenderized her like a porkchop" for the abuse. She uses that, within the interview's context, to discuss granting in-memoir glimpses of her childhood. How story never is simply the recounted situation: never exists in vacuum, and how teasing out the influence of what came before can almost be harder than recounting the travail itself.
Fuck, it's a phenomenal interview I can't rec highly enough.
