having a body is horrifying: carmen maria machado on connecting the dots, gaslighting the reader, and scatter plot graphs

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn.

On November 17th, 2022, Carmen Maria Machado joined The Interlochen Review editors Kaydance Rice, Bella Rotker, Sophie Bernik, and Xime Silva for a conversation about her memoir In the Dream House and short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. 

KAYDANCE RICE: A lot of your work has a mythic quality to it or deals directly with mythos in works such as “The Husband Stitch” or the footnotes in In the Dream House. How does myth inform your work and how you approach incorporating it? 

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO: Like a lot of people, fairy tales, myths, legends, and folktales informed a lot of my childhood. I had the Disney version of the Little Mermaid in my mind from my childhood and then I had this extremely violent and very different and upsetting version after someone gave me this Hans Christen Anderson book. It’s also why I’m interested in seeing the way stories move from person to person or from one mode of telling to another and the way that they change tells us a lot about the culture the story’s being told in and the teller. 

With stories like “The Husband Stitch,” one of the roots of that story was reading the green ribbon story as a kid and it really fucked me up and stuck with me. I remember it so clearly, I could recite it to you. I think there’s something really valuable in the urban legends that really stick with us and the ones we can’t quite shake. So for me, I was like, clearly I have a response to that story so I should try my hand at adapting it and see what happens. 

KR: Also in In the Dream House, you use footnotes in several of the vignettes, oftentimes referencing literary devices and clichés in fables. How did those footnotes inform the piece for you and in what ways did you approach that incorporation? 

CMM: Weirdly, I think the things people ask about in that book the most are the things that came last in the process. I was trying to find other fairytales that I didn’t know about that had an element of being silenced to it and the way that I thought to do that was to look up taxonomies of fairytales and see if there were others I had missed. And that’s when I discovered this gigantic book with this incredibly detailed taxonomy. I was really taken by it as a document and the way that everything was laid out was like a poem.

One of the projects of Dream House was putting myself and my experiences in a kind of context. And the context I was looking for didn’t exist for various reasons. So to then see little details of my experiences in little fragments of tropes or ways to categorize folk tales felt like a little piece of me was in this big-ass book in a library somewhere. I just started to comb through it and look for things and find places it would fit in the book. It was a fun part of the project where my brain got to relax for a second and comb through this document to find stuff.

BELLA ROTKER: In your piece, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” you take this deeply personal and emotionally weighted moment and it’s fragmented and put in a nontraditional form. How did you approach the bending of genre in this context? 

CMM: That was another late addition. I had this idea very early on in the project, I wrote it in a notebook “gaslight the reader?” and then circled it a bunch and I just didn’t know. I had this idea to give the reader a sense of distortion, because to me one of the most powerful moments in writing are when the writer can mimic an experience of the character so you feel stuck in that experience.

So I was like, how do I create an experience of gaslighting or distortion and hostility to the reader that’s legible. I was thinking about the Choose Your Own Adventure because you have a choice but it’s not a real choice, it’s created by the author, it’s artificial. It felt like a natural choice to make the reader have an experience of being stuck in this endless conversation and endless situation that won’t end and there’s not a correct answer because there’s no way of getting to the other side. It just became like, “Oh yeah, that’s the form.” Then I had fun doing it because I had to map it out and make sure everything was working structurally. It was a playful formal thing when the rest of the book was pretty hard. 

KR: In the Dream House functions as half literary criticism and half memoir so I was wondering how you balanced the two aspects of the piece and how they informed each other? 

CMM: It’s pretty wild because once you’ve sold one book and it’s done pretty well you can sell books that haven’t been finished yet. Which seems great but it’s actually quite stressful because you’ve sold a thing and now you’re like, “Oh, I gotta finish it, whoops!” When I first sold it, it was just the personal piece. But when I pitched it, I was like, “this is what I have but I haven’t done any of the research yet,” and they were like, “great,” so I was like, “great.” 

I had to make some decisions about how I wanted to balance these things. I’m definitely not a researcher so it was tricky to teach myself how to translate that research into good prose and something I’d be proud of. I was having these revelations in real time about gender and violence while I was doing this research which was then informing the memoir sections.

BR: In the Dream House fragments the self into a series of vignettes. How do you think fragmentation works in a project that deals largely in memory? 

CMM: The act of writing a memoir is so singularly bizarre and there’s no way to explain it if you haven’t done it or written something like it. I think it’s the act of sitting in a memory and trying to remember a conversation. I had this really weird moment in the book where my ex and I are walking and I couldn’t remember if we had started the fight in the pool and then gone into her childhood bedroom or if we had gone into her bedroom and then went into the pool. I had written it one way but then I was uncertain which it was. It was really bugging me and I was like, “Oh my god, how come I don’t remember.” Some of it was really clear, but all you can do is try to approximate the experience. 

But for me, I think of fragmentation like a scatter plot graph. There’s this set of data and there’s this best fit line that goes through it like the idea of the piece. I kept a LiveJournal in high school and there's things that I wrote about in there and I would not have remembered if I hadn’t written it down. Now I remember, but do I remember it because I wrote it down? And it’s this weird cycle and there’s no way to account for it. You just have to construct a thing that feels as real as it possibly can. So we have these points of data and we have to keep track of it like a map in my mind. From that I can extrapolate or figure out how I can be thinking about this in relation to whatever the project is. There’s a way the brain connects these bits of data and generates the reader an experience of constructing meaning and doing their own work as well.

KR: Within In the Dream House, we bounce back and forth between various places, not just within the dreamhouse itself, but also with various road trips and moves the speaker makes. How did you approach characterizing each of those locations and differentiating them? 

CMM: You know, it's funny, because I don't. Some writers are very place-based writers. And generally speaking, I've never felt like the setting is really important to the project of a lot of my work. The stories could be anywhere. I mean, I'm from Pennsylvania, so if you squint, you're like, “Oh yeah, that's Pennsylvania.” I feel like it's not even a specialty of mine. But also it's funny that's true of my work, because I am so place-based — I’ve lived in a lot of places and taken many roadtrips in my life. 

I feel like a lot of the memories in that book are tied to these deeply sensory place experiences. I feel like it's something about being in a space and having a sense of a natural space and a space that just has new metaphors. There's something about a new landscape that provides a place for me to bounce an echo off in a way that's maybe new or more unfamiliar like high desert. It’s not a place I normally go and it’s got its own new set of logic and nature and animals and air.

BR: A lot of the vignettes in In the Dream House are written in second person. How do you approach voice and point of view in nonfiction and how did you approach the alternation between first and second points of view for that project? 

CMM: The early draft that I mentioned that I turned in to my editor was entirely in second person. I didn't realize this until my editor said to me, “Hey, so let's talk about the second person.” And I was like, “what?” And he said, “Look, I want to make sure that you're writing a memoir in second person because you want to be, not because you're so traumatized that you're holding the story at a distance from yourself.” And I said, “that's a super good note. Let me think about it.” So I went back and I was like, nah, it doesn't have to, whatever, I'll put in first. Who cares? So I began to move things over. And as I was doing that, I was reading out loud and it didn't sound right.

But then I was like, yeah, but second person, this makes sense for these other sections, the sections that are more contemporary, like me writing the book. And then I was thinking about this novel that I really love called We The Animals by Justin Torres. And it's told in a we voice. And towards the end of the novel there's this thing that happens that basically ruptures the point of view entirely. So instead of being we, one brother peels off and the final part of the book is just by himself alone and the gesture of it when I read the novel, it was so devastating. It was so beautiful and so heartbreaking and it always really stuck with me. And I was really interested in that gesture, for trauma to exist in a way that it literally breaks apart the very point of view of the book, which is sort of its very core.

And so I decided to try something similar. So I had this gesture in the beginning where I break apart the you and the I. The I is the me that's here right now and lived her life and did her thing. And the you is this really sad, scared version of me who's twenty-four and will always be there. I can see her very, very clearly,  as we all can see our past selves, but there's no way for them to access us. It's like time travel in that way. 

There’s something really interesting about the idea that you could separate the self like that. So I just kept it. I was a little worried when I did it that it would be a little illegible, but I tried it. And then I was reading through a draft and I was like, “Oh, this actually works, I think. I think people will find it really interesting.” There's actually a moment in the book where  I had a section that was in first person. And there's a moment where I find a snail and I pick the snail up and then I accidentally drop it and its little shell cracks and it’s dying. And I'm so devastated that I killed the snail basically and I slipped into the you voice. My editor flagged it and was like, I'm pretty sure this was an accident, but also this is great. 

So it just became a device that was doing a lot of work to articulate something really true about the book. All these things are giving us tools to understand the emotional stakes of the book. 

SOPHIE BERNIK: Throughout Her Body and Other Parties and In the Dream House, you used similes, which in my first read, I could only describe as gutting me. Take for instance, “your heart launches against your ribcage like an animal,” in In the Dream House. How do you go about crafting your similes and figurative language in general?

CMM: The secret of writing that is so weird is that much of what I do is unknown to me entirely. I can talk about craft all day. But on some level there is a piece of it that's truly mysterious. 

So sometimes phrases just come into my brain, which is not a helpful answer. How do you reproduce that in any way? I think in metaphor and simile. I think oftentimes when a metaphor is really snapping for me or it's really working, it's because I had that thought. 

Or I'll be like, what am I describing? Okay, a thudding heart, what is that like? Okay. And then I'm thinking about it and my brain is doing this. Sorry, people reading this, you don't know what I'm doing visually, but I’m making little rings with my hands. And I'm just spinning through. And then occasionally they don't land. And then I'll put it in and someone'll be like, this is crazy. You’ve got to take this out. And I'm like, oh, right. Okay, good call. 

I feel like if I see a thing, I just stop and think about it. Just to give a very stupid example, this is the first snow I've seen of the season, which is very exciting for me. I'm not wearing the proper boots because I didn't know it was going to be snowing here. And the very tips of my toes are very cold because these boots are not the proper boots. The way over here I was just thinking about this phenomenon of how the tips of my toes are very cold and I don't know if that's going to be a metaphor or something, but I was just very aware of it. And I feel like that level of minutiae, being a sensory experience, feels significant enough that I'm almost finding a place for it in my brain somewhere. And maybe five years from now there'll be a story where a character will be having thoughts about how cold the tips of her toes are in her boots.

Writing is so much about observation and about being in your body and being in the space that your body is occupying and really giving that a lot of weight. Writers have different ways of doing it, but for me it's like you're seeing what's happening in my head and I'm just trying my best to move it to the page.

XIME SILVA: In stories like “Real Women Have Bodies,”  the world and its dystopian elements feel fully developed even without much detail about the background. How do you go about creating this sense of groundedness while still focusing mainly on the characters and their personal narratives?

CMM: In a way it's not that different of a question from the fragmentation question because when I’m writing dystopia, the world is not supposed to be clear. Dystopia or science fiction is not my genre but for some reason I feel like the world is ending. But it's an illusion of space and you're creating a trick because you can't articulate every single thing about the world. You're trying to create an illusion where a reader can read a story and understand the dimensions of how the world has gone wrong. It's also not different from characterization, you’ve got to find enough good details that when a person reads, they're like, oh, the character has taken shape for me entirely. I feel like I know them, even if you're only getting a certain number of brush strokes of characterization. 

I feel like the same is true of world-building. It's an illusion. You're trying to generate a sense of space and scope and expansiveness even when you only have an especially short story where you don't have that much room. And so you have to create this illusion. of what's happening and the reader is filling in the blanks. And so it's like the fragmentation and the reader creating this sense of space by looking at the details and being like, oh wait, I kind of understand. Even more if it's like a — what is the thing where there's dots and there's a picture and you draw a picture. Where there's like, like for children, like...

SB: Connect the dots?

CMM: Connect the dots! Jesus Christ. Yes, connect the dots. It's like the reader is generating meaning out of these beats of data and information. And it's fun because you get to kind of be like, what do I want to highlight in this world? “Real Women Have Bodies,” I want to  imagine what it looks like on the news when one of the anchors disappears mid-broadcast or what about the video of the landlord finding the woman who's faded.

It was just me imagining little cultural details of what that would look like in that world, but certainly it's not that much if you were like, what is the actual world-building happening here? It actually isn't that much at all. But it's enough that it feels like it's a fully realized world, even if you're only getting little bits and pieces of it.

SB: Given that a lot of your stories are heavily invested in emotional arcs over physical narratives—take “Especially Heinous,” for instance, which essentially writes over SVU to give Benson and Stabler further emotional depth—I was wondering how you go about crafting an emotional arc in a piece, which isn't necessarily linear or narratively straightforward?

CMM: The thing about fragmentation is that it’s a structural thing you can apply in many ways. Because in a way it's just the same thing where you're pushing a character. There’s this really great quote by the writer Raymond Queneau, who was this French writer who writes these constraint-based writing practices and he talks about pushing characters across the page. And that story is making them move. And I feel like in a way, that's what you're doing. 

In the case of “Especially Heinous,” you're getting these snapshots and the fun part was getting to think, what are the moments in these characters’ lives or experiences that I get to highlight to move them forward? Where will the reader have a sense of what is happening to them that feels clear. It's just a really fun way of thinking about it. And I mean, it has its own challenges, obviously, because you are asking a lot of the reader and I think some readers really struggle with that sort of thing, but some readers really respond to it. I really respond to it as a reader. 

XS: Much of the collection Her Body and Other Parties focuses on the body and the body being harmed by others. And, while a lot of this harm is perpetrated by men, I was wondering if you could speak on the importance of writing about the ways in which women harm other women or how women often tend to harm themselves. 

CMM: Part of the memoir’s project is to say that violence as something only men can do is untrue and does a tremendous disservice to people who have experienced violence at the hands of women. It also generates this very bio-essentialist and absolutist way of thinking about gender. 

Obviously in the first book“The Husband Stitch” is a story about male entitlement which is fairly legible in the story. But, you know “Eight Bites” is a very personal thing for me, the war the women fight with their own bodies and with other womens’ bodies, mothers and daughters especially, was a theme that was really important to me. 

“Mothers” is also an early fictional attempt at writing about queer domestic violence and lesbian domestic violence. And I think it is important to be thoughtful about that sort of thing. Because I think it’s easy to think of it as being very simple and it’s not simple. We are capable of violence in the same way as we are capable of receiving violence. And we’re not let not off the hook by our gender or genitals. And so it’s definitely an important theme for me. I think being really aware of the ways in which we can commit violence against each other, even in ways we’re not intending to, is something we should be doing. 

KR: In your piece “Especially Heinous,” how did you approach the reconstructing of the narrative of a show like Law and Order that has an already very dedicated following? What were the challenges and what aspects, if any, did you feel dedicated to maintaining as well? 

CMM: Oh, I was dedicated to none of it. I didn't. As I was reading that story I was like, what are they going to do to me exactly? Nothing, I suppose, and so I just kept doing it. When I was writing it, the initial idea that I'd had was taking the existing episode capsule descriptions and modifying them slightly. So the first eight to ten episodes of that story are actually similar to the show’s plots. And then it was just too restrictive for me, it just wasn’t giving me enough room to breathe. But the titles were so interesting, I could just use those jumping off points. So I went through and deleted all the other capsules because I had to write it like IMDB or whatever. And I just began to write into the title and I didn't really feel invested. I wanted to call the protagonists Benson and Stabler. I've seen the show and certainly have some sense of who they are as characters. Initially, I actually did have some of the other characters make actual named appearances and the editor at the magazine that I'd been writing the story for was like, “you actually could take those away, you don’t want there to be too many characters that you recognize on the show, it’d be distracting.” So I just called my other detectives, detectives or my interns, the interns. Sometimes I would just make up other characters too. I don't really feel invested in any of the real show. Except for the part with Alex and Olivia and I did that because I wanted that to happen in the show. That was my one little gesture toward the fandom of SVU and the show itself. Everything else, I did whatever I wanted. 

SB: I wanted to touch on your turns toward the reader in the “Husband Stitch.” How do you see these impacting the way a reader moves through the piece?

CMM: The green ribbon was in this book called In a Dark, Dark Arrangement by Alvin Schwartz. I remember when I was looking to write with the other sort of urban legends that are in that certain topic and we have a bunch of the stories with stage directions. I went to Girl Scout camp as a kid and I remember telling one of the stories at camp where it’s this guy looking for a woman. And weirdly, the directions say to grab the person next to you and I made this girl cry. And I was like, whoa, that was powerful. 

I really wanted to reach out to the reader and implicate them in some way. I like the idea of it being a kind of sensory or descriptive experience. You can actually do the task being assigned to you. And there's one where it says, open the window, it'll be raining, I promise, and it's funny  the number of times I've gotten emails and messages from people who said, “I did, and it was raining.” You don't really notice it, but it does happen. So I feel like there's just a really fun kind of gesture. For me it's a way of implicating the reader in the story but also nodding to the oral traditions. The interaction which to me feels like it's very powerful and potent.

XS: You write a lot of stories that center around themes of rape, eating disorders, womanhood, etc., often in ways in which these themes are not usually explored, in fantastical and metaphorical ways. How do you approach crafting narratives like these without being cliché or coming off as too obvious?

CMM: I mean, that’s the question. A gesture people often make that I see a lot, I see it a lot in student writing, is thinking of genre element as a one-to-one metaphor. So, they’ll be like, “it’s a story about racism, but with aliens,” or, “it’s a story about sexism, but with ghosts.” And you’re like, “okay, got it.” The metaphors are perfectly neat and that’s a tempting thing. But I think it’s way more interesting than that. Non-realism provides us these diagonal avenues into inquiry. “Difficult at Parties” is the last story in my first book. And it’s a story about a woman recovering from sexual violence, and also having a sense of interiority scooped away or stripped away. I remember thinking to myself when I was writing that story, “I wanna write a story about sexual violence, but how on earth do you do that in a way that it hasn’t been done before?” It can be done, good writers find ways to make it work. I was thinking and sort of happened upon this idea of she has access to other people’s interiority, but not her own. There’s no neat one-to-one way of thinking about that. It’s about a woman trying to solve the puzzle of her own loss — it’s convoluted and trying to get back to who she is inside. Genre tools offer us these diagonal ways into stories that can be done in very obvious ways, but you want it to be a little more nebulous than that. 

SB: I wanted to ask you about “Real Women Have Bodies.” The piece does some excellent work creating a world with convincing magic, while not making the surrealism the star of the show. How do you go about using the strange worlds that pop up in her body as backgrounds to the stories being told and not the point of them?

CMM: That’s something I’ve seen modeled for me by writers that I love. Kelly Link is a great example. If you haven’t read her, you must, she’s brilliant. And she’s a writer who indulges in beautiful weird details that lead nowhere. She just lets the story do its own little weird thing. I feel like there’s something about that gesture that’s so playful. Playfulness is a quality in writing that I find incredibly valuable. I think that my favorite writers are writers who are playful, who let the story have its own little nooks and crannies and crevices and little bits of magic and mystery. Maybe it’s metaphorically resonant. But maybe I just like it and I want it to be in there. It’s interesting. Or playful. Or fun. Or beautiful. It’s something that I really value in writing as a reader and writer. If I read something and I love the way the writer is approaching certain things, I adapt it and it becomes part of my writing. It’s also just a fun and valuable way of engaging in world-building, especially in magic realism. It feels essential to my process. 

BR: “Eight Bites” opens in a surreal description of the human body. How do you approach body horror?

CMM: Having a body is horrifying. There’s blood coming out of it all of the time, there’s illnesses and viruses. There’s something so bizarre about the fact that we have this very delicate, intricate mind that is just being hauled around by this insane meat sack that is decaying at all times and could break down in any way at any moment. It’s kind of amazing. In some ways, that’s why I respect the body so much. I am very grateful that mine just hauls my ungrateful ass around. There’s something really interesting about the body and the ways in which it can fail us, but also the ways it can bring us pleasure. Yes, it could break down at any moment. But it could bring you everything you’ve ever wanted. How lucky to be alive and to have that. Having a body is this double-edged sword: it’s wonderful and terrible. I love weird, squeamish body stuff. I like getting a chance to write grotesquely.

BR: In the Dream House grapples a lot with themes of domestic and personal violence. And Her Body and Other Parties also centers on sexual violence. How do you conceptualize these heavy topics in your work in such a way that it’s healthy to you as the writer?

CMM: That is assuming that I am being healthy about it. I will say, I do write about a lot of heavy topics. Especially with Dream House, I didn’t take very good care of myself when I was writing that book. Quite frankly, it almost got the better of me. To be clear, I think writing about subjects like that has tremendous value. I think that they’re as important a thing to write about or to make art about as any other part of the human experience. I’ve heard people say we shouldn’t be writing about rape or making art about rape. I disagree with that very strongly. We absolutely should be. It is tricky and risky. It reminds me a little of how when I was studying photography in college and I had this professor. He would always say, “If you have to embarrass yourself to take a photo, it’s okay, because it’s one moment of embarrassment but the photo is forever. Don’t be afraid, jump in and do the thing.” I feel like when I’m writing about a subject that is really causing me pain but ideally, it’s contained. 

In the memoir, it’s kind of a different animal. With the memoir, I get to have some feelings about what I’m writing and think about my own experiences if it’s relevant. It’s hard. It’s so funny hearing you guys talk about Her Body and Other Parties because I wrote that book between ten and seven years ago. I was a really different person. That book feels almost like it's not mine. I can talk to you about writing it but I feel like the emotional experience of writing those stories is a little bit removed from my current self. It was a totally different me. And the memoir is different but still there’s also more of a sense of removed-ness than I had even a year or two ago. You have to do the thing and if you do it right it’s forever. You have this artifact of the way that you’ve this art. You’ve just done the thing. You have to ask yourself, is it worth it for me? It’s a very personal question. But for me, I’m just going to do it and see what happens.

SB: We were wondering about your thoughts on younger audiences reading In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties. They obviously both deal with heavy content but I find that young people like myself are really drawn to your books and the way they deal with things like queerness, abuse and womanhood. Is this an audience you anticipated garnering with your books? And what do you hope young readers will take away from them?

CMM: It’s so funny you mention this because I literally had this conversation with someone just yesterday. I was expressing to this person that I was excited but also it’s weird how many high schoolers read my work. There’s two thoughts about this that are sort of separate branches. One is that a thing you can’t do too much as a writer is think about your audience because you will go literally crazy. There is no way to write for everybody and you cannot please everyone. You’re writing for people that haven’t been born yet, people who you could never imagine that could ever exist. You have to write for yourself. 

With Dream House, I was thinking about queer people. But even with that book, I was getting emails from people who had gotten early copies being like, “I know you didn’t write Dream House for me but I'm a straight woman and I’ve never read anyone write so clearly about psychological abuse before.” I had a man write to me. He was like, “I know you didn’t write this book for me but I was abused by an ex-wife and I’ve just never seen anyone write about a woman committing abuse in this way.”  So even before the book had come out, people were writing to me. I thought this book was going to be very niche and was going to speak to five people. It’s amazing to me. That just shows me that, even with that memoir, where I was imagining an audience, I was thinking so small. In some ways, I can’t think about an audience at all. 

Certainly, if you ask me, “do you imagine high schoolers reading your books?” I’m like really? Because they’re very sexy. It feels a little weird to imagine. It’s funny because I hadn’t really thought about it. But I meet so many younger readers and I'm obviously delighted. It’s hugely flattering and also makes me feel like I have no way of knowing what the work is going to do. The audience is very unknown to me. 

It’s interesting, too, because my books keep getting banned. All of my books have been banned in various locations. Very recently I got an email that my graphic novel was banned in a school in Missouri. It was physically pulled out of a library. People keep asking me if I think it’s appropriate that high schoolers are reading your work? And I'm like, if professional educators are teaching the books, who am I to say? I’m just a writer. It’s something I think about but it makes me so happy. I’m really happy to be here.