Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-bending short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties was one of the hottest books of 2017. In her revolutionary memoir, In the Dream House, Machado writes about her personal experience of queer domestic violence, and gives readers essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

Unpacking the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, In the Dream House is 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. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, among many others. 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.”