in the dream house a memoir carmen maria machado

And I remember thinking, 'why the but?' And I think we expect fat people to be unlovable, and we expect them to be stupid. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago called ' The Trash Heap has Spoken,' and I talk about how, in Shirley Jackson's biography, there's this really bizarre line where they're interviewing somebody who knew her, and they said she was so fat she took up half the couch, but she was really brilliant.

One of the sort of chief struggles of my adult life, my artistic life, has been trying to reconcile the things I knew to be true about myself with the way that the world views me. On describing herself as a 'weird fat girl' Like I'm gonna put this in a container, like, here's my experience, here's how it felt. But I think it does, and here's what happened to me. So I think part of writing the book was trying to say, some people might not think that what I'm describing constitutes abuse. You recognize that, right?' But it was a lot more subtle than that. But I think it does, and here's what happened to me.Īnd it was weird, because I think I write about in the book how, you know, people like domestic violence narratives to be very clear cut, and I talk about in the book how on some level I really wished, I wish she had just punched me in the face, and I had this black eye, and I could be like, 'Hey, she punched me. part of writing the book was trying to say, some people might not think that what I'm describing constitutes abuse. And I think it can be really harmful, because it doesn't permit space for a multitude of experiences, some of which can be bad - not because the relationship is a lesbian relationship, but because somebody in the relationship is not well. But I think you have a lot of people sort of translate this into, 'women aren't capable of hurting each other,' or 'women aren't capable of abusing each other.' Lesbian relationships are the fantasy, the ideal - I would say that I think lesbians and queer women perpetrate that that idea.

But my sort of day-to-day life, I don't really have to deal with it, because I'm married to a woman, and that's just not part of my experience right now, which is actually really lovely. I always talk about how in my relationship, like, obviously the patriarchy affects me in all kinds of ways. There's this idea that not having men present in a relationship takes a certain kind of stress off, which sexually is actually true. Book Reviews 'Her Body And Other Parties:' Be Your Own Madwoman

In the dream house a memoir carmen maria machado