In The Dream House: A Review

I knew I'd probably like this book because I adored Carmen Maria Machado's earlier collection, Her Body and Other Parties. I say "like" because going into this I wasn't a huge fan of memoirs. Are they a style, a genre, a topic, a narrative? I haven't read enough to know, but whatever they are this one is something else entirely.

In the Dream House was inventive, haunting, fast-paced, un-linear, and layered. It read almost like a diary in the sense that each "entry" was written in a different genre. The tone bounced around from self-deprecating to nurturing to third-person. Reading through Machado's past was an adventure that made me feel like I was watching something intimate through a one-way mirror. I eagerly flipped through the stories, taking time to read each footnote citation. This was probably my favorite part about the memoir. It added so much to the narrative(s). The way the citations were crafted made the memoir feel like reading a studied text. It also added another, deeper layer to simple phrases or moments by directly linking to themes and tropes from folklore. I need to go back and study these more.