In the Dream House Themes

While Machado seeks to make queer stories more visible and to celebrate queer love, she’s also deeply focused on portraying the harm and violence that can exist in those stories. She scrutinizes the trend in pop culture of queer, or queer-coded, characters like Ursula from The Little Mermaid being disproportionately given the role of the villain. Machado suggests it isn’t a problem to have queer villains, as long as there are plenty of other queer…

Machado’s experience with Christianity has lasting consequences on her sense of self-worth. As a churchgoing teenager, Machado obsesses over ideas like the Rapture and sexual purity, fretting that she doesn’t meet the standards of a scrutinizing God. But it becomes clear that those standards are paradoxical. In Machado’s mid-teens, she becomes infatuated with Joel, a new pastor at her church. He encourages her to become close to him, meets her late at night…

Machado feels a significant weight of responsibility as a writer. She’s acutely aware that her own story of abuse is less dramatic than those of other women, like Debra Reid, who was imprisoned for killing her abusive partner. But though she feels uncomfortable making any kind of comparison between her story and theirs, it’s still vital to her that stories of psychological abuse like her own become part of an archive that would otherwise…