Yes, there are plenty of her own handwritten notes and beautiful illustrations, but she also cobbles together family photographs and letters to tell this story through the generations. Belonging reads like a home video and a history textbook rolled into one.
Random and hodge-podge as it may sound, trust me: the curation feels organic. These things are connected, is what Nora Krug seems to be saying. There is something unbelievably generous about the way she offers these bits of history to us.
She can leave us with an image and let us sit with the complicated discomfort. We join her in the midst of her reckoning. This is a story with many forms, all centered on the Dream House: a real place where Machado and her ex-girlfriend lived, but also a series of mental fortifications forged through emotional abuse, physical violence, gaslighting, and suspicion.
Machado calls on a series of narrative traditions in recounting this story, one for which there is little to no existing narrative precedent, since abusive queer relationships have so rarely been addressed in popular culture; the result is a dizzying, monumental achievement.
I needed this book; I think a lot of us do. She uses footnotes to call upon tropes in mythology and taboos in literature. She references queer theory. In the Dream House is a dizzying, raw, and deeply personal story and with her experimental structure, she is casting lines out, trying to find and helping others find the structure that holds.
I have never before read a memoir that reads like a thriller. Machado deconstructs the memories of her abusive relationship and filters them through literary tropes in order to lay out the signs, interpret, organize and in doing so repeatedly, in what becomes a pattern that never satisfies, she and the reader come to the understanding that there will never be a unity of narrative, nor any traditional resolution to a tale of trauma.
To echo Corinne and Katie, this is a book you need to read. House of Psychotic Women is what I hope all works of pop culture criticism to be in the future— erudite, personal, intense, mind-bending, and refusing to draw a line between literary merit and personal taste.
Plus, the design is awesome! A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it and because decisions are hard. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. Alison L. Video Podcasts. We long to be known and loved, to be understood and embraced.
There are different words to describe this, but the Christian word for it is grace. I wonder, when we talk about the religious element to memoirs, and the form's enduring appeal, how much we are talking about that: the hope that our lives, failures and all, are not beyond the reach of mercy.
More on: Public Life , Culture , memoirs , Books. Prev Article. Next Article. The result is a moving and at times haunting first-person account of life on hospital wards. It is perhaps the raw honesty of moments like these that have struck a chord with so many readers. As a result, she says publishers are now focusing increasingly on these type of non-fiction titles. Watson currently sits third in the top bestselling memoir list this year, in a line-up that includes just one big name — Michelle Obama, who sits just above Watson with her autobiography Becoming.
She also believes the incessant chatter of social media has changed the essence of celebrity, and muted the need for A-lister memoirs. In the end, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor, and died, discredited and unproductive, in Paris.
But it was his willingness to reach inconvenient conclusions and many progressive fans find his supposed deathbed conversion to Catholicism a very inconvenient one that set Wilde apart: capable of transcending everything to make the characters ring true, he let The Picture of Dorian Gray take on a life of its own.
In that sense it is a portrait of its author, and thankfully, since its only curse was to be brilliant, it could not share his fate. Image Credit: Wikipedia. Parramore explains that the Ultraviolence chanteuse is only the latest heir to a long lineage of decadent femmes fatales that rise to cultural prominence at moments of perilous social transition or imminent collapse:.
This potent combination of women, sex and death is going to be one of the calling cards of late-stage capitalism.
We are experiencing fearsome global dislocations and distorted social and economic systems that are killing our life-affirming instincts. The death drive is perennial, but when a society seems to hover on the eve of destruction, these Eves of the Apocalypse — suicidal brides, young women fixated on pain and death — emerge to speak our well-founded anxieties. They signal that just now, the death drive is very strong.
Just as Parramore and others criticize Lana Del Rey for social irresponsibility, for promoting an anti-feminist celebration of sadomasochistic sexuality and for embracing capitalist spectacle unto death, so the most persuasive and compelling attacks on Shakespeare have charged him with amoral aestheticism and a sensationalized skepticism about human potential. This is a play in which traditional authority and the religious foundation on which it rests have collapsed into nothingness.
In this densely learned paper, Steiner attempts to synthesize into a coherent and persuasive argument the complaints against Shakespeare made throughout modern history; he focuses particularly on the criticism of Leo Tolstoy and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Tolstoy and Wittgenstein, Steiner explains, implicitly relied on a concept of the poet as spiritual authority and moral prophet. For European thinkers of the 19th and earlyth centuries, it was not enough to be a prodigious coiner of words and creator of spectacle, as Shakespeare undoubtedly was:. This does not, however, make of him a Dichter , a truth-sayer, an explicitly moral agent, a visible teacher to and guardian of imperilled, bewildered mankind.
Because his plays express no sense of a nearly divine vocation, of a mission to save humanity by transmitting ethical truths, Shakespeare cannot be the equal of Dante or Milton or Goethe , of the Greek dramatists or the Russian novelists, all of whom wrote to commune with the divine and to bring light to the world.
Shakespeare can be seen as the paradigm of the apolitical artist, the dissolute aesthete reviled not only by the religious conservatives of all faiths but also by those who nurse radical political hopes, such as the anarcho-pacifist Tolstoy, the Soviet sympathizer Wittgenstein, and even the socialist-feminist Lynn Stuart Parramore.
But after the war, the shell-shocked Smith discovers a different moral in Shakespeare:. Here he opened Shakespeare once more. How Shakespeare loathed humanity — the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly!
This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus translated the same. The young colonial intellectual sees Shakespeare as the poet of empire, anticipating the postcolonialist critics of P.
Stephen even pictures Shakespeare as a money-minded hoarder of necessities during famine, an image of horrifying relevance to Ireland:. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife.
To sum up the political case against Shakespeare: his nihilism and skepticism translate directly into a political agnosticism all too willing to collaborate with oppression and injustice, especially when it is in the interests of shareholders. On this reading, what is at stake in Shakespeare is profit.
Knight seems to make an irreproachable judgment against Hamlet — and, by extension, against the writer who expects us to take this monster for a hero:. He has seen the truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the universe: and the truth is evil. Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal.
What can Knight say to mitigate this conclusion? Without mentioning G. Do we even like him? Maybe Shakespeare sucks because — and to the extent that — life sucks. I so agree with Liz describing how she discovered new things about yourself in writing a memoir.
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