Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Machado’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Machado is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

EB: How did you start writing in general?

CMM: I’m one of those people who has been a writer since I was a kid. I always would write stories and essays, write things for school, make little books for myself. I’ve always done that. But I didn’t really pursue it professionally until I decided to go to grad school.

EB: And what drew you to writing nonfiction?

CMM: For a long time I didn’t think that I could write nonfiction. It was always really different for me. Also, there was someone in my life who wrote nonfiction who told me I wasn’t good at it. I took that pretty seriously; I wasn’t even sure I was capable of writing an essay in the way that I can write a short story. But at some point, I started doing criticism and some other little pieces, some humor, just small things here and there, and eventually I started moving towards writing creative nonfiction in this way that was meaningful and interesting to me. Though the process for me remains very slow. I write nonfiction much slower than I write fiction.

EB: I actually wanted to ask about that. Besides the pace, what is your writing process like for writing fiction versus nonfiction? Is it similar or different?

CMM: Well, as of right now, I only have two books, one of each, so it’s sort of hard to compare. I don’t have a great data set for proper analysis.

EB: [laughter]

CMM: Writing fiction feels more playful, feels easier. Even when I’m writing fiction about really difficult things, there is a protective sheen of plausible deniability, in terms of the autobiographical content.

The memoir was far more difficult. It has such emotional subject matter, and that made it challenging to write. It was very taxing to work on that book. And then there’s fact that nonfiction in general is actually about figuring out what you think. And figuring out what you think is really hard. Sure, people fire off opinions all the time, but to really suss out what you think about something and why—that’s difficult. That’s why essays take me so long. I’ll think, oh, I’d like to write about that topical topic, but then it takes me a long time to get to the answer, the topic isn’t “hot” anymore.

EB: I hadn’t thought about it like that. That’s such a good point. All writing, I feel, you get into through questions, but maybe in fiction it’s a little easier to let the questions stand on their own?

CMM: You can have questions that stand on their own in nonfiction, too, it’s just different in a very essential way.

The other thing that was different for me about writing fiction versus nonfiction is that Her Body and Other Parties was a collection, so I could work on the stories individually, while In the Dream House, even though it is made up of these tiny chapters,was one whole big—thing. I’d never done that before. I’ve never written a novel, and writing one cohesive long work is really difficult. It’s hard to keep all the pieces in your mind. I don’t know how anyone does it.

EB: Yeah, I’m writing a book right now and it’s a nightmare.

CMM: My wife went to an MFA program for young adult literature, and her mentor there told her that, when you’re writing a book, if you’re doing it right, it should feel like you’re in a big bowl of spaghetti.You’re trying grab all of the noodles around you, but there are so many noodles.

EB: That is so accurate! That is totally how I feel right now, like I have sauce all over my shirt.

CMM: Right? And you grab one thing but it’s connected to all these other things and, yeah, I really don’t know how anyone does it.

EB: We’ve established writing a nonfiction book is really hard, but when did you decide you had to do it? When did you know you needed to write this memoir?

CMM: I’ve been trying to write about this topic [abuse in same-sex relationships] for a really long time. I first wrote some stuff immediately after my break up, and it was terrible. I couldn’t place it anywhere, it never seemed right. I showed some of it to a friend of mine who is an editor and she said, look, at the sentence-level, you’re a great writer, but you’re too close to it still, you don’t have enough distance from the material to make good art out of it yet.

At that point I was working on it on the side—while I was revising Her Body and Other Parties. I was in Iowa City teaching at a summer camp program for young writers, and when I wasn’t teaching, I was spending my time wandering around. I don’t know exactly what happened—like how it was sparked—but I started to think about my former relationship as a haunted house. I wondered how I could tell the story that way. I sat down and made a list of all the possible formal constraints and genre concerns that could connect to, and the whole rest of the trip I kept adding to the list. It was the first time I had a sense of the structure of the book. Before I was trying to write it in this straightforward way, and I couldn’t do it. But it was only when I realized I had to think about it as a formal challenge that I was able to pull the pieces together.

EB: That actually leads into the thing I really want to talk to you about: I love how you blended in research, pop culture, statistics, literary and art criticism throughout your memoir. What was your research process like? Do you start with the personal story and then go out looking for research, or did research inspire you to write about certain aspects of the personal story? And how did you figure out what research to include and what to leave out?

CMM: I sold the memoir to Graywolf after I had sold Her Body and Other Parties, but before Her Body and Other Parties was published. I sold it based on a really rough skeleton of the book and a lot of the personal material. There wasn’t any research in it at that point.

Then Her Body and Other Parties came out and I was basically touring for a year and I had no time to think, and then last year I realized, oh, cool, now I have to finish this memoir. I went to a residency in New Mexico last summer, and I finally really dove into it, and I added 150 pages to the book. I work at Penn, and we have a program where you can have a student researcher help you with a project, so I had a student researcher. She found some really great information for me about Gaslightthe film, the history of queer relationships as it relates to domestic abuse, and a lot of stuff from the Herstory archives. I used her material as a jumping off point. I would read, follow a footnote, read something else, realize something. For example, the idea that the way we talk about queerness unhinges people from gender identity, that came from the research. I didn’t have that thesis before I went in.

I spent weeks of the residency just reading. I always knew that I wanted to draw from other texts, and so that summer I let myself fall down a bunch of really weird rabbit holes, and I spent all this time trying to locate documentaries and track down books and papers.

I knew the arc of the personal story going into the book because, well, I had lived it. But certain things popped up and surprised me research-wise, and also the research would stir up things from my childhood and adolescence that I hadn’t previously thought about including in the book. It was a mix of knowing and not knowing.

EB: That makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard some writers, like Susan Orlean, say that they need to do all their research up front before they even think about starting to write, but I am more like you, I find I need to go back and forth. Often I don’t even know what I need to be researching until I’ve started writing.

CMM: I had definitely written a bunch of the book before I started the really intensive research. I wanted to get down the stuff about myself before I started to do all this reading because I didn’t want to clutter it up. I wanted to keep it, not separate, because they definitely inform each other, but I wanted to get it down true before things started to inform each other.

EB: Speaking of the personal material,I often wonder how memoir writers handle writing about people they are close to. Did you show your wife your manuscript as you wrote it? Did you allow her to veto things in it about her?

CMM: I’m still learning how it all works. Ask me this question again in fifteen years.

EB: [laughter]

CMM: In terms of my wife, Val, I asked what she wanted to do. Normally we share each other’s work at every step—here’s a draft, here’s a thing I added, here’s a new story—but she said that with this book it would be too much for her. She suggested I start by just sending her the pieces that mentioned or included her, and then she would review them and let me know how she felt. So, she’d look at those, have a few tweaks. But the really cool thing is sometimes she would remember things that I had forgot, and made the project into a fuller picture.

Eventually, once I had a complete draft, she sat down and read the whole thing, just the once. It was important to me to respect what she wanted throughout.

EB: What was it like to write about such a volatile former relationship? Did you feel compelled to get your ex’s permission for anything? Did you fear for your safety? I have a lot of students at the creative writing center where I teach who want to write about abuse, trauma, and assault, but they are often afraid of the consequences of writing about those things.

CMM: If I said I wasn’t scared to write a book like this, I’d be lying. (I’m not scared for my physical safety right now; if I was, things would be a lot different.) I don’t know what else to say really other than it is pretty terrifying. I’m in therapy, I take Zoloft, and I have to manage it the way I manage all my fears.

EB: My writer friends and I joke that all the best writers need to be in therapy all the time.

CMM: Honestly, I think all people need to be in therapy all the time. You need a space to talk about your fears.

EB: Did you ever consider not writing or publishing this book because of those fears?

CMM: I’m a writer. Thething about being an artist is when things are happening to you, there is always some distant place where it is forming in you as art. It exists somewhere in you as art. I have a writerly eye. For me,the challenge wasn’t will I or won’t I write about this, it was how will I write about this. What was hard was figuring out the right shape for it so it could be good art and not just writing it for therapeutic reasons. That’s what I was concerned with: how do I make a good piece of art that other people can read and have an experience with. But, no, I didn’t ever think I wasn’t going to write it.

EB: I get it. My whole life, every experience I have, no matter how horrible, a small part of me is always observing and taking notes on it for later.

CMM: I think that’s an artist’s perspective. If you are a working artist—it is an active part of your life, if you have an artist’s practice, if it’s not a hobby, it’s your life—you see things that way. If you’re a photographer, you’re always looking at things in terms of photographs.

EB: Right.

CMM: You don’t do it in a calculated way, it’s how you think and how you see. How you think is shaped by the kind of art you make. People who aren’t artists don’t understand that.

EB: I also love what you said about good art not being the same as therapy. Sometimes I read my students’ work and think, oh, they need to go to therapy and figure some things out before the can step back and make work about this.

CMM: It’s not that I don’t think writing can’t be therapeutic, I just think that writing for publication is not the same thing as writing for therapy. Those things are really different. Pain does not equal art. In a class I taught last year, I said to my students that you can write about something painful that happened to you, but you don’t have to. You are not your pain. If you want to write or talk about other things, that is fine. But I think there is an instinct that all people want from you is the worst thing that happened to you. Sure, that can be the beginning of a conversation, but that alone isn’t art.

EB: In general, what do you find most to be the challenging part about writing nonfiction?

CMM: Trying to put words to what often has no words. Trying to figure out what you think. All those things are very difficult.

EB: And what is the most rewarding part?

CMM: Oh, lord, I don’t know yet. Ask me in a year. I don’t feel very rewarded yet! I’m proud of this book, because I didn’t think I could pull it off, and I feel like I did, but for a long time the book felt like it was a hot pile of garbage. But I’m about to go on tour and have to read regularly from this really intense book that I wrote and… I don’t know.

EB: I can’t imagine having to read that material night after night. It’s exhausting speaking in front of people in general, let alone about something so intense and emotionally taxing.

CMM: I did a reading from it for the first time this summer when I was teaching at the Clarion Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and it was really intense. Afterwards I just wanted to lay down. I felt really exhausted. So, I am anticipating the whole book tour is going to be like that, but I’m trying to manage it by only doing a certain number of stops and not doing a million like last time.

EB: Well, good luck!

CMM: Thank you.

EB: Finally, do you have a favorite passage of nonfiction, written by a fellow non-man?

CMM: I have always loved the closing passage of Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”:

That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here—let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence—is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.