Themes in Literature/Isolation and Community/Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is an American writer born in Allenton, Pennsylvania, in 1986. She is best known for her short story collection Her Body and Other Parties and the award-winning memoir about abuse in a lesbian relationship, In The Dream House. One of Machado’s favorite genres is horror because as a “transgressive space,” she explains in an interview, it


 * tells us a lot about who we are, what we are, and what we, individually and culturally, are afraid of.” Another of her interests is writing about sexual pleasure:


 * I feel like it’s not often done well....I’m tired of reading really dreadful sex scenes where everyone’s miserable and then eventually maybe one person has a reluctant orgasm. I thought, What if I tried to have a scene where people had sex and it was great? My characters do have sex in varying emotional states, and with various results.

While Machado admits to having cried while completing some of her most personal writing, she determinedly balances her expressions of vulnerability with bluntness so as not to seem soft or sentimental.