When Covid hit, Marne was marooned on Long Island, living with “their very dear and very sweet but very heterosexual aunt and uncle.” Carmen, usually averse to talking on the phone, was convinced by Marne to read The Haunting of Hill House to them. They didn’t know that Carmen was a well-known author, but still, they say, “I’ve never swiped on anyone so fast in my life.” Clockwise from standing: writers Carmen Maria Machado, Val Howlett and Marne Litfin in their Philadelphia home, December 2021.

One day in 2019, Marne was on Tinder and came across Carmen. They married in 2017, and kept an open relationship.

“After the breakup Val and I got in touch with each other mostly as a postmortem,” Carmen says. The book catalogues the many manifestations a home can take: container of mental sickness, machine for evil, but also hallowed, familial space for healing, adventure and joy. They were both dating the same person, the one who provoked In the Dream House, Carmen’s experimental, nightmarish memoir about queer abuse. And Carmen often finds herself uttering, “Oh, that’s clearly a ghost.”Ĭarmen and Val met in 2011. A prober of anxieties with a standup comedy practice, Marne writes more straightforwardly realist short stories and nonfiction essays. Val, whose primary craft is the coming-of-age tale, is working on a YA novel about teenage lesbian suffragettes set in 1913 Philadelphia. Carmen is known around the house as “big tall vampire lady.”Įven though Carmen is 5’ 8”, she towers over her wife Val Howlett, and their partner, Marne Litfin. Carmen Maria Machado’s first short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties-an inventory of the monstrous that includes fabulist L aw & Order fanfiction and a ribbon cloaking an unspeakable secret-developed a broad cult following. The three of them live in a tall, old Victorian home.

Carmen machado in the dreamhouse