This the third in a series of interviews with authors whose work has been banned. Carmen Maria Machado is the award-winning author of three books, including the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was named by The New York Times as one of fifteen titles in “The New Vanguard,” a list of “remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st Century.” Machado lives in Philadelphia and in Iowa City, where she spoke to The Little Hawk.

City High students have returned this fall to the news that a federal judge has lifted the injunction against state law SF 496, which led to thousands of books being removed from Iowa public schools last winter, including from ICCSD libraries and classrooms. You are an award-winning and bestselling author whose work has been banned in multiple states. Which of your books have been banned and why? 

I have had challenges on all three of my books: In the Dream House; The Low, Low Woods; and Her Body and Other Parties. The biggest time was with Dream House. When COVID was going on, there was a huge controversy where this school in Leander, Texas, outside of Austin, had this memoir unit in which [In the Dream House] was on a list of books students could choose from to read and write about. I discovered [what was going on] when someone messaged me on Instagram saying, ‘I’m in this district. There was a school board meeting yesterday and somebody was reading passages of your book out loud, and also had a sex toy that they were, like, waving around.’ So it was very weird. I found and watched the video, and at first it was kind of funny because, like, this is obviously really f***** up and stupid. But [as I watched], it was like, ‘This book is grooming our children.’ It got really homophobic, really quickly, and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s not so funny, it’s actually really bad.’ I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about it. And then Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, wrote a letter at some point to the public school districts in Texas, and my book was one of two that were mentioned by name. So [the memoir] is the one, I’d say, that is most frequently banned. However, somebody also banned the graphic novel, The Low, Low Woods, in, I think, Louisiana. And years ago, before this current wave of censorship, there was also this time when an inmate in a women’s prison in, I wanna say Missouri, had requested my book to be in the library, and the correctional department rejected it. 

That sounds like a lot.

Yeah, it’s really weird, because when I was a kid, I was very involved in my local library and local public library. I volunteered there every summer for years and years. And every year, we would have banned book week, and they would make a big display of all the books that had been banned, and I always wanted to read the banned books. I would always make a beeline for the display, because I was like, ‘That’s what I want, is what people are telling me I’m not supposed to be reading.’ But it is really bizarre to become an adult and write books and then have those books [be banned]. It’s actually quite f***** up. I just hate it so much.

Your work is known for its vivid and honest portrayal of queer sexuality and sexual relationships. The Iowa law specifically says that school districts should eliminate books that contain “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” Do you think this law is intended to focus on straight sexuality or queer sexuality? Or both? 

I think it’s both, because even if you’re talking about heterosexual relationships, work that portrays sex as positive or neutral is a danger to their bottom line, regardless of whose sexuality it is. I think they like to focus on queer and trans people for obvious reasons that aren’t even worth explaining—yeah, they’re homophobic—but I do think that generally speaking, the kinds of people who are passing these laws, who are advocating for these groups, whatever: they are also just generally very sex-negative. (I would say, specifically homophobic and transphobic.) And I think, if you had a straight character having a sexual awakening, I also don’t think they would really like that, because that would show agency and pleasure, which would be against their philosophy.

We know from reading George Orwell’s 1984 that sex in books can be an anti-government political statement of personal liberty. Do you see your work as political? In what way?

I think there’s a fairly good argument to make that all art is political in some way. This always felt like a very understood thing to me, and yet people do push back against the [idea]. But even something that considers itself apolitical, is political, by the fact that it considers itself, or the author considers it, to be apolitical. And I think that what we commit to the page as authors, what gets bought by publishers, what gets read widely: those are all political questions. 

I do see my work as political, and I don’t mean that in the sense that I sit down and am like, ‘What is my agenda?’ I exist in the world as a Latina, as a fat person, as a queer person, as a woman. And existing in those spaces and asserting my right to make art about what I want, and peoples’ ability to read and access that art, is also obviously very political. But I think that’s true even if the author is not queer, or is white, or whatever. I still think that what comes to readers and how readers access that work is also a political question. So yes, I would say that my work is political, but I would also say that all art is in some way political, even if [some people] think that politics does not exist [in art]. 

Why do you think banning books is so important to conservative lawmakers when they have not banned content that is easily available on phones and computers?

You mean, [why have they not banned online] pornography, or publicly available sexual content? It’s weird, but I think the fact that it’s art makes a difference. I think that if you’re trying to keep a young person’s brain very shut down, [content] coming in via art is actually more powerful than that coming in via other methods. 

I think they mostly just see it as an easier fight. Because it’s easier to say, ‘What about the children?’ and ban a book at a certain school–take it out of a library, you can physically remove it–as opposed to trying to ban, like, sexual content on the internet, which is essentially an impossible task. How would one even do that? So I think for them, it’s an easier battle. And I think they do actually see education as an existential threat. There are ways in which [book banning] becomes a stand-in for other things. 

Why do you think people don’t want teenagers to read about queer sex?

I think some people do believe that just by accessing material about [queer] sex, it could, I dunno, ‘gayify’ a straight person. But that’s not of course what happens. What happens is a person who is new in their sexuality who might access some kind of sexual content, might sort of be like, ‘Oh, am I gay?’ It creates this avenue for them to understand [themselves]. And also, in this case in the context of a piece of art, it’s like you’re reading something and understanding something that’s happening, artistically speaking, and you’re also getting this dose of yourself. Now if you are a bigot who doesn’t want your kid to be gay, I can see how that would translate–if you are very, very stupid–it would translate in your brain, to, like, ‘Oh, my kid read a book and became gay.’ But that’s not what happens; we know that’s not what happens. 

But I do think that again, parents like this, and the politicians who are trying to exploit those parents, they keep a tight rein on their families, and they keep this sort of boundary around their kids. That’s what parents do–they’re trying to instill their kids with their values, etc., and the hard thing is, like, when you are in a public school system, it’s not just your child. It’s other children, other peoples’ children. And I am of the philosophy that if you really want to restrain what your kids are reading to such an extent, then you should [be] homeschooling your kids. And that still sucks–I hate that–but that is your right as a parent. Until that child is 18 and then they can go out into the world and do whatever they want. I don’t have kids, but if I did have kids, I don’t want some other parent at my kids’ school who doesn’t share my values telling kids what they are and aren’t allowed to read, especially when professional educators, like the teachers at these schools, are saying ‘We think this book has some value, or we think that kids having access to this book is important,’ which is their job, not the parents’ job. 

Do these kinds of bans change the way you think about writing?

What an interesting question. . . No, in the sense that, I’m not letting random homophobes and politicians dictate what I write. That isn’t interesting to me. I also recognize that I am not explicitly writing for teenagers, and if I were, and my work were getting censored—I know that it wouldn’t affect me necessarily, but—I can imagine that if you would write books for teens and those books were constantly getting censored, I can imagine how that would kind of mess with your head a little bit and it might get hard to approach your work. I don’t think that’s true for me specifically. Truly, I am such a cantankerous, contrarian person, that I’m just like, ‘If they don’t want me to write about this, then I’ll just write more of it. It’s fine. What are they gonna do about it?’ And I feel very lucky to feel that way. But I could absolutely understand, intellectually, how for somebody it would actually create–at least, weirdness, in their experience of committing something to the page.

I do feel lucky in the sense that, I decided a long time ago the kind of work I wanted to make, and this was long before I was published. When I was in school I made decisions about what kind of artist I wanted to be and what I wanted to [write] and what my voice was going to be. And I feel like I made that decision and stuck to it and have never really had to change that, ever; I just sort of just kept honing my voice more and more. But I could understand–especially if that was where you were focusing your energy, working for children or teens–I could see how that would feel weird. Not because you’d done something wrong, but because censors put voices into your head. Which sucks, and is awful.

How would you describe your experience of being an author whose work has been banned? And living in a red state? 

It makes me really sad–me, in sort of a literal sense, but also [in the sense of what] I kept thinking about especially with this thing that was going on in the Leander School District. I was thinking about the queer kids in those schools. This is what I argued in the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times. I was like ‘You know, my book is about seeing things that are hard to see, and the lessons that I learned about my case, like domestic violence in queer relationships; and so there is something really f***** up about telling teens and queer teens that you don’t want them knowing or learning about this stuff, even indirectly. I think also it’s hard because I know a lot of these bans are framed as ‘protecting the children’ or ‘keeping kids safe.’ But that’s not what keeps kids safe. And also if you scratch all of this rhetoric, right underneath that little surface of keeping kids safe is racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. [It’s] not that subtle. 

And it makes me really sad for the queer kids in these communities, it makes me really sad even for non-queer kids, kids who are learning about people who aren’t like them, you know? And it’s heartbreaking as an artist, and–and I feel weird calling myself this–but as a queer elder. As a person who is, you know, a queer adult, it’s really terrible, because for me, like, one of the weirdest things about coming of age when I did—in high school in the early 2000s—is that I just didn’t see stuff about people like me, so I sort of struggled to understand who I was. In some ways that’s different now because of the internet, obviously. As I’m sure you know, it’s really different being your age and there’s a lot more out queer people. At that age, I knew one girl who was gay, when I was in high school, and she was actually amazing to me, because I was like, ‘Wow, you really know who you are.’ But you know, you just never met other queer people. . . So I think that part of it is they [the people banning books] can see that they’re losing this fight—that queer people are now able to understand themselves earlier in their lives, but they are trying really hard to make that. . . [trails off]. . . There are queer kids in red states. I think also people forget this. Even when you’re in the most conservative place, there are still queer, trans, like, they still exist. And we shouldn’t abandon them, we should be fighting for them, even if we’re coming from places that are more progressive.

What else would you like to add on the subject of book bans in the local schools? 

Young people are so vulnerable. This is something that I think about as a teacher, and as an adult in the world (I’m not a parent, but I’m an aunt.). Kids are so vulnerable. And teachers and people who are trying to make curriculum for young people—to not just learn and grow as thinkers and as people in the world, but to help them also see themselves and understand themselves—they’re the best of us. And they do not get paid enough to do this really good work with young people. And the people who either try to interfere with that work or use other people to interfere with that work as a way of furthering a political agenda are the worst of us. And it feels wild to me that in the year of our lord 2024 that we’re still dealing with this, and this is happening on any kind of state level. It’s wild, it’s deeply upsetting, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.  I wish I could be like, ‘It won’t survive, or it won’t last.’ Ultimately, those books persist, and young people get to grow up and make whatever decisions they want to make about the art that they access and consume. But as somebody who spent my young teenage years not really understanding who I was, it breaks my heart to think that some random politician who’s trying to further this bigger political agenda is going to interfere with young peoples’ abilities to access art. That is terrible, and yet people do it all the time. Obviously we’re in this weird historical moment right now that’s been going on for a while and we’re just in this cultural contraction. . . but it’s terrible. It’s terrible and it feels very discouraging. It’s very heartbreaking. And I feel sad—very, very sad.