Paperback, 304 pages
English language
Published Nov. 6, 2020 by Serpent's Tail Limited.
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. …
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
This is not an easy read, but it's a brilliant one. Machado's fragmentary style is a fascinating way of showing the effects of an abusive relationship on her psyche and her life, how 'the woman in the dream house' became part of her life and then broke it apart. It moves in to the very small, with detailed examination of events in her relationship, and also moves out to the wider issue of abusive relationships in the queer community.
Carmen María Machado's In the Dream House was book #8 in my 2022 journey to explore works challenged or removed from Texas libraries or schools. carmenmariamachado.com/in-the-dream-house
I am afflicted with the librarian's obsession with footnotes, and was fascinated with the way Machado wove her citations of a particular source into almost another layer of narrative, like the voice of the Greek chorus.
Being a queer woman myself who went through a tumultuous lesbian relationship before it met its inevitable end, I found this book more than engaging and interesting. We all know there's not enough written accounts —or media, for that matter— about abuse in queer relationships, so I think Machado's memory is a very necessary addition to a shelf that should start getting bigger with the years, about literature that must exist about people like us, who may end up in relationships that should perhaps not ever come to be.
That's why this book is so scary, I think, because it's raw in the way abuse is depicted without it needing to involve the typical force of physical violence, describing instead what can be just as damaging: psychological abuse. God knows it's fucking taxing to go through something like this, something that seems senseless and unexplainable and, ultimately, our fault. But, …
Being a queer woman myself who went through a tumultuous lesbian relationship before it met its inevitable end, I found this book more than engaging and interesting. We all know there's not enough written accounts —or media, for that matter— about abuse in queer relationships, so I think Machado's memory is a very necessary addition to a shelf that should start getting bigger with the years, about literature that must exist about people like us, who may end up in relationships that should perhaps not ever come to be.
That's why this book is so scary, I think, because it's raw in the way abuse is depicted without it needing to involve the typical force of physical violence, describing instead what can be just as damaging: psychological abuse. God knows it's fucking taxing to go through something like this, something that seems senseless and unexplainable and, ultimately, our fault. But, luckily, these things can have a bittersweet ending and actually end at some goddamn point, even though we may think we got this far and maybe if we try just a little bit harder, it'll get better. Sadly, in most cases, it does not, and both people need help, some more than others. To put a stop to a relationship that got a bit out of hands is really difficult but, once done, liberating and deserved.
This book clearly hit home, even if not to the fullest extent. Still, I think this was a book that I needed to read, that came right at the time when my own story finally has been closed and shelved on the memory lane, for ever and ever —or, well, for as long as my own story goes on.
