Paperback, 272 pages
English language
Published Nov. 7, 2020 by Graywolf Press.
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.
I connected with the literary styling of this memoir and it had a deep resonance with my experiences. I find indirect prose does a much more effective job at communicating the things in life that can’t be communicated. There’s plenty of directness too, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg on the horizon. The real damage is beneath the surface; invisible, suffocating.
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.
