In the Dream House: A Memoir

“Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn't have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.”

“The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.”

“You cried in front of many people. You missed readings, parties, the supermoon. You tried to tell your story to people who didn’t know how to listen. You made a fool of yourself, in more ways than one.

“When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.”

For many years, Carmen Maria Machado was locked into an abusive same-sex relationship. A nightmare, she had a hard show more time pulling herself out of. In her debut memoir Machado, describes this experience, in exquisite and painful detail. It can be a difficult read at times, but her writing is so bold and gorgeous, it guides the reader safely past the ugly passages. I loved her story collection, Her Body and Other Parties and with this one, she has proved to be a voice to be heard. I can't wait to see what she does next. show less

In the Dream House is a beautifully written and constructed memoir of and reflection on an abusive relationship.

Rather than going through events in a linear way like most memoirs, it breaks the story down into fragments and intersperses it with reflections on the larger context in which the relationship happened - gaslighting and the movie the term comes from, other writing about abuse in lesbian relationships and its absence from most discussion of domestic violence, the author's experience writing the book.

This is so beautifully written, and so original and thought-provoking. I am sure it will stay with me for a long time, and I will definitely read everything else Machado writes.

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This review can also be found on my blog.

I wish there was a way for me to intellectually discuss In the Dream House but it seems impossible. This is truly one of the most incredible, gut-wrenching books I have ever read. In this memoir, formatted very differently from anything else you have ever read, Carmen Maria Machado details her abusive relationship with another woman. That alone points to why this would be such a difficult review, but Machado’s skill with writing is truly something I have never seen before. I just counted and I’ve tabbed 17 different pages with quotes or scenes that dug deep into me -- and that was me trying to restrain myself.

A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling show more maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.

God, even just reading through these tabbed pages to write this review has me on the verge of tears on my couch. There are points at which I merely drew a line down the entire page; there was no way to separate out one meaningful line or set of sentences from their larger context. To me, that’s indicative of an incredible writer. Nothing in this feels extraneous, it all feels essential and imbued with significance.

Even the enduring symbol of queerness--the rainbow--is a promise not to repeat an act of supreme violence by a capricious and rageful god: I won’t flood the whole world again. It was a one-time thing, I swear. Do you trust me? (And, later, a threat: the next time, motherfuckers, it’ll be fire.)

Another impressive aspect is Machado’s ability to set this within its greater context. As a queer woman, it can be so much more difficult to navigate what would already be difficult situations. She speaks to her naievety as a baby gay and the fact that we always see men portrayed as abusers. On top of that, the time period in which this relationship took place was one where lgbtq rights were tenuous and it felt important not to “look bad.” I understand all this, and it feels so important that Machado was able to explain it in such a succinct way.

Do you see now? Do you understand?

In the Dream House will certainly remain one of my favorite books of all-time, I can already tell. I absolutely cannot recommend this enough, but want to emphasize that it is an extremely difficult read and to take care while reading. To me, this book is a place of understanding and a way to process for (particularly queer) survivors of abuse; it is also a place where those who may not have experienced abuse can come to understand it further. I applaud Machado for being able to write this, and cannot wait to see what she puts out next.

You have no reason to believe me.

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wow, this book.

this is devastating and gorgeous and i feel badly for loving something this much when it is so full of pain and hurt. (but also exquisite writing and depth of thought and honesty and history and folklore.)

and footnotes! (i mean, i really love footnotes, but these are amazing.)

i need to think more about what she does here: what her few researched sections on queer history do for the narrative that her own story doesn't; how she writes in different styles and innovatively (that choose your own adventure section!); and most importantly when she uses the first person (sprinkled in) versus second person (most of the time). i might not have the exact answers to all of these questions, but i do know that this is absolutely show more brilliant and necessary and so well written/done. (edit to add some thoughts: it's like she's showing us little snippets of the relationship to get at the truth of what it was like for her. it's also how memory works, showing pieces at a time or events in flashes. each little chapter is a little insight into her life when she was with the woman in the dream house, and each showed her a little something different about that woman, and so we are given a new voice or a new way of telling or a surprising turn. the change between first and second person pulls us in and pushes us away, something the woman in the dream house did to carmen over and over again, keeping her from feeling sure and comfortable with where she was, who she was, in that relationship.)

"'Don't you ever fucking write about this. Do you fucking understand me?'

You don't know if she means the woman or her, but you nod.

Fear makes liars of us all."

"...and also you're afraid you're going to miss your flight because your girlfriend spent her time this morning putting on her face, an expression you've always found sort of funny and vaguely sexist but that now just strikes you as horrifyingly ominous, because it suggests that she has one face and needs to put on another, and you saw underneath it last night, when you were so afraid and cowering, and she was screaming, and you were hiding from her, hiding from the woman who once told you she loved you and wanted to have children with you and called you the most beautiful and sexy and brilliant woman she'd ever met, you had to hide from her in a bathroom with a lock on the door, and if your family found out they'd probably think it proved every idea they've ever had about lesbians, and you wish she was a man because then at least it could reinforce ideas people had about men, and how she probably wouldn't understand but the last thing queer women need is bad fucking PR..."

"Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat."

"From the corner of my eye, I stared at her freckles and imagined kissing her mouth. When I thought about her, I squirmed, tormented. What did it mean?

I had a crush on her. That's it. It wasn't complicated. But I didn't realize I had a crush on her. Because it was the early 2000s and I was just a baby in the suburbs without a reliable internet connection. I didn't know any queers. I did not understand myself. I didn't know what it meant to want to kiss another woman.

Years later, I'd figured that part out. But then, I didn't know what it meant to be afraid of another woman.

Do you see now? Do you understand?"

to refer back to when reading her book of short stories:
"You will spend the next few years of your writing career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time...
You can't bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn't know what else to do."

a quote from sarah manguso: "The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember, it's that you'll remember." show less

Machado has written an incredibly powerful book that does three amazing things all at once: It makes the nebulous but horrific experience of emotional abuse feel palpably real. It exposes the hidden world of women abusing women in lesbian relationships and examines without flinching all the uncomfortable questions that raises. And it does something completely new with the memoir form. If it had achieved any of these three, it would be worth reading, but that it can do all of them is an extraordinary achievement.

When Carmen Maria Machado was getting her MFA at Iowa City, she was also involved in an abusive relationship that she writes about here. The conceit is that every chapter -- ranging in length from a single paragraph to several pages -- is set in a specific genre or trope, so one chapter is "The Dream House as Unreliable Narrator" and another is "The Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure." It's an effective way of pulling together a narrative that isn't too difficult to read, given the subject matter. Machado has researched ideas and themes that appear in fairy tales and folk tales and pulled them in to illustrate the ways in which the abuse manifested and in her response. Machado is also looking at the history of domestic abuse among show more women and how that differs from and imitates the more familiar partner violence in heterosexual relationships.

This could be a heavy book and a sad one, but Machado is so brilliant and her mind is so active and eager to seek out connections and ideas that I had to consciously slow down my reading. And Machado's story doesn't remain one characterized by uncertainty and turmoil. show less