In the Dream House

chai ♡

Rating: really liked it
Very few works of writing are more fraught, more difficult, than a memoir. It’s mental self-flagellation: the prying open of one’s life, the splitting of the past like a cracked egg, the choice to trap yourself in the mirrored halls of your own memory, the equivalent of digging a nail into an open sore.

Writers like Machado offer up their ability to communicate the inexpressible through language. But it isn’t an easy feat—“putting language to something for which you have no language.” Machado couldn’t find a language for her wordless agony, and like many other queer people in abusive same-sex relationships, she’s had to gather up the silence like a mantle and carry it along with her, step by step. Hers, like many others, is a story like a cry into empty space, with no walls to throw a lonely echo back. This is, Machado explains, “the violence of the archive”, how it wells up and pulls so many stories under, in ways foreseen and unforeseen, as often denied as acknowledged. How its silence is so loud it can blast a blanket of quiet that smothers queer relationship trauma.

In her memoir, Machado joins her account to the ones before her, long kept under a pall of silence. Into this “archival silence”, Machado screams, and the sound crashes, breaks like a wave and floods the pages with all the force of the ocean.

**
In every sense, this memoir is a masterpiece. Machado audaciously pushes the boundaries of the memoir form, reshaping the very definition of it to suit the thrumming drum of her remembrance. And once unearthed, there is no containing the memories. The words whip out of Machado like a spirit breaking free of the skin that restrains it, and that restlessness is echoed in the way the chapters are broken apart and re-formed and siphoned into a series of vignettes, translated into narrative traditions (romance novel, stoner comedy, road trip, self-help bestseller) and literary tropes (Unreliable Narrator, Pathetic Fallacy, Choose Your Own Adventure). “I broke the stories down,” Machado writes, “because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.”

In the Dream House is frequently footnoted too, with Machado accounting fairy tale motifs as they occur, jabbing a dose of eerie fantasy into the memoir—reflecting, perhaps, the war that stirred in Machado between belief and disbelief as her relationship with her abusive ex-girlfriend turned from rocky to surreal to dysfunctional. It’s an unusual structure, but Machado carries off with dazzling aplomb. She also occasionally breaks from first-person narration to address a “you”, a younger Machado from the past. This has the potential to be gimmicky, but the author does it to genuinely good effect: the “I” is grounded in the present, while the “you” gives the sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from an ice floe drifted out to sea.

Above all, In the Dream House is a powerful illustration of the ways that abusers know how to show themselves to best advantage, how to cast their victims into shadow and doubt. Machado understood very keenly how it is to receive a love you could not understand why you were worthy of. Her abusive ex-girlfriend—the woman from the Dream House—picked up with quick and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world Machado was most insecure about, how she liked to raise her hopes with a look and break them with another. The manipulation, the gaslighting, and here a chapter called Choose Your Own Adventure, an exercise in futility as Machado struggles to follow the complex footwork that led them to that dysfunctional conversational pivot. The carefully curated insults, against which soft things might smash and be broken, and the following kindnesses that stung worse than cruelty ever could. That impulse, too: to keep it inside, to hide it—in the raw hope that burying it all away will diminish its power and give it a less vital and terrible form. How easy it could all be forgotten, distilled into habit and convenience. “Sit with this,” Machado heartbreakingly urges herself at one point, “don’t forget it’s happening.” Later, an understanding, like a thumb pressed to her throat: “This is not normal. This is not normal. This is not normal.” There are no bounds to how many emotional octaves the author can reach, and my heart felt as raw as a burn by the end.

As we plow ahead, barreling toward the closing pages, Machado writes—paraphrasing the final lines of a Panamanian folktale: “my tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off to you”. The story might be over, but for many readers—who could say none of their own, but saved it in their chests, where it did not need to be spoken—it will echo on and on.

Roxane

Rating: really liked it
With exacting, exquisite prose, Carmen Maria Machado writes about the complexities of abuse in queer relationships in her absolutely remarkable memoir In The Dream House. She deftly chronicles the wildness of succumbing to desire, the entrancing tenderness of loving and being loved, the fragility of hope, and the unspeakable horror when the woman you love is a monster beneath and on the surface of her skin. What makes this book truly exceptional is how Machado creates an archive where, shamefully, there is none. She demands that we face the truths we are all too often reluctant to confront about the kinds of suffering we are willing to tolerate and the suffering we willfully ignore. Machado has already dazzled us with her brilliant fiction writing and she exceeds all expectations as she breaks new ground in what memoir can do.

Also, fuck that trash ass bitch. She ain't shit. At all.

Cindy

Rating: really liked it
Machado uses her lyrical writing skills to articulate her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship, a difficult subject that is not often discussed. The writing is lovely and haunting, taking the lens of speculative horror fiction to frame her real experience. She describes the complexities of being in an abusive relationship with the added layer of societal expectations for what a queer relationship should look like; these topics and emotions would definitely resonate with anyone who has had similar experiences in toxic relationships. The pretty prose and poetry of the writing is what cinches the 5 star rating for me.

Kat

Rating: really liked it
exquisite, cannot recommend highly enough.

Larry

Rating: really liked it
I am both sheltered and naive, hopefully a little less of each after reading this memoir. It took a short time for me to adjust to the format - some “chapters” as short as one sentence - but I was hooked from the start. Like Tara Westover’s “Educated,” this story evoked emotions across the spectrum of human feeling - for oneself and for others. I marvel at the strength of people like Ms. Machado, and I am grateful that she shared her life with us. She is a treasure.

emma

Rating: really liked it
i read most of this stone-faced, face unchanged even as i was recalling repressed traumas with needle-like stabs, even as my heart ached for carmen maria machado, even as the pained gorgeousness of the writing took my breath away.

https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...

and then i got to the part where things are allowed to be happy again. and i burst into tears.

this is a beautifully written, brilliant researched, painful and raw and horrific and wonderful nightmarish fairytale of a book. it's 5 stars and i will never read it again but i will think about it all the time.

bottom line: sometimes, you read a masterpiece. sometimes, a book hits you at exactly the right time. finding both in one tome is once in a lifetime.

-----------------
tbr review

do you ever put off reading a book because you know it'll hit you too hard?

file "one of the best writers i can think of writing about the thing that is closest possible to home" under that.

Justin Tate

Rating: really liked it
YES YES YES!!! A 1000x better than expected, and I expected nothing short of holy scripture.

Months earlier I stumbled upon the description and knew this book would be monumental. As early reviews crept in, my anticipation grew. I had my Kindle fully charged and stayed up until midnight so I could start reading the second it released. By 2am I was 30% done. A few marathon readings later, I reached the last page with breathless finality. The result? Monumental doesn't even begin to cover it.

The funny thing, it's not monumental because of what happens. Bad relationships happen all the time. Abusive relationships, mental and/or physical, happen all the time. It's talked about less in queer relationships, that's true, and Machado does a great job pointing that out, but I doubt anybody will be dumbfounded by what they read. They will be surprised, however, that there's someone brave enough to talk about it, and by how personal she's willing to get. They will be surprised by how she structures it.

The structure really is what makes this a masterpiece. It's not just the experience, it's the delivery. The darkest memories are brilliantly conveyed in second person and through varying lens. Most of them literary devices. Machado recounts her life through the eyes of Chekhov's Gun, Choose Your Own Adventure, Haunted House, Erotica, Plot Twist, and dozens more. Each section is short and precise. Never a wasted word. For those uncomfortable reading about abuse, she doesn't take it too far either. This isn't battered woman porn. She doesn't go on and on. We get snippets, glimpses of a life that we can easily piece together, and, more importantly, relate to.

What she accomplishes for the queer community specifically, I think, is breaking the ice. After hard-fought battles for marriage equality, there's this unspoken rule that gay relationships must work. If they don't, people will point and say I told you so. By extension, rights may be taken away. Obviously that's not the only factor that kept Machado in her relationship. It may not even be in the Top 10, but it is a shadow that hovers over the scene. She points to lesbian stereotypes as well. Society expects men to be abusive, but two women? Their relationship should be a utopia, right? These stereotypes, this ice, is something she clearly wants to break apart. And she succeeds tremendously.

Of course you don't have to be queer to recognize this is a master work of memoir and creative non-fiction. It is a testament that all experiences, however ordinary or unique, should be shared. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book is the relentless honesty. She veils it slightly by the structure and 2nd person, but in a way this makes the experience more real. More true. And the accomplishment, I think, is for any one person to read this and be able to know that, for sure, they are not alone.

Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤

Rating: really liked it
You enjoy reading memoirs because you like to get a better understanding of people, how they think and feel, to learn different perspectives. You are lesbian and particularly enjoy memoirs by people in the LGBQT+ community. You see this memoir come out (ha ha!) about a lesbian relationship and you notice a lot of people really love it. You assume you will too. You read and read and you don't ever get inside the author's head or have any idea of what she thinks and feels. You don't because she rarely describes her feelings and she writes in the freaking second person present tense and you're like "What the hell is this? Who writes a memoir in the second person??".

However, since the author writes very well, you continue reading, hoping she'll eventually open up and really let you into her life. You'll eventually get a sense of who she is. You're hoping she'll stop writing as though you the reader are the one going through all this instead of the author. You wonder what so many people love about this book that maybe would work for you as a novel (you doubt it because you'd still not get to know the characters), but as a memoir? Nope, just not doing it for you.

OK, that's enough writing in the second person; I'll stop trying to make the review about you the reader and let you know that this review is what I think about the book. Better?

Again, what the hell???  Perhaps Ms. Machado thought that by writing in the second person, the reader would feel like they were in her shoes and maybe wonder how they would feel if they were. And maybe that's what it did for some people, but for me? I kept reading the book wondering if I would ever learn anything about what she was feeling. Perhaps it was too painful for her to write in the first person but in that case, it wasn't time for her to write a memoir about painful experiences and she should have waited until she'd had therapy and worked through her feelings.



Maybe Ms. Machado simply wanted to bring awareness to the fact that same-sex relationships can be unhealthy and abusive, just as straight ones sometimes are. If that was all she wanted to do, then she did that very well. Maybe a lot of people were unaware of this fact, but being lesbian, I've known of three abusive relationships between women over the years. Therefore, I didn't need to read the book but I am glad the book sheds light on this topic which is rarely ever talked about.

As a memoir however, the book just didn't work for me. There were entire chapters describing movies and tv episodes. Who does that? It's a memoir, not TV Guide!  I know almost as little about Carmen Machado as I did prior to reading this book. I don't even know how she and her ex-girlfriend supported themselves. There was talk of various places they lived, but not about what they did to pay the rent and buy groceries -- did they even buy groceries and pay the rent or did they squat illegally? And feelings? I don't think I've ever read a memoir where the author talked so little about how they felt. Or even what they were thinking. She merely relates a few emotionally abusive episodes and some of the manipulation tactics her ex used on her and then goes on with the movie references and a lot of discussion (repetitive) about how there can be abuse in same-sex relationships. It's elegantly written but........

You probably won't read any more of her books, especially not a memoir if she happens to write another in the future. You are glad this book is finished, though it wasn't a terrible read. Still, you are ready to move on to better books. Yay for you! I mean...  me.

4 stars for the quality of the writing. 1 star for content.  

Elle (ellexamines)

Rating: really liked it

“I thought you died, but right now, I’m not sure you did.”

This is, genuinely, my favorite book I read in the entirety of 2020, and maybe one of my favorite books ever. Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir about a queer abusive relationship blends reality with media and its mirrors. It flurries between grandeur and media and the simple, the human, varies between detailed tales and hypothetical quandaries to tell the story of a relationship.

Everything is a metaphor and not. Homes are a metaphor, the freudian idea of a basement threatening everything. The dream house is not necessary for domestic abuse, but hell, it helps. A house is never apolitical. As this wonderful New Yorker article tells it, “In the Dream House is primarily about the quandary of constructing In the Dream House.” It’s a story about the telling of stories that are not told, a going-through of every possible medium with which you can articulate abuse.

There’s a specific chapter from this novel I think about a lot, Dream House as I Love Lucy, in which Machado allegorizes her relationship to I Love Lucy, a comedy wherein the protagonist can never learn. In simple detail, she explains the plot as a narrator never able to escape her narrative but always the butt of the joke. And then she ends the chapter:
Isn’t this funny? This is funny. It’s so funny. It could be funny. One day it will be funny. Won’t it?
And isn’t this truly what you become—the butt of the joke, everyone laughing, the details so obviously absurd, the ex so demonic in characterization, but the joke’s not funny, and it can’t be, and you can’t laugh. I’ve explained this chapter end to a shocking number of friends and it never fails to incite a little bit of shell shock. I promise, it is even more when you read it.

I had several favorite chapters of this book, listed here with key quotes:

→Dream House as Lesbian Pulp Novel
The cover tells you what you need to know: depraved inversion, seduction, lascivious butches and big-breasted seductresses, love that dare not speak its name. There are censors to get past, so tragedy is a foregone conclusion. It was written to the dna of the dream house, maybe back when it was just a house, maybe even back when it was just Bloomington, Indiana, or before humans even existed there at all.

→Dream House as Lesson Learned
It was a power struggle, which is weird because you had no power at all.

→Dream House as I Love Lucy
Isn’t this funny? This is funny. It’s so funny. It could be funny. One day it will be funny. Won’t it?

→Dream House as Sniffs from the Ink of Women
Years later, if I could say anything to her, I would say for fuck’s sake, stop making us look bad.

→Dream House as Comedy of Errors
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 has to put on another. And you saw underneath it last night.
And you wish she was a man, because then at least it could reinforce ideas people had about men.

→Dream House as Demonic Possession
But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things, for which they will receive a carte blanche forgiveness the next day?

→Dream House as Ambiguity
The abused needed to be a feminine figure: meek, straight, white, and the abuser a masculine one. The queer woman’s gender identity is tenuous and can be stripped away from her at any moment should it suit some straight party or another.

→Dream House as Five Lights
The final word, lights, is practically oatmeal in his mouth. (This chapter was one of my favorites in the book.)

→Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure
You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you, or you leave it. You dream about the future. It’s going to be alright. One day your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you.

→Dream House as Hotel Room In Iowa City
You only speak the language of giving yourself up.

→Dream House as The Queen and The Squid
Not that I want to eat you; I just want you nestled in my stomach for all eternity.

→Dream House as A Death Wish
You’ll wish she hit you. You have this fantasy, this fucked up fantasy, of opening up a photo on your phone where you look glazed, and disinterested, and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. You want something black and white more than you want anything in this world.

→Dream House as Public Relations
Pen poised over paper, wondering if they would let the world know if they were unmade by someone with just as little power as they.

→Dream House as Cliche
The stoning. This image has stayed with me for so long. What both has been and is a punishment for homosexuality, inflicted by the woman she loved. Stone. Stone butch, stonewall, queer history studded with stones like jewelry.

I adored this book, a lot. Quite a lot. I'm really hoping for more from this author, and know I will think about this book for a long, long time.

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Skyler Autumn

Rating: really liked it
2 Stars

I don't usually review books that are about a survivor recounting their journey because I believe these stories should be told whether writing is something you are gifted at or not. That's why I never rated Chanel Miller's Know My Name because although there were flaws in style and presentation who am I to tell a survivor that they didn't do their own story justice. That being said although abuse in queer relationships are stories that need to be told. The fact of the matter is Carmen Maria Machado wrote this book like a professional 'I know my shit' writer. She did not tell her story in plain English she used fancy language and experimental techniques. She showed us she is a "proper" writer so if that's how she wants to tell her story then she is opening herself up to assholes like me that are going to review it.

I am clearly in the minority here when I say that I did not enjoy... feels like the wrong word. Let's say I just felt nothing for this memoir. No sympathy, no outrage, no freakin interest. There was so much fluffy writing and fancy metaphors that I had to drudge through to get to the actual story. By the time I got to the meat and bones of this abusive relationship I was so bored and spent by the reading journey. Taking readers in and out of her actual abusive relationship with flower-y imagery just made me as reader feel disconnected and a bit confused. How am I suppose to sit and feel this trauma the author faced when she keeps pulling me away from it. It was as if a friend was coming up to me being like "Hey this woman I'm dating spent the night screaming at me as I hid in the shower" and before I can really wrap my mind around that bomb my friend just dropped she goes, "Look at that flower isn't it beautiful, looks at the colours and what they symbolize." Thats distracting right? The impact of the first sentence kind of loses its weight. Now imagine that kind of whiplash in an entire novel.

Overall, this memoir felt like an essay that needed a shit ton of filler to make a novel. The dramatic ass words and weird little research snippets of old movies just felt like the author was really trying to stretch a 5 page novella. I wish this story could have been stripped down to its core so I could actually feel and understand the difficulty of being in an abusive queer relationship instead of feeling like my usual sociopathic self for not caring and being on the precipice of DNFing.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
Contemplative and inventive, In the Dream House dispels the silence surrounding abusive queer relationships. In her debut memoir Machado recounts the violence she endured for years at the hands of her first girlfriend, a rail-thin, androgynous unnamed white woman who routinely invalidated and gaslighted her. Written in arresting prose the work unfolds in a series of terse, terrifying sections, each of which centers on a single trope, from the conceptual (‘Epiphany,’ ‘Memory,’ ‘Void’) to the generic (‘Murder Mystery,’ ‘Noir,’ ‘Bildungsroman’). As she moves back and forth in time, viewing the bond from several angles, Machado embeds cultural criticism and theory into her story, considering the ways in which abuse toward and among women, specifically lesbians, is (and is not) represented. With great subtlety the writer captures the power dynamics at the heart of her relationship, and her commentary on American culture is sharp.

chan ☆

Rating: really liked it
this one is tough for me. i’m glad that this book exists and it’s one i could see myself recommending, but it’s not one that i particularly enjoyed. enjoyed isn’t a great word, but i’m lacking a better one.

i think a good way to say it is that i like what this book said but not the way it was told. the short vignettes, the lack of linear story telling, and the flowery prose did not work for me.

luce (currently recovering from a hiatus)

Rating: really liked it
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While I definitely admire Carmen Maria Machado for having not only the strength to tackle such a difficult subject matter but to do so by sharing her own personal experience with her readers, and part of me also can't help but to recognise that In the Dream House: A Memoir is one of the most innovative memoir I have ever read, I would be lying if I said (or wrote) that it was flawlessly executed. I'm definitely glad to see that many other reviewers are praising it and or have clearly found it to be an emotional and striking read...nevertheless I will try to momentarily resist peer pressure and express my honest opinion instead, which is that In the Dream House: A Memoir struck me as a rather disjointed amalgamation.
On the one hand we have pages and pages chock-full of quotations from secondary sources discussing the way in which American society tends to dismiss or not acknowledge that sexual, emotional, and physical abuse within the queer community is possible. These sections seemed to adopt an essayist's language. However, while these sections used certain academic terms (possibly not accessible to a wide readership) and were structured like essays of sorts they didn't really develop Machado's initial argument (that abusive queer or LGBTQ relationships are often called in to question since many consider the idea of a woman abusing another woman unbelievable). I didn't agree with some of her readings of certain queer films nor did I find her own brand of queer criticism all that compelling.
The other segments in this memoir draw from Machado's personal history with an abusive relationship. Her partner (a woman) emotionally and psychologically abused her throughout the entirety of their relationship. Machado deviates from the usual recognisably 'memoir' way of presenting one's own story offering us instead with fragments of her time in this abusive relationship. She addresses this past 'self' in the secondary person, so there are a lot of 'you' this and 'you' that, and her abuser as 'the woman in the Dream House'. Here her language becomes even more flowery and the imagery and metaphors were rather abstract. These sections seemed snapshots more than anything else. The 'poetic' style seemed to take on more importance than Machado's own story.
I also wasn't all that keen on the way she traces past conversations and incidents back to folklore. She seems a bit too ready to connect every single moment of this awful relationship back to Jungian archetypes. It was weird and it made some aspects of memoir seem a bit artificial.
Also while I get that sometimes including graphic or deeply personal moments is horrifyingly necessary when discussing abuse (such as Isabelle Aubry does in her memoir where she talks in detail about the horrific sexual abuse her father inflicted upon her) here we had these random sex scenes which seemed to be included merely to be subversive.
Overall I just couldn't look past my dislike for Machado writing style. Still, I'm definitely in the minority on this one so I recommend you check this one out and see for yourself whether you are interested in reading this.

Lucy Dacus

Rating: really liked it
There is no readying yourself for this one. Carmen is a modern legend, case closed.

Marchpane

Rating: really liked it
In the Dream House is a most unmemoir-like memoir. This account of Carmen Maria Machado’s years in an abusive same-sex relationship plays with form, blending elements of literary criticism, pop culture essays, folk tales and the shadowy worlds of her short fiction.

To tell this real-life story, Machado cleaves herself in two: the first-person, present-day “I” — settled, successful, safe — addresses the second-person, past “you”. This textual interplay between two Carmens affords more closeness than addressing an imagined reader would.

“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.

I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did.”

Machado has then further cut and polished her pain into dozens of tiny gleaming facets, variations in style that are employed as lenses, each one offering a new revelation. Among these, for example, are Dream House as lipogram; as prisoner’s dilemma; as Schrödinger’s Cat; as Choose Your Own Adventure®; as comedy of errors. This all could have fallen into a gimmicky heap, but the blend of formal inventiveness and raw vulnerability is executed beautifully.

In the Dream House is a memoir from someone who not only has a painful experience to relate and work through, but who can also REALLY write AND think AND synthesise, who in her own words can braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. Overall it is unconventional (and as such won’t be to everyone’s taste), but not in a way that’s distancing or abstract. A genuinely memorable and highly impressive work. 5 stars