A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties 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, … 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.
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Absolutely remarkable… What makes this book truly exceptional is how Machado creates an archive where, shamefully, there is none.
This is Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir. It’s also a horror story.
Machado is well-known in horror spaces for her astounding short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, where she weaves together social issues and classic spooks, but this book is truly her crowning glory. In the Dream House is mostly autobiographical, but delves into the history of queer abuse, identity politics, folklore taxonomy, and societal expectations, tying together her own life with the lives and study of others like her. Lyrical and elegant, academic and well-researched, In the Dream House is a triumph of nonfiction in every form: the essay, the memoir, the autobiography, the history, and takes its place among the defining pieces of literature of our time.
The Dream House is just that. Carmen Maria Machado, alongside her girlfriend, finds and purchases the house of her dreams. It’s beautiful, it’s spacious, and over the next few years it becomes Machado’s prison. Machado’s girlfriend, referred to only as the woman in the dream house, devolves slowly over the course of their relationship from a beautiful, sensitive, and talented young woman to a monster that lives only to terrorize Machado, gaslighting and manipulating her into believing that her loving girlfriend is the real her and that their love is healthy and normal. Alongside this harrowing personal tale, Machado discusses how her relationship was hard to describe and validate because of the stereotypes that exist about women, queerness, and even the appearance of her white, slim, beautiful girlfriend. Accompanying this are discussions about queer histories of abuse, the role of villains in our society, and Machado’s journey of healing post-relationship.
The structure of this book is just phenomenal. Not only is Machado blending genres both in and outside of traditional nonfiction topics, she plays with the actual book chapters themselves. This book is divided up into several parts, then further into chapters which all share the same naming structure: Dream House as_____. Sometimes chapters repeat, sometimes they’re one page long, sometimes just a sentence. What I loved most was the creativity involved in some of these pages. Machado often inserts footnotes, most of them used for traditional purposes like citing sources and minor clarifying notes, yet as the book goes further in they change form. Machado’s relationship moves from fairy-tale to horror, and the footnotes, which had been citing fairy-tale taxonomy, grow frantic and more gruesome, from citing sources to almost manic detailing, a crying meltdown in small type. In another section, Machado begins the chapter with a scene in bed with her girlfriend and leaves the reader to choose what happens next: do you defend yourself? do you apologize? do you ignore her? She, frustrated with you and herself, chastens you for picking unrealistic options, for daring to stand up for yourself and by extension, her. If you try to read the book chronologically, she informs you it doesn’t work like that. The narrative isn’t that easy. I adored this kind of playing with format, where the book was not only a venue for telling a story but a story in itself. You are a participant in the narrative, not just an outsider.
This book also feels particularly timely even though it came out almost two years ago as we continue to have discussions around purity culture and queer representation. The villain of this story is a woman, a queer woman. In the past five years or so, there’s been a big push for there not to only have diversity in media, but for those diverse populations to be represented as the good guys as opposed to the long-term history of queer-coding villains. But there’s a lot of good discussion about how this has gone too far. Soft sapphics and cute gays, people of color who protest and never riot, women to have their victimhood recognized but not their abusive behavior. This book grapples with a lot of that, to understand the urge for queer people to not be painted in a bad light by society while also understanding that… queer people can be bad people. To recognize marginalized populations as being equal is to recognize them as being people, who are capable of evil just like everyone else. Machado’s abuser was a queer woman who thought herself a victim. How does society recognize this in the wake of #MeToo, which told society to always believe women, which slotted them into the category of abused and not abuser? We think of abusers as being men in heterosexual relationships, maybe even homosexual relationships, but never a woman hitting another woman. That’s silly, that’s a catfight. Not abuse. There’s been a big push to portray queer and female characters as being devoid of flaws in an effort to portray them in the heroic light that society denies them, and while those characters are important, denying the existence of wrongdoing does no one any favors. Machado grapples with this topic throughout the book and struggles with her own personal love for queer villains, who are evil for the sake of the aesthetic and panache.
In the Dream House does so much. Not only is Machado telling her story, she’s relaying a history and discussing issues, she’s inviting the reader into the horror of her relationship. This book is harrowing and elegant, perfect for both fans of Machado’s earlier horror work and nonfiction more grounded in reality. The book’s creative structure and its genre fluidity give it a pervading sense of unreality. Dreamlike, if you’ll permit it. This book has been making waves for many administrator’s efforts to ban it from schools and libraries, but if anything, it’s a necessary and provocative read for us all.
review blog
Dream House as Reality.
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.
In the Dream House is a memoir showing domestic abuse in a queer relationship. The author describes her trauma in poetic prose that is so freaking haunting. Every aspect of her story resonated so deeply with me, and there’s a reminder here that being queer doesn’t make you good or bad. It just makes you queer, and you’re able to fall for the same mistakes that anyone else could – include falling in love with a monster and staying in an abusive relationship.
It was hard to get into at first. The audiobook is narrated at a very slow pace so I ended up listening to it at 1.75x playback speed. She also addresses her past self in the second person “you,” which was throwing me off the first few pages.
A part of me wishes I had read a physical copy or on my kindle so I could have highlighted the heck out of it but I am glad I did the audiobook as well, I found the author’s voice to be very calming.
It’s a memoir centered around a toxic same-sex relationship from the author’s past. I had NO idea what this was about when I started it, only that Noelle Gallagher said she really enjoyed it, but it impressed me a lot. Her style of writing was poetic and creative, each short section based around the section’s heading – always “Dream House as …”
I like that with her memoir she is also educating and spreading awareness about same-sex abuse, something that I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never even considered.
One of the best-written memoirs I have read to date.
This is one of the best memoirs I have read in years.
This book ruined me. It’s brilliant, emotional, innovative, extremely clever and absolutely devastating. I will probably never shut up about it and have already bought copies to foist upon unsuspecting friends.
A brilliantly-written and creatively-constructed memoir about a relationship between the author and another woman that quickly turned dark and abusive. Fascinating, strange, dark and yet hopeful. A book that needed written.
It’s a testament to Carmen Maria Machado’s abilities that a memoir as harrowing as In the Dream House can also be so energizing to read, so propulsive.
Wrought with alarming premonition, propulsive rhythm, and a trove of folkloric archetypes, Machado’s genre-crushing memoir is a meditation on the eclipse of knowledge and intuition by the narcotic light of a destructive bond that feels like love.