Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House is a brilliant, multi-faceted, and experimental memoir in every sense of the phrase. Structurally and emotionally it pulls readers in many directions, all of which come together to deconstruct the haunting arc of a psychologically abusive relationship.
In its simplest form, In The Dream House is Machado’s recollection of her long-term relationship with a woman she meets while they are attending graduate school. On the surface, everything is picturesque: they fall in love, begin a long-distance relationship when the unnamed girlfriend moves to a different state, and spend most of their time in the girlfriend’s sprawling, beautiful dream house. As time goes on those warm, fuzzy feelings are replaced with hurt, manipulation, screaming, belittling, jealousy, and, eventually, nearly every scene ends with Machado in tears.
Each of Machado’s accounts of the relationship is written as a vignette with titles ranging from literal to metaphorical and represents a different facet of the experience. Together, these break down the complicated layers and thoughts that led her to and through the abuse with crushing honesty.
“Dream House as Inciting Incident” recalls the day she meets her abusive girlfriend, who at this point is just a dreamy, crush-worthy woman that captures her attention. Machado gets more obscure with titles like “Dream House as Noir,” in which Machado’s girlfriend explains to her that her fits and volatile passion for her is simply “what it’s like to date a woman” because women have emotions and are sensitive.
More experimental is the paranoia and panic found in “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” in which Machado tells us of a morning where she wakes up next to her girlfriend who is angry with her for moving in her sleep and waking her. You feel the dread and anxiety of how something so simple can go terribly wrong in an instant for her. You pick between choices like “apologize profusely” or “tell her to calm down” and turn to a specific page to see the result, all of which are frightening and evidence that, at this point in the story, there is no winning and Machado’s once dream house is now an everyday nightmare. In “Dream House as Schrodinger’s Cat” (a reference to physicist Schrodinger’s theory that if you place a cat in a box with something that can kill it, the cat is, in a sense, both dead and alive until you open the box) Machado muses on how it is she became caught in an abusive relationship. “Was it the fact that you’d already been tenderized like a pork chop by: never having been properly in love, being told you should be grateful for anything you get as a fat woman, getting weird messages that relationships are about fighting and being at odds with each other?”
What stands out perhaps even more than the chilling memories found in Dream House is how difficult it is for Machado to navigate her abusive relationship because, as she puts it, “I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women.” From that perspective, In The Dream House transcends from a memoir into a powerful political act against the silencing of queer women who have suffered abuse as much as anyone else with less reference or support than most. It breathes life into a very human experience that has been kept in the closet while the LGBTQ+ community has worked to become more accepted with time because, as Machado says, “the desire to save face can defeat every other interest.”
It’s never an easy read, but in the end, beyond being a political act of literature, beyond being a tome of queer sisterhood and strength, In The Dream House is Machado’s story of survival all her own. Her use of the second person perspective throughout the periods of abuse pull you into the experience with her, while her first person perspective in the aftermath of it suggests she’s made it through the worst of times in one piece; now it’s your turn to consider and reflect what you’ve absorbed. Machado’s tale will stir up every emotion imaginable and stands as a symbol for not only what one queer, Latina woman is capable of, but what every woman is capable of. As Machado puts it on the very first page, “If you need this book, it is for you.”