A Review of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

If you’ve clicked on this review, you have most likely read Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties. If you haven’t yet, run–don’t walk–RUN to your local bookstore or library and get yourself a copy (if you want a taste first, you can read the Law & Order: SVU-inpsired novella that is one of my favorite parts of the collection here).

I was excited when I learned that Machado had an upcoming book, a memoir called In the Dream House. I tried to learn as little about it as possible, hearing only that it was an account of a relationship gone wrong. Knowing anything else up front didn’t matter to me because her writing is so unique, so capable, and frankly, and so weird (in the best ways).

Without giving too much of the subject matter away, this is the most uniquely structured memoir I’ve ever read. I’m a big fan of hermit crab essays and playing with form, so this book piqued my curiosity as soon as I began reading. The memoir is a retelling of an abusive relationship, during which Machado and her girlfriend lived in a house in the midwest that she refers to as The Dream House. Each chapter, sometimes as short as a paragraph or as long as 15 pages, is titled “Dream House as __________”, with the blank being a metaphor, a literary trope, a setting, a cultural touchstone, or something else entirely. The memoir swings from Dream House as a Lesson in the Subjunctive to Chekhov’s Trigger to Choose Your Own Adventure to Denouement. It could be easy to write this structure off as a gimmick, but it’s so unique and thought-provoking, not to mention the memoir still simultaneously unspools a page-turning, mostly linear narrative.

A recurring theme of the book is the author grappling with the fact that there is so little in writing about abuse in lesbian relationships. Queer literature has often had to struggle against the so-called mainstream, but she notes another reason why it’s so hard to find a record of abuse: queer women are already fighting so hard to make society at large recognize their humanity and dignity that they often don’t want to be seen as having the same kinds of problems as everyone else. Machado bristles at this instinct to hide the darker truths of queer relationships: “We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers–real life ones–do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure and upright as people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough” (47).

The memoir can be a little academic in tone sometimes (honestly, for me, that’s often a selling point), so don’t go into this expecting a light read. Still, I think it’s an engaging book, one that people will be talking about for a long time.

I don’t think this counts as a spoiler because there is so much more at stake in the memoir, but I am in awe that Machado was able to write an entire memoir about this relationship without ever even naming the girlfriend. Her deft prose brings us right to the precipice, showing us what it was like to live with such a cruel, manipulative person, without ever really making the book about this woman. The memoir is a haunting, and Machado is our brilliant, alluring guide through the house of mirrors.

In the Dream House comes out November 5th from Graywolf Press.

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