In the Dream House
2019
- psychological abuse
- lesbians, biography
- american literature
- lgbtq biography and memoir
- stonewall book awards
- lambda literary awards
- lambda literary award winner
- collection:judy_grahn_award=winner
- american women authors
- biography
The story
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, 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.
What it’s like
Clipped, restless prose that shifts register from chapter to chapter, sometimes lush and sometimes flat as a case file, with sentences that tilt toward the uncanny: a house that keeps reappearing, a voice that turns sweet and then cold. Each section borrows a genre's furniture, a ghost story's creaking stairs, a fairy tale's dark forest, a lurid erotic script, so reading feels like walking through a series of rooms where the lighting keeps changing. Between the harrowing passages come sharp, wry asides on Star Trek, Disney villains, and courtroom language, small breaths before the next drop. The mood is watchful, unsettled, tender and bitterly funny by turns, best suited to a late-night read in a quiet room with a clear head. Intensity is high in emotional terms: sustained psychological abuse, manipulation, fear and shame. Physical violence appears but is not lingered on, and there is no gore. This is not a gentle read. It suits readers who want memoir that breaks its own form, who are drawn to essays on queer life and power, and who can stay with harm described honestly.
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