Carmen Maria Machado

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, 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.

A Memoir

In the Dream House

mara

The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), w den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (none of this can really be happening), a prison (need to get out need to get out), and, finally, a dungeon of memory. In dreams it sits behind a green door, for reasons you have never understood. The door was not green.

I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.

Marion R

In her essay "Venus in Two Acts," on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the "violence of the archive." This concept—also called "archival silence"-illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.

The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ảpxeiov: arkheion, "the house of the ruler." When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I'm a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it's a parent deciding what's worth recording of a child's early life or-like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its "stumbling blocks" —a continent publicly reckoning with its past.

The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.

Clara Gauthier

I wished I had always lived in this body, and you could have lived here with me, and I could have told you it's all right, it's going to be all right.

And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don't recognize it.

We will always be hungry, will always want. 

cleo

We can't stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being- one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast into themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go. 

And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually - the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other - I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They're always by far the most interesting characters on screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They've adapted; they've learned to conceal themselves. They've survived.

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, 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--haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman--in 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 about 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, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, 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.

Ch. 135 - trying to highlight quotes from audio books is difficult, but Dream House as PR is such a good chapter. 

Alli

But that's the minority anxiety, right? That if you're not careful someone will see you, or people who share your identity, doing something human and use it against you.

...It's not being radical to point out people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that - your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can and do fail. 

This book. It keeps breaking my heart but I can’t put it down. 

Megan BV

You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.

But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.

 Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

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 or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.

How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.

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.

I bring this up because it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying.

I should remember to read more nonfiction. New perspectives make me think about and feel so many things. (And it’s only page 4) 

The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence…. When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence.

I think this is a brilliant way to start a book. 

I never read prologues. I find them tedious. If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide?

margot colville

Abbi Brown 

Carmen Maria Machado is an INCREDIBLE writer.

This is a book thats gonna stick with me for a while. Her writing is so compelling and vivid and her use of "You" when describing her own experience is haunting.

Chloé

Carmen Maria Machado is an INCREDIBLE writer.

This is a book thats gonna stick with me for a while. Her writing is so compelling and vivid and her use of "You" when describing her own experience is haunting.

so eerie and haunting and funny and engaging and intimate and lyrical and devastating 

the intricacies of continuing to stay with your abuser; of continuing to love your abuser, despite being acutely aware that what you are experiencing is Wrong - sometimes can verge on being inexplicable for the one involved. yet Machado executes it gracefully - somehow every single thought I've ever had regarding this topic has already blossomed and bloomed out onto this paper

something changed in me the day I finished this novel - i'd like to think i will return to it for as long as time allows. 

the intricacies of continuing to stay with your abuser; of continuing to love your abuser, despite being acutely aware that what you are experiencing is Wrong - sometimes can verge on being inexplicable for the one involved. yet Machado executes it gracefully - somehow every single thought I've ever had regarding this topic has already blossomed and bloomed out onto this paper

something changed in me the day I finished this novel - i'd like to think i will return to it for as long as time allows. 

Kiran Aftab

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Greer Andersson

✰✰✰✰✰
Mwah, chef's kiss. This book just became an instant new fave for me. Machado's prose and style of writing just works so, so well for me and I ate up every second of this beautifully written book. The short chapters are also an absolute god-send for ADHD brain, I appreciated this so much. 

There is so much more I could say, but in full honesty, my head is fully empty. But just trust me when I say this is definitely worth the read and may be a top contender for my favourite book of 2024.

i fw this book heavy...imagery is out of this world, impeccable use of fairytale allegories, weaved with great tact and timing throughout the story. highly highly recommend !!

iris 

Fenix Voliton 

carmen maria machado will never fail to make me cry this is one of my fav books ever

Nisindi

Isabella 

i have no words. i am speechless... this is one of the most immersive memoir i have read; the writing style and storytelling was so beautiful. very heartbreaking 3 highly recommend everyone to read this, but do check the trigger warnings before. (p.s i was listening to phoebe bridgers while reading and it definitely added to the reading experience)

Sonia Grgas

JoAnna

Machado is a brilliant writer. I found some of the more abstract essays to be slower reads, but I loved the book all the same.

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different narrative lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Ned Summers 

Jasmine Ghartey

「 most types of domestic abuse are completely legal 」

this memoir follows the relationship machado had with her abusive girlfriend at the time who tortured her mentally and emotionally. I don't feel like it's "right" to review a memoir tbh, specifically one like this but I will say that I'm grateful that machado felt comfortable to be vulnerable enough to share this tumultuous time in her life with so many people. my rating is really just based on writing and execution 

the part that I appreciated the most, next to the beautiful writing and the creative way she structured her memoir, was the research that she put into proving her point being that, specifically in relation to her own situation, lesbian domestic abuse cases aren't taken seriously enough to provide protection for the victim. they're glossed over and considered to just be "two girls/people having a fight" when that's far from the truth. abuse is abuse, regardless of your sexual orientation and gender identity, so I appreciated the amount of historical references and examples that machado used because I learned a lot about how lesbian domestic violence cases have been handled. also how the lack of urgency to stop treating homosexuality and heterosexuality as separate entities when it comes to these situations of abuse. (and look at how most hetero abuse cases are handled...no one seems to care regardless until the person is dead, and even then we don't see a resolve sometimes) 

i think that aside from this being beautifully written, it is important to read for your own knowledge to truly understand (even if you are queer) how truly defenseless queer people are in the courts, especially when they're defending themselves against someone in their own community. 

this memoir is about domestic violence so if anything in that realm is triggering to you, I suggests you skip this one, but I do 1000% recommend it.

Brilliant and bound to be on my mind for a long, long time.

laetitia

wow. machado is easily my favourite author of the year. read this thrice & am still reeling from it. so powerful & lyrical & shattering & so so genius—never knew the memoir form could be written in this way. also, what masterful use of the second person!!!!

One of my top books of 2023 and one I’ll revisit. Every page subverts, shocks or lulls you into a deceptive peace. CMM is a master at storytelling and this time, she is telling the horror story she lived through. Shining light on abuse in the queer communities, she makes the memoir beyond her experiences. What is the dream house? What does it mean to be in the dream house? Can you ever capture or do justice to memory? 

Xiang

anita

mi nuevo libro favorito, no sé explicar todo lo que me hizo sentir

Cassie B

M. Marques

** spoiler alert **
           I didn’t know I needed this book.
I feel better now that I’ve read it - there’s this reassurance that I was not crazy. What I thought had happened really happened. I didn’t make it up. I was not crazy. She “was”.

Will Vunderink

Machado's memoir is a harrowing story that feels half-baked structurally. Each chapter makes use of a different genre or narrative trope to tell the story from different angles, but the effect is muted because Machado's voice remains consistent throughout.

The first-person mini-essays on pop culture, queer history, etc. are a necessary piece of the puzzle but I'm not sure they work amid second-person chapters detailing the history of Machado's relationship. So while the structure could have been improved with more thoughtful editing, as a whole the memoir is an eye-opening and worthwhile read.

kyra

** spoiler alert **
           You know the tight feeling in your throat, when your body is getting ready to cry? That was my state reading the book.

This book is for everyone - for those in or have been abusive/toxic relationships, romantic or otherwise, those who want to understand, those who don't want to understand.

The chapters were artfully structured, and the choose your own adventure bits were simply brilliant.

My only regret is not having a physical copy to highlight and annotate. 

Beautiful, haunting and so important. 

My only regret is not having a physical copy to highlight and annotate. 

In the Dream House A Memoir

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