In the Dream House

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Facing the archival silence around the subject after her own experience of abuse in queer relationship, Carmen Maria Machado creates an entire archive of her own in her memoir In the Dream House. The archive includes a lipogram, a perpetual motion machine, Newton’s apple. It contains a stoner comedy, pop single, lesbian pulp fiction, as well as lessons, places, objects, and myths. Each archival item documents—sometimes straight on, sometimes aslant—an aspect of the “dream house” existence which Machado found herself trapped within during the two year span of her abusive lesbian relationship.

These archival items manifest as usually brief written passages, like memoiristic flash fiction. Machado’s style is alternately colloquial and nerdy, the work of a writer’s writer who clearly revels in the turn of word and shape of phrase be it everyday or erudite. Machado’s figurative language is some of the best and most effective I’ve read. Footnotes, often alluding to the contents of other archives, such as folklore motif indices and research on queer intimate partner violence, append many pages. The book is unabashedly experimental, and the more I allowed it to teach me how to read it, the deeper I fell under In the Dream House’s charm and magic—a fitting and almost unnerving spell.

While the book was uncomfortably readable, spinning out within me a mixture of tension and fear and ugly voyeurism, some of its most powerful work is not in talking about the dreadful specifics of Machado’s own relationship, but in clarifying the ways that sexism, homophobia, and queer erasure conspire to make queer intimate partner violence so difficult to imagine, discuss, and know as a part of our collective archive.

Subjects this book contains which some readers may be sensitive to: Abuse, sexual assault, racism, incarceration, homophobia.