In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir and nonfiction follow-up to 2017’s Her Body and Other Parties, is an anthology of failures. Every chapter, in fact, fails, flashing out of existence almost as soon as it forms, each falling victim to its own soaring ambitions. One could say that the book never really begins, as if it is unable to chart a path forward, no matter how tortuous. One chapter, for example, is titled “Dream House as Cosmic Horror,” another, “Dream House as Unreliable Narrator.” Dream House as Mystical Pregnancy. Dream House as Vaccine. Dream House as Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, etc. None of these similes stick, and the book begins anew.
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. In the Dream House: A Memoir — Carmen Maria Machado My debut memoir, In the Dream House, is available from Graywolf Press (US) and Strange Light (Canada), and Serpent's Tail (UK). ”Welcome to the House of Machado. Proceed directly into the forbidden room; enjoy the view as the floor gives way.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times.
With each chapter, Machado switches away from the latest governing simile as blithely as a dilettante switches to a new subject, leaving the distinct impression that she will return, retrieve the subject, and realign it on the straight road to narrative coherence. She leaves reminders to herself to do so, after all: dense footnotes drawn from volumes of folklore, occasional clarifications, notes to herself in the second person recalling an incident from the past. The cumulative text is, as a result, the equivalent of Penelope’s burial shroud for Laertes: it builds itself up only be torn down again, a strategic failure that, I believe, ultimately, succeeds. For in compiling these failures, in organizing them in concussive flashes, Machado bestows form and mass on something that barely even has a name.
Domestic and intimate partner violence among queer people has historically been listed near the bottom of the gay agenda, if it is has been listed at all. For a long time the concept itself was unworkable within the context of queer relationships—if there was no marriage, no shared home, could there be violence in the domus? Could queer relationships even last long enough to be afflicted by abuse, especially among gay men, who, during the formative years of domestic violence’s emergence as a concept, were dying en masse from complications from AIDS? To discuss queer domestic violence was to discuss dry water or hot ice: there was no name for the violence that did not confound the received definitions of “queerness” and “domestic violence.” If once this was the love that could not be named, it is still the violence that will not be.
Carmen Maria Machado Twitter
Much has been made of how this memoir does that work—how it “names the violence,” or “speaks the unspeakable” or some other formulation that, while accurate, understates the scale of what Machado has accomplished here. In the Dream House physically manifests the despondent disorientation that a survivor of domestic violence can never fully correct. Its structure curls and darts and circles like an abused mind taking great pains to parse fabrication from fact, to build—as if with an unbroken brain—an airtight case against accusations of insanity and asking-for-it. Its footnotes and folktales and firm notes-to-self are like the marginalia of a survivor, scribbled into holy books and self-help guides that only lead back to the question: how did I become what I have become?
It is the question that underpins all of the others a survivor asks oneself. How does one describe what happened? Why does “domestic violence” feel both too specific and not specific enough to account for how it unmakes a queer relationship, one that was born under the tinselly optimism of the Obama years—a time that was supposed to be good for the queers, but that wasn’t good for you? To whom does one explain it, and why? How? In the Dream House offers some of the answers to these questions that I have been asking myself and that I have failed to answer for more than three years, when I became what I thought I would never be and what I thought could never exist: a gay male survivor of an abusive queer relationship. There was no ready-made metaphor that fit, even awkwardly, the contours of queer domestic violence. I had no blueprint for my own dream house. Perhaps now I do.
***
Early in her graduate program at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Machado met a moneyed soft-butch blonde from Florida with a Harvard degree and scammer energy. The blonde had writerly aspirations, intent on admission to America’s most storied creative writing MFA program, and was presumably in Iowa City to cultivate her connections to the university. Through a mutual friend, she meets Machado, whom she makes to feel “like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.” Smitten from the outset, Machado can’t believe her luck when she is brought into the fold of the blonde’s open relationship with another woman, Val.
The trio lease a home in Bloomington, IN, where the blonde will begin her creative writing MFA (she was rejected by Iowa). Machado fondly recalls the fantasies she wove about the place, portraying the three women like a queer, polyamorous Fauna, Flora, and Merriweather. However, it is a short lived dream. Abruptly, the blonde breaks things off with Val, pledging herself to Machado, who proves her investment in the relationship over and over again by taking regular trips from Iowa City to Bloomington, shacking up with the blonde in the Dream House. She is always proving, pressured by the blonde’s possessiveness, which at first appears benign before evolving into outright abuse. Only Machado doesn’t perceive what is happening to her as it unfolds, and thanks to the the gaslighting of her abuser, struggles to maintain a grip on what is appropriate and not within a relationship that is supposed to be loving. It’s only in retrospect that she begins to sketch out the plan of the house in which she was trapped.
If In The Dream House is a blueprint for a house, then that house is an amalgamation of slanted floors and sloped ceilings like those in the sinister house of Lovecraft’s story, “Dreams in the Witch-House.” Gilman, the precocious and unstable protagonist, disintegrates mentally and physically over the course of the story under the influence of a spectral witch. Even while dreaming, he “could not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary,” menaced by a horror that Machado unflinchingly, almost clinically, confronts in this memoir. Much like Gilman’s, Machado’s is both hers and not hers in this book, circumscribed and disciplined by repeated manipulation by her abuser. Indeed, the heinousness of this particular case of partner violence is the way in which Machado becomes a prisoner in her own home and her own body.
This is not just the horror of things whose shapes confound our geometry, whether physical or conceptual. More inclusively, it is the horror of a body that becomes less than one’s own. This latter theme haunts Machado’s fiction, too: “The Resident,” the penultimate story in her debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties, tracks the downward spiral of a somnambulating writer at a menacing literary residency. In her memoir, Machado picks up the spools of this and other of her stories, threading them through the needle of her own body’s backstory of queerness and trauma. In fact, this book is as much a memoir of her relationship to her body as it is of her relationship with her abuser—two relationships that became inextricable, as was perhaps inevitable.
“You were suspicious of their feelings because you had no reason to love yourself--not your body, not your mind. You rejected so much gentleness. What were you looking for?”
My debut memoir, In the Dream House,is available from Graywolf Press (US) and Strange Light (Canada), and Serpent's Tail (UK).
”Welcome to the House of Machado. Proceed directly into the forbidden room; enjoy the view as the floor gives way.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
One of the best-reviewed nonfiction titles of 2019
An LA Times Bestseller
In The Dream House Carmen Maria Machado Vk
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction / Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction / Finalist for the Stonewall Book Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award / Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing / Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Best Book of the Year:
The New Yorker / TIME Magazine / New York Times / NPR / Publishers Weekly / BookPage / Vulture / Autostraddle / LitHub / Vogue / Kirkus / Entertainment Weekly / Harper’s Bazaar / The Atlantic / Paris Review / Vogue / Washington Post / A.V. Club
Best Memoir of the Decade:
LitHub / Paste / Autostraddle
Carmen Maria Machado Pdf
Forthcoming Foreign Editions:
Brazilian / German / Italian / Norwegian / Polish / Russian / Spanish
You can purchase In the Dream House at your local independent bookstore, or from:
Graywolf Press / Bookstore Link / IndieBound
Powell’s / Amazon / Barnes & Noble
The audiobook is available here.