Review: In the Dream House

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House” is technically a memoir, but don’t expect to open to the table of contents and detect a linear path from Machado’s childhood to her current status as happily married graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. What Machado has done with this book is a truly expert level of deconstruction, to both the story of her own tortured love affair that forms the basis of the book and the structure of memoir itself. I was equal parts intrigued and delighted by her efforts and if you’re at all interested in the subject, you will be too.

Sectioned off into one page, one paragraph—sometimes one sentence—long gulps of prose, the book is formatted into capsules titled “Dream House as _____” (Dream House as Epiphany, Dream House as Lesson Learned). Each title is a wry statement on the subject of the confession, criticism, recollection that follows, lined with witty footnote references to fairy tale tropes. The capsules piece together and pore over the details of a relationship Machado had in her twenties’ and the nightmarish psychological and verbal abuse that accompanied it—the tense feeling of dread you get as she falls in love with a beautiful girl who adores her, and as that girl gradually becomes a monster, is as unnerving as an actual horror story. Yet, because it’s real life, there are horrible moments followed by mundane ones, and peaks of ridiculousness (arguments that start over nothing and end with Machado literally having to lock herself in a bathroom away from her girlfriend like Shelley Duvall in The Shining) followed by plateaus of semi-normalcy. The book gives you a teeth-clenchingly realistic idea of what it is like to be in the slow boil of non-physical abuse—because Machado’s girlfriend never hits her, and because Machado truly wants to hang on to the relationship and the love and acceptance she’s found in it, she thinks she can manage her behavior and change her reactions enough to make the girlfriend stop losing her everloving mind on Machado for such tiny indiscretions as “falling asleep while watching a movie with her roommates and not immediately answering her girlfriends calls”. As any survivor of this kind of a relationship could tell you, it was never about the unanswered calls, and it would never not be about SOMETHING.

Taking advantage of the dip and dive of the story structure, Machado incorporates everything from literary and film criticism (discussing Ingrid Bergman’s performance in Gaslight, for example, a movie that lends its name to the current psychological term for being manipulated into questioning your sanity by someone for their own gain) to research into the issue of underreported domestic violence among lesbian women into her narrative. To the latter point, I thought of just how many heterosexual, male-on-female stories of violence there are in mainstream literature, news headlines, etc—how the battered-by-a-man battered woman is a familiar trope in books and media. Conversely, I had trouble trying to think of a famous case of a lesbian relationship shaded by violence (though Machado brings up several in an insightful section on historic cases of female-on-female abuse or murder). She goes on to consider how personhood, and the right to even BE in a public or legal binding relationship, is such a comparatively new concept in the lesbian community that the more nuanced, and even negative, views of members of this group have yet to come to popular acceptance. Hopefully, with this book and with the encouragement of other voices from people with similar experiences, that will begin to change.

By telling her story in such a rivetingly original way, Carmen Maria Machado has created with In the Dream House both an intensely personal and a compulsively readable account of her attempt to “make sense” of a love affair gone wrong, and a thought-provoking meditation on the idea of the way in which a fairy tale romance can turn into a nightmare. Once I started reading it, I had to stay up to see what happens, and if that isn’t the highest form of praise an author can get from me, I don’t know what is. Check it out.


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