Review: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

 

Carmen Maria Machado has written an evocative book on abuse in lesbian relationships that seems to interweave forms of memoir and essays. She takes her experiences and studies them through various devices by calling the relationship the ‘Dream House’. The text is interspersed with footnotes mirroring the events in the relationship to fairy tale motifs that gives the surreptitiously horror-esque atmosphere in the book a gothic undertone.

Throughout the book the author examines less discussed issues centering around abuse in queer relationships, from the failure of documentation of such issues to their dismissal based on heteronormative filters to outright denial. 

I found the way each chapter mirrors different perspectives and so called ‘cliches’ and known stories, brilliant and intriguing. Carmen writes with such conviction and honesty about her harrowing experiences, separating her younger self(you) from the current(I), unravelling her life on paper. She barely ever talks about what she was feeling during the course of events of the book. Unspoken, it is left to the reader, whatever they may identify as, to see it for what it is. 

“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 unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.”