• 'Carmen Maria Machado's pointedly funny, deeply reflective In the Dream House manages to be a short story collection, memoir, and lesson in fragmentation all rolled into one.' Club 'The world needs this book.
• The prologue of Carmen Maria Machado's memoir, In the Dream House, defines the concept of archival silence: “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.” Queerness itself has been left out of the narrative for.
• In her memoir, In the Dream House (2019), Carmen Maria Machado probes the ugly depths of an abusive relationship she experienced while studying for her MFA at the University of Iowa. A personal examination of the events before, during, and after the relationship, the memoir is also an exploration of the cultural realities of life as a queer woman and the assumptions people make about queer relationships.

Machado’s devastating memoir traces the abuse she endured at the hands of a woman within a relationship that, like an uncanny number of relationships, started off just fine. Each chapter is based on a narrative trope, oftentimes short, which translates a chilling urgency that builds up thunderously throughout her story.

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.

On a more general level, “In the Dream House” is a textbook example of the power dynamics at play in monogamous abusive relationships and how difficult it is to remove oneself from the trajectory of harm, especially when one has internalised that we deserve hate or, even worse, that we do not deserve to be loved.

“And as the ground gets farther and farther away you swear to yourself that you’re going to tell someone how bad it is, you’re gonna stop pretending like none of these things are happening, but by the time the ground is coming toward you again you are already polishing your story.”

Carmen Maria Machado Biography

In The Dream House By Carmen Maria Machado -

Machado’s words stayed with me for a very long time – she nailed the abstract, empty feeling, the numbness of the pain, the fear of not living up to the abuser’s expectations, the fantasies of ceasing to exist, because “you have forgotten that leaving was an option“, and the coping mechanisms that abused victims engage in to protect themselves.

She justly talks about how the law does not acknowledge the ramifications of psychological and emotional abuse within a domestic setting, which are “completely outside the law” and thus not punished to the same extent as physical abuse.

“Putting Language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.“

In The Dream House Carmen Maria Machado Review

More specifically, In the Dream House is a testimony, a survivor’s account of abuse at the hands of someone with whom the author shares the same gender and sex. Naively, I’ve always entertained the idea that same-sex relationships, especially between women, would not replicate dangerous and violent abuse mechanisms that occur between men and women, or at least not to the same extent.

“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.”

When she was living with her partner and enduring the abuse, Machado was unable to find the words to define and comprehend what was happening to her because she couldn’t find examples in literature, pop culture or other cultural products. This memoir is an important stepping stone, in the sense that it creates an archive of same-sex abuse, a precious testimony that will hopefully help others to put a name of their abuse and break their shackles.

In The Dreamhouse Carmen Maria Machado Deutsch

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This memoir was a groundbreaking read to say the least, and shook many of my core assumptions. Machado’s is a brilliant writer – even if the topic is tough, it was a pleasure to read her prose. Highly recommend this read to anybody looking to read something off the beaten path of memoirs.