In the Dream House

By Carmen Maria Machado: a review

Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is one of my favourite books of all time, and since I’ve been diving into non-fiction and queer literature, In the Dream House was a fitting choice. It details Machado’s experience of abuse in her relationship with an unnamed woman in both a literal and figurative ‘dream house’. 

I’ve only ever done reviews for fiction books so this review is more just a look at the importance of the topics she covers, namely abuse in queer relationships, and an overview of the book.

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In the Dream House is an excavation, first and foremost. As memoirs often require, it’s clear that there was deep personal probing into unpleasant—to say the least—experiences involved in writing it. The sections are divided by titles: Dream House as something — ex. ‘Dream House as Chekhov’s Trigger’, ‘Dream House as Self-Help Best Seller’. This allows Machado to explore her experience within certain parameters and to touch on the taboo topic that is abuse in queer relationships. 

She uses folklore and fairytales to illustrate complex points about different kinds of abuse, womanhood, being queer, and the nature of naming something to break it. Specifically, she uses Stilth Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a book containing thousands of motifs in folk literature. Throughout In the Dream House, Machado cites many motifs, integrating them into her experiences, creating this sort of roadmap for what she went through that offers different perspectives.

The ‘Dream House’ is haunted. It’s haunted by dreams and thus becomes a house of what it is haunted by. Revisiting a haunted place feels like salt in a wound and the book does not shy away from that brutality; the use of “you” in place of Machado makes us as readers unable to look away, something that people often do when it comes to abuse in same-sex relationships and queer relationships in general. Machado effectively breaks this fraught silence around the topic with vulnerability and resolve.

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The section on queer villains is among my favourite sections. Essentially, Machado says that queer characters do not have to be good to be worthy of representation and that queer villains must be created and exist in context, i.e. other queer characters. She states: 

“We deserve to have our wrongdoings represented as much as our hedonism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.” 

There’s a much larger and in-depth conversation to be had about queer villains, and while the book doesn’t go into extreme detail, that section is a good place to start.

As Machado is essentially writing about a queer villain, she takes the time to dissect this villainous queer woman stereotype, and in one interview, reflects on how she felt she couldn’t write about her experience because of fear of feeding into this stereotype.  

Machado explores as well this pervasive stereotype of lesbians as ‘unable’ to be the abuser and by consequence to be a victim, and the fact that there is an equating of femininity with victimhood, creating this rigid view of who ‘can’ be and who ‘can’t’ be victims. It’s an extremely dangerous view, and it affects women and woman-identifying people of colour disproportionately. Machado discusses Debra Reid, who was part of the Farmingham Eight, who were all women in prison for killing their abusive partners. Because Debra Reid was a black woman and a lesbian, she was egregiously mistreated both within and outside the prison system compared to her white counterparts — read the section from In the Dream House here.

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You can tell throughout her life that Machado was grasping for anything to help her define what was happening to her and specifically the context it was happening in, but there is so little literature or accounts in existence that she was left without much that could help her name it. This book is such a significant one because it may provide that context for someone else.

In the Dream House is an unconventional memoir, an excavation, an exploration. It’s a deeply moving book. It will offer you a perspective into abusive queer relationships and you will certainly learn something. All in all, In the Dream House deserves to be read and paid attention to and I’d absolutely recommend it. 

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That’s all for now, take care of yourself!