In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado (review)

In the Dream House (Graywolf Press), Machado's second full-length book and her first memoir, chronicling the author's abuse at the hands of another woman, doesn't fit within conventional narratives about domestic abuse, in part due to its queerness, in part due to its structure. Machado found a fitting metaphor in the concept of the "Dream House." If the "Dream House" represents the mental prison of her abuse, each chapter—most not even a page long—brings the reader to a different corner, and where Machado doesn't describe the horrors outright, her omissions allow silence and shadows to convey the fear that words can only imply. The gulfs of white space surrounding her paragraphs, precisely where language is most absent, come to possess the mystery of darkness in the horror stories that inspire Machado's style: you don't know what's there, but you know it's too dreadful to be named.

Machado enters this relationship as any young person enters a horror movie: innocent and unsuspecting. While most teenagers were escaping in pairs to the dark corners of house parties, Machado was preoccupied with her Catholic faith and its strict sexual dictates. As a result, she entered the world of romance late, never got a frame of reference for a healthy relationship, and never learned how to spot a toxic one. Compounding this lack of experience is a shoddy vocabulary to describe queer experiences, especially queer abuse. How can she make sense of her partner's abuse when the only widely circulated narrative of queer relationships is the joyous celebration of queer love after the legalization of gay marriage? How should she present her hellish narrative to the world?

Presentation might be the dominant theme of her memoir: how queer women present themselves to society, how Machado presented her relationship to her friends and family, how she presented herself to her partner. While coping with unrelenting emotional abuse, she was forced to pretend she was happy and content, that she thought her abuser was a kind person at heart, and that she truly did love her. The abuse never escalated to physical violence—yet another way in which Machado's memoir diverges from cultural stereotypes about abuse —but her partner's psychological manipulation fundamentally remolded how Machado perceived the world. Her partner's cruel, volatile personality was counterbalanced by the kind, pleading persona she projected to rope Machado back into the relationship. From the many contradictory selves Machado perceived, she constructed an idea of her abuser totally divorced from reality. Even when they finally separate, Machado says, "I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we had created together."

"Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat," Machado notes, and her language astonishes at almost every level. Take this example: "Your back starts to hurt, and your feet, and a doctor says to you, direly, that you need to lose weight. You bawl your eyes out and miss the punch line entirely: the weight you need to lose is 105 pounds and blonde and sitting in the waiting room with an annoyed expression on her face." Her language bristles with metaphors, similes, and pop-culture references, deftly woven together in a polyphonic style. Through this sensitive style and her short chapter structure, Machado layers insight after insight and finds a language to describe her experience that captures just how difficult finding that language was.

The search for that language, though, was a heavy burden for Machado to shoulder, as hers is perhaps the first account of queer abuse a wide audience will read. Throughout the book, she is hypersensitive to the effect her memoir will have on the queer community. She describes that, while writing, a gnawing anxiety plagued her that by depicting abuse in a queer context she was slowing the already slow march toward equality. Why? Because of the "minority anxiety . . . That if you're not careful, someone will see you—or...