“In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado

This is another book that has been on my list for a while, and while the material is pretty sad and dark at times, I’m so glad that I picked it up. It’s about an abusive relationship between the author, and the partner she refers to as “the woman in the Dream House.”

The plot is fairly simple and beautifully universal in its specificity. The author meets a beautiful woman and they start dating. She ends up doing long distance with this woman as she’s in an open relationship, but then its just the two of them. And it becomes clear that something is wrong, her partner starts fights and insults her and throws things at her. And then will insist that she doesn’t remember anything bad. This continues until the abuser starts dating someone else and breaks up with the author, who is devastated. The author ends up reconnecting with the abuser’s initial partner, the one she was initially dating, and they end up married. I personally found a lot of comfort in the very last line of the acknowledgements that the author would do it all again, it led her to her wife.

This book is so thoughtful I almost need to read it again. Every chapter starts with “The Dream House as” and then a category or something for the chapter. The timeline jumps around but the story never ceases to make sense. The Dream House starts as a metaphor most clearly, then it solidifies into an actual house that the abuser lives in. And it sort of melds into both. There’s the metaphorical aspects and the real aspects. I was confused about the phrase “the woman in the Dream House” as I figured the author was described more as haunting the place with her cries, but it makes a sort of sense. She anonymized the abuser and connects her to the house where the author felt trapped, but the woman has more power in that space.

The story is accompanied by footnotes indicating different tropes from folklore. Which is a really cool touch, it makes the narrative feel more like a cautionary tale or as something happening to a fictional person. There is a brief discussion at the end about how Machado wanted her experiences to be unique, but when she started researching there are so many women telling the exact same story. Which is how I felt as well coming out of my breakup, its funny that we so desperately want to have unique experiences while also feeling as though as aren’t alone. But turning it into folklore is a way to highlight the individual, while noting how it combines with other tales.

Machado makes it clear, this isn’t supposed to be a definitive text on lesbian abuse. But it is really cool that she did all of that work and added it into the text. She writes about lesbians trying to get their experiences recognized, and how the way lesbians subvert gender roles has made that hard. And the importance of knowing that abuse can come from within the queer community, and that it almost certainly will. Because we are all people! We are all flawed! There is no way to guarantee that a community is going to be entirely wholesome. It’s definitely been something that I have thought about, but it is shockingly something that not many people are open about. You have to experience it, usually, to know that it happens.

So much was presented so thoughtfully and creatively in this book, I am so glad that I picked it up. It is masterful, and I think it will stick with me for a while.