In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado: An Excerpt The New York Times
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I'm really interested in this from the spectrum of human behavior that exists between those two poles, how shortsighted and narrow it is to imagine that you need a narrative to be a certain thing in order to give it weight. And it's not enough just to say, "This happened to me and I'm going to tell you what happened to me." I actually thought that I had sort of psychically, mentally, emotionally kind of come over this big hump, and this whole process of writing this book has just dragged me right back into that head space. The prevailing sort of anxiety about this book is not about sex and it's not about polyamory and it's not about queerness. It's more about my own embarrassment and my own humiliation. Appropriately, Machado apologized for the noise as workers were redoing a bathroom in her Philadelphia home when we spoke on the phone last Monday, the day before In the Dream House was published.
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Far more stressed out than I felt for my first book. This book has been very hard to write and edit. It's been very hard to do press for, difficult every time I talk about it. Even as many autobiographies seek resolution, Machado finds a form through which to narrate an experience of abuse that she has not fully resolved, and stretches the capacities of memoir in the process. In the Dream House grapples with finding ways to talk about an abusive relationship between two women.
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She meets her abuser within her first few months in Iowa City, and stays in the relationship throughout the rest of her time there, even when her girlfriend moves to Bloomington, Indiana, to attend another MFA program. Most of the chapters are written in the second person; the “you” is often Machado as a younger woman. Her abuser is never named, appearing only as “she” and “your girlfriend.” The choice of the second person addressee is an important one. At times, the reader feels a part of the relationship, too, trapped with Machado in something like a fun-house prison. Machado is at the forefront of a wave of writers (including Sarah Hall, Julia Armfield, Fiona Mozley and Sophie Mackintosh) producing sensual, defiant, highly inward stories that centre on the female body.
Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir is a portrait of a relationship in fragments
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But I think it does, and here's what happened to me. Like I'm gonna put this in a container, like, here's my experience, here's how it felt. That's a line from the opening chapters of In the Dream House, a new memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. It's an examination of sexuality and a haunting account of a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with her then girlfriend.
In the Dream House: A Memoir
With bewitching, at times chant-like prose, Machado invites the reader into her dream house, lets us look in all the closets and the empty rooms and watch as she recreates, or resurrects—as she writes that all good memoirs should—what it was like to live for several years with an abusive partner. In the Dream House is a maze of emotion and analysis. It is Machado’s first book of nonfiction, and it complements her successful collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, as both draw on fairy tale and science fiction to build full and complicated worlds for her characters. Machado mostly narrates this in the second-person present (“you are”) – hard to pull off without feeling gimmicky – but the book’s organising principle is more dizzying.
Machado exulted in finding her desire reciprocated “without needing to change a single cell” of who she was. I have written quite a lot about my experience through fiction and that was quite helpful to me in terms of thinking about my myself in this removed way from my experience. But this is an important story that just hasn't had a lot of space in the memoir and creative nonfiction world. There's something important to me about owning up and saying, "This is my experience,” not through the lens of this premise or this story, but in my own words, and in my own way of thinking. That was just really, really important to me.
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Since there are so few literary accounts of abusive same-sex relationships, Machado forges a new way of telling her story that borrows from dozens of genres. Some chapters are named after narrative traditions such as romance novel, stoner comedy, road trip, self-help bestseller. Others filter her memories through literary tropes such as Unreliable Narrator or Pathetic Fallacy or Choose Your Own Adventure. The latter invites the reader to make a series of decisions, pointless even though they give the illusion of control. In the Dream House spans the several years that Machado was a graduate student at the University of Iowa’s MFA program.
Read Me: How Carmen Maria Machado Confronted Her Domestic Abuse To Write Her Acclaimed New Memoir
I was teaching there and talking to the students a lot about genre. I was discussing it at great length and at some point and I also had a lot of spare time when I wasn't teaching, so I was wandering around Iowa city and thinking thoughts, and at some point I was like, "Huh, I wonder if maybe thinking about this story in a sort of a more Gothic or haunted house tradition would be interesting." And that's really weird, because I would never say that to another person.
But now I feel like I see it everywhere, people struggling to articulate things that happened to them that aren't illegal or actionable but are still awful, harmful, or abusive. I had a set of epiphanies while writing the book. I didn't write it for the purpose of healing myself or engaging in therapy.
The place is pretty, cozy, and they are in it together. Sadly, the idyllic atmosphere quickly shatters because Machado's girlfriend is prone to violent outbursts and often engages in emotional, verbal, and psychological abuse. She can be dreadfully cruel and physically destructive, sometimes without provocation. Machado's writes about it all with devastating honesty and vulnerability, both of which are magnified by using second person. This is Machado's story of suffering and survival, but you are in there, and that makes the house your house, the girlfriend your girlfriend, the pain your pain, and the abuse Machado endured something you must digest and process yourself. There's this idea that not having men present in a relationship takes a certain kind of stress off, which sexually is actually true.
It’s a type of renovation that one wishes could be just as simple for the spirit, as Machado continues to feel vulnerable about the events she recounts in her memoir.
When she tried to tell people about her experience in the Dream House, they doubted her. At times, she even wishes her ex had hit her, left bruises that could be photographed and offered up as proof. Instead, she has this book, which despite its superficially fragmented form, is held together like a string of beads by a single, unbroken narrative. It even ends in a fittingly fairy-tale twist I won’t spoil. This story may be too dark to be called a last laugh, but its power is undeniable nonetheless. So I think part of writing the book was trying to say, some people might not think that what I'm describing constitutes abuse.
I feel like there's something inherently queer about it in that way. Maybe that'll change one day, but that stuff is what I'm really fixated on. I feel like I see it everywhere, people struggling to articulate things that happened to them that aren't illegal or actionable but are still awful, harmful, or abusive. So I just become more and more obsessed with it. Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House is the most innovative memoir I've ever read. The 2016 HGTV Dream Home winner, David Rennie, took the cash option, and his decision did not affect the “HGTV Dream Home 2016” episode hosted by HGTV personality Tiffany Brooks, who surprised Rennie with news that he won the sweepstakes at his church in Connecticut in March 2016.
Though one of the biggest revelations about writing it was being like, "Oh, I am not entirely better." There's something important to me about owning up and saying, "This is my experience,” not through the lens of this premise or this story, but in my own words, and in my own way of thinking. As a child, Machado loved retelling horror stories, especially ones she’d read in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, around the fire at Girl Scouts camp. This marked the beginning of her love for the horror genre. For its Los Angeles debut, Dream Hotels introduces its west coast flagship to the palm-lined streets of Los Angeles.
She fumed to see her poetic outrage at the world’s injustice reduced to a plea for attention. “After all,” she notes, “melodrama comes from melos, which means ‘music,’ ‘honey’; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen.” Machado understands that memoir, like architecture, requires a sense of proportion. The problem is that women’s feelings are rarely ever considered proportional. There's this really lovely program at Iowa in the summer. It was a summer kids camp, a writer nerd camp basically.
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