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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Carmen Maria Machado publishes personal memoir ‘In the Dream House’

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Carmen Maria Machado's new book 'In The Dream House' (2019) is pictured.

Late into "In The Dream House" (2019), Carmen Maria Machado recalls how, in the midst of an abusive relationship, she found that her creativity unexpectedly flourished. Though she notes that one would assume that this context would have the opposite effect,Machadoinstead found herself prolific, producing stories outside of conventional forms. The shape of these stories were in weird constraints: entire narratives might take place in the form of lists, or in episode synopses for TV shows. Later, some of these works are included in her debut short story collection "Her Body and Other Parties" (2017), and she is praised for how she steps outside of convention, breaking down conventional form. But though Machado accepts the praise, she can’t unlink the stories from the relationship that helped to produce them.

Like these short stories, "In the Dream House" also breaks down traditional narrative form, pushing the limits of what a memoir can be. Machado traces a lesbian relationship in her mid 20s that turns psychologically abusive, as she pursues an MFA at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. At the time, her girlfriend lives in Bloomington, Ind., and Machado regularly makes the drive to the house which they share there.As her girlfriend starts to act out in increasingly harmful ways to Machado — screaming torrents of abuse at her, or chasing her around the house — Machado grapples with the space of the home itself, noting the ways in which it doubles in conflicting sensations, a space both intimate and snug at the same time that acts as a threatening ground, hosting her abuser.

In the telling of this story, Machado breaks away from the established format of memoir: She drops into the second person “you,” and takes the reader on a montage through dozens of tropes and genres, as varied as the Bildungsroman to Chekhov’s Gun. This is an innovative choice, connecting to one of Machado’s central problems in the text. Little art or material exists which documents queer abuse, and as a result it’s a difficult experience to live through or depict in words. By bringing the reader through all these different tropes, Machado makes the format of her words recognizable, though the relationship painted by them may not be.

In particular, Machado finds that the lack of an archive for lesbian abusive relationships makes it difficult to share her experience with others. She confronts the stereotype that lesbian relationships are “safe,” since men are removed from the equation. However, this belief removes the possibility of sharing experiences which don’t conform to the stereotype. Throughout the memoir, the reader gets a clear sense of how Machado struggles to live a narrative that goes ignored by many, even by those in the queer community. In the chapter “Dream House as Naming the Animals,” she writes about Adam in the Garden of Eden, and the difficulty he must have felt in giving all the animals a name: “I feel a lot of sympathy. Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat.”

Part of the difficulty of sharing her experience also involves widespread misunderstandings about domestic abuse. It’s difficult for Machado to share her experience because her girlfriend’s actions are technically legal; at one point in the text, she wishes that her girlfriend would hit her and leave a mark, so that she could show other people something that would fit their understandings of abuse. The memoir also paints a clear picture of the difficulty of leaving such a damaging relationship, doing so through the tone of the voice and the devices strewn throughout. At one point, the text takes the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel. If one reads through this section linearly, rather than skipping to the appropriate pages, they see a page that says “You shouldn’t be on this page … You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You’re smarter than me.” There is a combination of desperate longing to get out and intense self-hatred for not doing so throughout the text — and yet, at times the reader forgets that leaving the relationship is an option for Machado, so swept are we into the intensity of their relationship.

But ultimately, there’s something noble in the work Machado does, how she’s willing to look at her past unflinchingly. If her own experience was worsened by a lack of material regarding queer abuse, "In the Dream House" attempts to fight against this problem by way of its own existence. The creation of this book was difficult work — requiring a painful unearthing for Machado — but it’s now a strong addition to the archive of documented queer experiences, something that can only get stronger as it grows.