The Very Queer In the Dream House Explodes Expectations of Memoir

The book is Carmen Machado’s deeply intelligent and fiercely innovative account of her experience of domestic abuse.

In the Dream HouseQueerness has always called attention to itself, and so must the art that explores its increasingly expansive borderlands. Queer forms break apart recognizable structures and expose them as incommensurate for the expression of an experience that by definition exists in opposition to the status quo. Queer narratives, too, inevitably call for new structural packaging, and autobiographical accounts of queer experiences have begun to formally reflect the often Gordian nature of the lives they represent on the page—lives irrevocably knotted by politics and power structures designed to resist their very existence.

“The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection,” writes Carmen Maria Machado in the opening pages of In the Dream House, a deeply intelligent and fiercely innovative account of her experience of domestic abuse. Machado’s richly layered narrative takes the form of a personal story embedded within an extensive cultural history. “[Memoirists] manipulate time; resuscitate the dead,” she writes. “They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.” The necessary context in this case is that of queer stories in a historical dialogue that has too often excluded them or written them out, and Machado explores the ways in which internalizing and then rejecting the dominant narrative has prevented queer people from understanding that our differences—which we’ve by turns reluctantly and defiantly come to celebrate—do not preclude ugliness. She explains that “queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind.”

Machado takes a hard look at her former self in her memoir, a self painstakingly excavated through calcified layers of doubt, confusion, and shame. Most of In the Dream House is written in the second person as an address to this unearthed self, a younger version of the author who suffered at the hands of a female lover in a relationship that forms the narrative backbone of a more general exploration of the historical representation of queer domestic abuse. The “I” speaker is the author now, happily married to another woman and living at a safe distance geographically and otherwise from the “you,” the lost and naïve girl who suffered through so much without understanding why. “I thought you died,” Machado says to the “you” who otherwise occupies these pages, “but writing this, I’m not sure you did.”

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In the Dream House is structured as a series of brief sections titled after various tropes expressing particular elements of her time in what she coins as the “Dream House,” a rental in Indiana where her girlfriend lived during most of the duration of their relationship, and which Machado frequently visited from where she was attending graduate school in Iowa. The relationship is narrated from its origins as a chance meeting in a diner in Iowa (“Dream House as Inciting Incident”) to a request for a drive to the airport to pick up the other woman’s then-girlfriend (“Stranger Comes to Town”) to a fateful, breathless first hookup (“Lesbian Cult Classic”) and a first confession of love (“Romance Novel”). The relationship trajectory briefly arrives at an experiment in polyamory (“Star-Crossed Lovers”) before dissolving into a monogamous relationship (“Entomology”) fraught with jealousy (“Appetite”) and gaslighting (“Lost in Translation”), and finally to an atmosphere heavy with frequent verbal and emotional abuse with the constant threat of physical violence.

Machado’s story is punctuated by harrowing moments of conflict that feel, because of their specificity, almost uncannily familiar. We come to inhabit her mind so wholly that the claustrophobia of her relationship with this other woman is made present first in the mind and then in the body like some foreign infiltrator, a cancer spreading quietly beneath the skin. The book’s hybrid nature is essential to its project, a marriage of form and content that elevates its subject by allowing it to accrue meaning in unconventional, surprising ways. Had Machado presented her subject in a traditional form, it would have gone against its own premise, and interspersed between the chronological narrative of increasingly severe instances of domestic abuse are brief forays into cultural criticism and queer history that further contextualize the ways in which we can be conditioned to accept abuse as normal, or as something we deserve, as Machado works through how the dominant culture views abuse narratives.

She interrogates films like Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, a quietly seething portrayal of a man sexually drawn to a murderer at the cruising grounds they both frequent, and George Cukor’s Gaslight, the suspenseful story of a woman made to believe she’s insane so that her husband can dispatch her to an asylum, as a way of showcasing elements of her own experience reflected back to her by popular culture, illuminating exactly how she’s been manipulated and controlled. Machado also includes an extensive retelling of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard is captured by the Cardassians and tortured into claiming that he sees five lights strung up above him where he’s being held, when in fact there are only four. He suffers and suffers but still maintains that he sees four lights instead of five, even as his resolve gradually weakens. Later, after being rescued, he retrospectively acknowledges that he was about to finally submit. “I would have told him anything,” he explains. “Anything at all. But more than that, I believed I could see five lights.”

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One of Machado’s central preoccupations is with the erasure of queer stories from conversations surrounding domestic abuse. “I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women,” she writes. “Did any of them gingerly touch their bruises and know that explaining would be too complicated? Did any of them wonder if what had happened to them had any name at all?” She’s meticulous about research and context, as in a section (“Dream House as Ambiguity”) in which she explores historical accounts of court cases that ruled on instances of domestic abuse between women, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that the only stories that persevere over time are the ones with overly salacious details about overly extreme acts of violence. In an extended and devastating section called “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” she guides us through a series of otherwise banal decisions that resulted in her abuse—responding defensively to accusations of moving too much in her sleep, for example, or deciding whether or not to wash her girlfriend’s dirty dishes after being commanded to do so—and thus thrusts us squarely into the world she finally, by the end of the book, has escaped. A world of unpredictable cruelty, a world where she was always afraid of what the consequences of seemingly banal actions might be.

The verifiability of women’s stories of abuse becomes central to In the Dream House’s final pages. Machado bitterly conveys the frustration of being the victim of wounds invisible to the naked eye, no bruise or scar available as evidence to make plain what she’s suffered, in language reminiscent of the testimonies of the women of the #MeToo movement whose stories are all that they have to show for what they’ve endured. “I think a lot about what evidence, had it been measured or recorded or kept, would help my case,” she writes as she attempts to affix an ending to her story, some kind of stopping point. “That there’s a real ending to anything is, I’m pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go.”

Machado imagines trying out different endings to her memoir, and she describes the effort to do so in the language of a craft essay, thinking about a potential reader’s experience of her story and debating whether to end on some kind of “narratively satisfying confrontation,” perhaps leaning in to a more conventional structure than the one she has otherwise chosen. But she instead leaves us in a place of ambiguity much like the experience of queerness itself, an identity category which has always struggled to be defined in terms of its own choosing. It’s an uncomfortable and indeed unsatisfying place to end a story about abuse, as the abuser is only exposed as such through the telling of a story that could easily dissolve with the slightest suspicion of exaggeration. But a necessary condition of Machado’s project is to spark dissatisfaction on the part of readers looking for any kind of definitive resolution.

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“You have no reason to believe me,” she tells the reader. But she isn’t begging us to accept the truth of her account. She’s daring us to doubt it. “If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound?” Machado writes. “Did she suffer? Who’s to say?” And the question reverberates through In the Dream House, louder and louder, building up to a scream.

Carmen Machado’s In the Dream House is available on November 5 from Graywolf Press.

Richard Scott Larson

Richard Scott Larson has earned fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his debut memoir is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. He’s also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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