Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the most innovative memoir I’ve ever read.
Many of us, now and in the future, need this book; it will be needed and recommended and read and reread for generations to come, and help some of us start to try to understand something it’s impossible to make sense of.
The dynamics Machado describes were familiar to me from personal experience, and once I’d finished the book, I pressed it into the hands of another queer woman, who had been in a relationship much like the one portrayed in the book. It was hard to believe that so few books have been available for us to describe that experience–the confusion, the invisibility, the anger, the grief, the warped sense of reality. In the Dream House begins to give a rich, vibrant language, a structure for understanding for that experience. And more than that: it made us feel seen.
What makes Machado’s memoir so distinctive is not just its inventiveness but its unflinching honesty – about the indignities of abuse, about the vulnerability of growing up feeling fat and therefore feeling “grateful for anything you can get” and also about bodily desires. “The diagnosis never changes,” she writes. “We will always be hungry, we will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognise it.”
For all the horror, In the Dream House is a ravishingly beautiful book, a tender, incandescent memoir like no other. There’s no doubt that Machado is one of the brightest literary talents around.
Instead of feeling disillusioned or constrained by the realization that queer people can enact the same harms on each other as people of other identities, Machado finds something else. What In the Dream House offers as a resource, as an expansion of a literary archive, is permission to unburden ourselves. “And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing,” she declares, “the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right.”
The narrative is occasionally punctured by necessary reprieves that come in the form of a brief legal history of documented lesbian abuse, a cultural analysis of queer Disney characters, a sociological take on butchness and masculinity and a meditation on an inappropriate relationship Machado had with a priest in her adolescence. The chaos would drown you if it were not for her masterful ability to bring you up for air at precisely all the right times.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
It was also reviewed at the Lesbrary, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, NPR, The Boston Globe, Oprah Magazine, Lambda Literary, Autostraddle, Slant Magazine, Irish Times, Datebook, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Remezcla, The Nation, and more.
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