Hello from my new apartment!
I skipped last week’s newsletter because I moved and was wholly consumed with nesting, but I’m back with a book rec I’ve been wanting to make since I started this project.
I picked up a copy the day it came out and finished it in under 48 hours, then proceeded to recommend it to everyone I spoke with in the following month. It’s by far the best book I read in 2019.
So why am I just now recommending it?
I think because I initially didn’t feel qualified to write about it in a way that would do it justice. I still kind of don’t!
But please just trust me on this one and read the book if you haven’t already.
— Becca
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Nonfiction, November 2019
photo feat. Shadow
At its core, this is a memoir that follows Machado through an abusive relationship. She falls in love with a charismatic woman who turns out to be a controlling, gaslighting partner, then struggles to make sense of the abuse both during and after their time together.
What sets it apart from any memoir I’ve ever read (and any memoir I know to exist?) is the structure.
Machado only ever refers to her former partner as “the woman from the Dream House,” and each chapter explores “Dream House” as a different literary trope. Towards the beginning, we see Dream House as a Romance Novel or Erotica or a tale of Star-Crossed Lovers. Later, in Chekhov’s Gun and Demonic Possession and Shipwreck, their relationship takes increasingly darker turns.
We see Dream House as noir, as stoner comedy, as a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and as dozens of other genres and concepts. In the hands of a less skilled writer, this might come across as gimmicky, but with Machado’s nuance and thoughtfulness, it absolutely works. The chapters feel like a series of vignettes (some as short as half a page), where she has the space to examine this relationship from all angles.
And in writing this book, she’s also created a valuable entry into the slim archive of what abuse looks like in queer relationships. Very little has been written on the subject because, as Machado explains, “the last thing queer women need is bad fucking PR.”
In one chapter, she writes that fantasy “is the definition cliché of female queerness … To find desire, love, everyday joy without men’s accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise.” But this idealistic stereotype doesn’t leave much room for honesty about what things look like when they go wrong.
We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.
Machado opens up the conversation about that “wrongdoing,” though to be clear the word is a huge understatement for the behavior of the woman from the Dream House. In the words of Roxane Gay, “fuck that trash ass bitch.”
Queer points:
+2 for introducing me to Sapphic Slashers
+8 for deep dives on queer villainy, domestic abuse in queer relationships, and the ways in which queer abusers and abused women are treated differently from their heterosexual counterparts in court
+12 for Plot Twist, which both surprised me and made me feel incredibly warm and happy