Meike's Reviews > In the Dream House

Winner of the Lambda Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction 2020
In this intimate, formally experimental memoir, Machado recalls how she survived an abusive relationship, but gives her own experiences a wider context: As she illustrates by giving examples from real life, art and scientific texts, violence in lesbian relationships has rarely been acknowledged and discussed, thus rendering the victims almost invisible and making them even more vulnerable. With "In the Dream House", Machado wants to add to the archive of stories about the human experience, turning the phenomenon of abuse between queer women into a topic to be considered, to be pondered. To talk about queer people as abusers is in fact, Machado states, an act of liberation: "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 met her unnamed ex-girlfriend when she was studying for an MFA in Iowa, and with time, "the woman in the dream house" became more and more controlling, passive-aggressive and also physically violent, gaslighting Machado, insulting and diminishing her and playing with her insecurities, until Machado finally found the strength to exit the relationship that had become a prison. The mechanisms Machado depicts will probably be recognizable for many people, but I have to admit that before the author pointed it out to me, I hadn't actively thought about the fact that there are hardly any texts that talk about abuse in a queer context, which means that queer people in these situations do not find themselves represented in (real and fictional) stories and are thus deprived of a language to express what they are experiencing. And although Machado explicitly states that it is her goal to change that, the situations and effects she depicts are in many respects universal. Machado is just a fantastic psychological writer with keen sensibilities, and she finds highly evocative words and images to convey her own past.

This main narrative thread is not only split in multiple short chapters, it is also interspersed with flashbacks, scientific research on the topic as well as examples from literature, music, films and real life that support Machado's argument that violence in lesbian relationship has long been a taboo. These paragraphs also paint a wider picture of American society as a whole, about dynamics that aim to "other" minorities and to control female sexuality. This multi-layered approach is also mirrored in the metaphor of the "dream house", which not only refers to the actual house in Bloomington the ex-girlfriend used to live in, but also to "a house that was not a house and a dream that was no dream at all", a (self-)deception with multiple different rooms and scary surroundings (think Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, where the house is also much more than an actual building). To convey her alienation, Machado refers to her abused self of the past as "you", which is a particularly tricky narrative choice, and I've rarely seen an author pull this perspective off so effortlessly and effectfully.

All in all, I liked this much better than Her Body and Other Parties (which I already found rather impressive), and once I started reading, I couldn't put it down. Some parts were slightly too fragmented for my taste, but this memoir is a real achievement and deserves all the praise it currently gets.

I did an interview with Machado, and you can listen to my radio piece, the podcast review (both with text in German) and the whole interview (in English, but for Steady members).