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It was a rental that was not a dream home in any conventional sense of the term, a “nondescript house in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana,” where her ex-girlfriend lived. The place was crowded with never-unpacked cardboard moving boxes repurposed as furniture and slowly disintegrating into the carpet. “They are soft and smell sweet like Pizza Hut boxes damp with grease,” Machado recalls. As she tells it, when Machado was a young creative writing student in the Midwest, she met another writer, a woman, “rail-thin and androgynous,” who goes unnamed in this account, and the two tumbled into a passionate affair. The woman became Machado’s first real girlfriend. For someone who felt that as a “weird fat girl” she was lucky to be loved at all, the relationship was revelatory.
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‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado: An Excerpt
Readers expect memoirs to be made of facts, however skillfully those facts are arranged and presented, and facts can be stubbornly uncooperative with our creative designs. But once written, memoirs don’t typically call much attention to how their authors struggled to tell the tale—the choices considered and rejected, the perspectives adopted and set aside. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the rare exception. This is a question I'm trying to get used to answering and thinking about. It is really hard to talk about this book in a lot of ways. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have to sort of stand up and say, "I am a grown woman. I am this person that people know. I'm going to stand up and tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to me and how stupidly I acted when I was 24 or 25 or whatever."
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The names of previous winners in HGTV's annual Dream Home sweepstakes contest are public record. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. “You’re not allowed to write about this… Don’t you ever write about this. ” So said Carmen Maria Machado’s ex-girlfriend after she had unleashed a tirade of verbal abuse.
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“Afterward — when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies… — you’ll wish that she had hit you,” Carmen Maria Machado writes in her groundbreaking memoir, In the Dream House. One of the sort of chief struggles of my adult life, my artistic life, has been trying to reconcile the things I knew to be true about myself with the way that the world views me. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago called "The Trash Heap has Spoken," and I talk about how, in Shirley Jackson's biography, there's this really bizarre line where they're interviewing somebody who knew her, and they said she was so fat she took up half the couch, but she was really brilliant. And I remember thinking, "why the but?" And I think we expect fat people to be unlovable, and we expect them to be stupid. And I think it's a very deep-set bias that a lot of people wouldn't even necessarily acknowledge out loud.
Brief Biography of Carmen Maria Machado
Years later, Machado has written about her experience (“Fear makes liars of us all,” she notes) but perhaps not in a way anyone might have expected. It’s hard to describe exactly what this book is. Well, it’s a slightly mind-bending memoir about two young, ambitious writers whose passionate relationship sours when one begins to subject the other to emotional and, at times, physical cruelty. Some of Machado’s preëmptive maneuvers work better than others. “Dream House as Queer Villainy” celebrates the “aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee” of figures like Cruella de Vil, Ursula, and Jafar.
Machado — whose first book, Her Body and Other Parties, was nominated for the National Book Award — met the woman at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. For all the experimentation, the basic narrative is straightforward. When Machado was at the Iowa writers’ school in her late 20s, she met a witty, worldly, petite blond Harvard graduate who spoke French and was a “mix of butch and femme that drives you crazy”. Machado, who had grown up in suburban Pennsylvania, had dated plenty of men but she had never been in a relationship with a woman before. She finally felt she had found the person she had been waiting for.
Part of what makes Machado’s relationship with the woman in the Dream House so poisonous is that since they are both women, it does not align neatly with our culture’s ideas about abusive relationships. Machado doesn’t have a vocabulary for talking about what is happening to her — in the same way, she writes, that she didn’t have a vocabulary to figure out what was happening when she was in the 10th grade and developed her first crush on a girl. “Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean,” she concludes. The author writes that her memoir is an attempt to build the kind of archive of same-sex abuse that would have made her feel less alone. It’s an “act of resurrection” that contains many other accounts that she found buried in news reports of old cases. She uses footnotes to track various folk tale motifs in the story, as if this meticulous cataloguing of strange behaviour helps orient herself within a bewildering experience.
Part of writing the book was trying to say, some people might not think that what I'm describing constitutes abuse. And then when it got really bad, there was a lot of drinking and a lot of, you know, she would drive really insanely with me in the car — which was terrifying — and threw things at me, and screamed in my ear as loudly as she possibly could. "I met her and sort of fell head over heels. You know, I'm queer, like I had dated a bunch of men, but I had never dated a woman. And I remember thinking that this was what I'd been waiting for, this experience. And she was really attractive, and really charming, and really funny — and she liked me, which was really intoxicating."
The memoir, by the acclaimed author of the short-story collection “Her Body and Other Parties”—which was a finalist, in 2017, for the National Book Award—chronicles Machado’s experience in a horrifying relationship. Just as it is difficult to say when the book begins, it is difficult to say when Machado’s girlfriend, blonde and slight, also a writer, first reveals her nature. Is it when she flies into a rage after Machado fails to respond immediately to a text? When she digs her fingers into Machado’s arm?
There is no reason that if Cinderella stays at the ball past midnight, her magic gown and carriage and glass shippers should disappear. There is no reason that Machado’s refusal to let the woman in the Dream House drive a car when she’s drunk should result in the woman screaming “I hate you, I’ve always hated you” at her, while transforming into “this fuzzy pale mass” with “her mouth a red hole.” It just happens, and in the moment, it feels inevitable. It’s only in hindsight that Machado is able to see how toxic and damaging that moment truly was. 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. There was a sort of chain reaction of thoughts that I'm pretty sure originated from me just thinking about haunted houses, which was actually a thing that I've been thinking about a lot for the last several years for some reason I don't fully understand.
Paging through this front matter feels like waiting for a haunted carnival ride to start, only to be wrong-footed. Fairy tales are in many ways about the making and breaking of taboos — leave the ball before midnight, don’t steal from the witch’s garden, don’t neglect to invite certain fairies to your child’s christening — and their stringent yet arbitrary lists of rules make them a perfect metaphor for talking through an abusive relationship. But that doesn’t quite capture how it haunts the grey areas of abuse, how it shatters the memoir form, how like a dream it shapeshifts. It ensnares and unsettles, tantalises and wrongfoots. I quote José Muñoz a lot because when I was reading his writing about queer ephemera, I was listening to a lot of history podcasts and I was really interested in the way that most of these straight hosts would dance around questions of queerness or transness in the past.
They try to destroy Machado, but she somehow becomes stronger because of it and turns into a new person despite the fear, tears, and bad memories. Throughout all of it, Machado learns to navigate her own sexuality and her writing while making sure she understands the place she occupies in a world that has always tried to erase women like her. In the first chapter, Machado reflects on her childhood years and tells a story about her time in grade school. Machado then elaborates on experiences in her childhood and environment while growing up. She goes on to discuss instances with her previous lovers, leading up to meeting and falling in love with "the woman in the dream house" who domestically abused her. For Machado, the Dream House was such a closed system.
I always talk about how in my relationship, like, obviously the patriarchy affects me in all kinds of ways. But my sort of day-to-day life, I don't really have to deal with it, because I'm married to a woman, and that's just not part of my experience right now, which is actually really lovely. But I think you have a lot of people sort of translate this into, "women aren't capable of hurting each other," or "women aren't capable of abusing each other." Lesbian relationships are the fantasy, the ideal — I would say that I think lesbians and queer women perpetrate that that idea. And I think it can be really harmful, because it doesn't permit space for a multitude of experiences, some of which can be bad — not because the relationship is a lesbian relationship, but because somebody in the relationship is not well.
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