A Review of: Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House

Format: 264 pp., hardcover; Size: 6×9″; Price: $26; Jacket Art: Alex Eckman-Lawn Publisher: Graywolf Number of Dream Houses in The Dream House: 144; Opening Dedication: If you need this book, it is for you; Another book by the author: Her Body and Other Parties; Representative Passage: Dream House as the Wrong Lesson: “ When MGM made the Academy Award-winning version of Gaslight in 1944, they didn’t just remake it. They bought the rights to the 1940 film ‘burned the negative and set out to destroy all existing prints.’ they didn’t succeed, of course—the first film survived. You can still see it. But how strange, how weirdly on the nose. They didn’t just want to reimagine the film; they wanted to eliminate the evidence of the first, as though it had never existed at all.”

Central Question: What is the correlation between the architecture of a house and the infrastructure of traumatic experience?

Sufferers of abuse live according to the logic of a fragmented reality, one that adheres to different rules from linear experience: times contorts, introducing the possibility of winding, repetitive, and cyclical temporality. In her new memoir of life in a psychologically abusive relationship, In the Dream House, Carmen Machado forgoes traditional structure, eliminating standard narrative and refusing to reduce the story to the confines of a single spacetime in order to convey this temporal dislocation. After all, a story that only meets the requirements of a coherent narrative—touching the flagposts of a beginning, middle, and end—would be inept to the task of conveying the true experience of Machado’s past self. Machado charts this erased territory and crafts a retelling of her psychologically abusive relationship with a former romantic partner, a young unnamed woman. The psychological violence employs volatile mechanics: cycles of manipulation and humiliation, narcissistic, and egomaniacal tactics designed to magnify shame and fracture self-love. The two aspiring young writers first meet at a diner in Iowa City, but as their relationship progresses, the dynamic becomes confusing to Machado’s past self. Her confusion stems from the fact that there has been so little language ascribed to romantic abuse in queer relationships. She navigates this often ignored dynamic by re-configuring the memoir form—and her understanding of her own past—so that it adheres to an architecture more accurately attuned to her lived experience.

In The Dream House finds Machado inventing new formal tricks in service to her past self—the memoir’s “you”—and creates a narrative structure that allows her to connect her past and present. We learn about Machado’s splitting in “Dream House as an Exercise in...