In the Dream House: A Memoir Hardcover – November 5, 2019

This is a riveting account of the writer's relationship as a grad student with another grad student. After an initial period of passionate lovemaking told with near pornographic detail (damn, I thought, will the whole memoir consist of sexual accounts?)But no, of course not, no relationship remains a honeymoon. And this one turns vicious. The abuse, except for one rather minor but crucially important incident, consisted of incredibly cruel psychological abuse.'The woman in the dream house" is the only name given to the partner, and the author seeks to relay the story from a variety of different kinds of storytelling and also incorporates a stunning amount of information about lesbian partner/wife abuse, a phenomenon about which she had previously been totally (dangerously) ignorant.Not at all pedantic, despite the suffering of the writer's memories, the book is so beautifully written it's hard to put down. My kindle stayed open far past when I should have been asleep.And it ends happily, the author wiser.

So fantastically written and incredibly relatable. If only I could have read this while going through my own parallel journey. Comforting to know I’m not alone in my experience. So beautiful the way she took something so painful, but put it into words.

This book is equally haunting as it is riveting. I love the way she wrote this and was able to share her raw experiences while bringing the reader in through the back door. I highly recommend this memoir.

A 1000x better than expected, and I expected nothing short of holy scripture.Months earlier I stumbled upon the description and knew this book would be monumental. As early reviews crept in, my anticipation grew. I had my Kindle fully charged and stayed up until midnight so I could start reading the second it released. By 2am I was 30% done. A few marathon readings later, I reached the last page with breathless finality. The result? Monumental doesn't even begin to cover it.The funny thing, it's not monumental because of what happens. Bad relationships happen all the time. Abusive relationships, mental and/or physical, happen all the time. It's talked about less in queer relationships, that's true, and Machado does a great job pointing that out, but I doubt anybody will be dumbfounded by what they read. They will be surprised, however, that there's someone brave enough to talk about it, and by how personal she's willing to get. They will be surprised by how she structures it.The structure really is what makes this a masterpiece. It's not just the experience, it's the delivery. The darkest memories are brilliantly conveyed in second person and through varying lens. Most of them literary devices. Machado recounts her life through the eyes of Chekhov's Gun, Choose Your Own Adventure, Haunted House, Erotica, Plot Twist, and dozens more. Each section is short and precise. Never a wasted word. For those uncomfortable reading about abuse, she doesn't take it too far either. This isn't battered woman porn. She doesn't go on and on. We get snippets, glimpses of a life that we can easily piece together, and, more importantly, relate to.What she accomplishes for the queer community specifically, I think, is breaking the ice. After hard-fought battles for marriage equality, there's this unspoken rule that gay relationships must work. If they don't, people will point and say I told you so. By extension, rights may be taken away. Obviously that's not the only factor that kept Machado in her relationship. It may not even be in the Top 10, but it is a shadow that hovers over the scene. She points to lesbian stereotypes as well. Society expects men to be abusive, but two women? Their relationship should be a utopia, right? These stereotypes, this ice, is something she clearly wants to break apart. And she succeeds tremendously.Of course you don't have to be queer to recognize this is a master work of memoir and creative non-fiction. It is a testament that all experiences, however ordinary or unique, should be shared. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the book is the relentless honesty. She veils it slightly by the structure and 2nd person, but in a way this makes the experience more real. More true. And the accomplishment, I think, is for any one person to read this and be able to know that, for sure, they are not alone.

I only recently re-entered the world of female non-fiction (not necessarily feminist, but female authors writing on subjects related to female living), and am reading this work as a part of a "book club," if you will. This review is not about Machado's experience, which is actually quite universal to all abusive relationships (to which I have great empathy), but to the book itself.The book follows, very generally, Machado's foray into an abusive relationship that happens to be a queer one (she being, from my understanding of the work, bisexual and her partner a maybe-polyamorous lesbian? A better description is her lover is presented as someone with a severe personality disorder that manifested itself onto Machado and transcends sexuality). The experience is given in a series of vignettes, intermixed with other vignettes on subject matters such as the art of vignettes/short stories/fables and academic-esque musings on lesbian culture. I get that it is hard to write about difficult personal things, so short form might be easier because of the "quick-in-quick-out", but it makes the story disjointed. There is an underlying current of mental dismantling though, so maybe the argument for this structure is to mirror this precipitous state.The book references that during this time Machado was finishing her MFA, and her work was not great. It would have been interesting to hear more about her work and day-to-day in her graduate program rather than just snapshots of social interactions with others versus social interactions with her partner. She only lightly touches on the bleeding edge of abuse.There is also something to be said though, about professional/academic writers writing about their states during writing. It can be incredibly boring for an average reader who is has a life more tethered to reality rather than academia. So maybe that is another thought on this...The book generally brought me back to my undergrad days hanging out at Bluestockings, when I had the time to really look and reflect on my chosen relationships rather than the socio-economic ties and required obligations that drive me now (mortgage, children, etc.). If you find this type of self-exploration and reflection indulgent or even narcissistic this book is not for you. If you have the capacity to read a very academically written queer relationship and general abuse story, then the book is worthwhile.

I’ve never read anything quite like it. In it, Machado explores her relationship with her unnamed ex-lover, a thin, blonde woman who turns ever more controlling and abusive. The book plays out like a horror film, forcing the the reader to watch helplessly as a hopeful relationship turns into a nightmare. Machado explores her relationship through the central metaphor of the dream house. At once real and metaphysical, the house provides the architecture of the book, a seemingly rigid scaffolding propping up the story which seems to shift and move when you’re not looking.The story is told in a series of chapters, some only a sentence long, that explore the relationship from different angles. Some push the boundaries of form to explore the relationship. The chapter ‘Dream House as Lipogram’ starts, ‘It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part’ (173). In ‘Dream House as Folktale Taxonomy,’ Machado breaks down how the key story elements of the book fit into common folktale trops, a motif that will come up again and again in the footnotes. And in perhaps the most powerful chapter, ‘Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®’, Machado plays out multiple responses to a scenario, responses that all lead back, crushingly, to the same place.Machado’s writing is deft and skillful. Most of the book is written in second-person, which emphasizes the disconnect between her current self - mostly referred to as I - and her former self, always referred to as“you”. As an English lit grad, I appreciated the chapters that advanced the story were interspersed with chapters that stepped back into a meta literary criticism of the work itself. I mean, can you really understand the power structure of an abusive relationship without quoting Foucault? ;)Utterly brilliant, endlessly surprising, this book felt like an endlessly giving gift, a dresser with a thousand tiny drawers to open, each with a smooth and polished treasure inside. A mesmerizing take on an important issue.

I read Her Body & Other Parties last year and struggled with Machado's magical realism writing style. I enjoyed a few of the stories but for the most part found them just a little too weird for my liking. In the Dream House, however, presented no such issues for me.This account of domestic violence within a female-female relationship is told in an unconventional way. The relationship is presented as a dream house but the life lived within this dream house is far from dreamlike, it's much closer to a nightmare.There is a sinister presence throughout the book - the woman from the dream house who is the abuser. She is never named perhaps to protect her, perhaps to protect Machado, perhaps to protect them both but her influence is felt throughout. The book is split into a number of vignettes each depicting a different aspect of the relationship. These vignettes are beautifully written, there is a section towards the end that is written in the style of a choose your own adventure story and it perfectly summarised the cyclical nature of domestic abuse and the feeling of powerlessness for the abused who feels that no matter what decision they make, the outcome will always be anger, frustration and pain.Machado also highlights how little information is out there about female-female domestic abuse. Thinking about it, I realised I also made assumptions that female-female relationships couldn't be abusive because women would never act in that way towards each other which is of course a naïve and ignorant view to take. In the Dream House goes some way to opening up the conversation on domestic violence and I am glad that it exists, let's hope it encourages more women to come forward and share their experiences to remove the stigma and start to address the underlying issues that have allowed this type of abuse to continue, disguised, in our communities.

Possibly the best books I have ever read! This book touches on a subject matter that some might find upsetting or disturbing but it is a memoir and sadly life isn't all roses and happiness. This books style is awesome it throws the conventional style of a memoir out of the window. The chapters are short, punchy and brutal. Words aren't minced but they are poetic. This book details a life of fear and confusion, darkness and brutality, mental and physical abuse. I think the short sharp chapters aid this feeling of suffocation and despair. Mixed into this are chapters about what we know about domestic violence in history and throughout history and how society has a very stereotypical via of who suffers from it. The author reflects on past court cases where women have been jailed for murdering an abusive spouse and how society has judged them for their actions. This book is not comfortable reading but it is engaging and hard to put down. The writing is edgy, raw, passionate and powerful. It really does knock the stuffing out of you. The fast pace of the memoir drains you emotionally just as living in that nightmare would have drained the author on many levels. Overall this is a book that does not conform to the rules but for that reason it shines very brightly. Amazing and brilliant.

In The Dream House is a beautifully written, lyrical memoir in which the author details her experiences of being in a mentally abusive relationship with her ex girlfriend. Each chapter is almost like a metaphor of how an element of the relationship can be viewed as something else.Machado writes in such a unique, haunting and complex way, yet it works so well. I would not expect this type of writing to work within a memoir on such a difficult topic, but it is perfect.I applaud Machado for being so honest and raw with retelling her experiences in this way and would encourage others to try this as it is so full of emotion and passion that the reader becomes quickly absorbed.

READ THIS IF... you like memoir, lyrical prose, and aren’t afraid to read about difficult topics.THE STORY... Carmen narrates her experience of an abusive same sex relationship.I WAS... intrigued by this memoir, as I loved Carmen’s short story collection enough to dedicate a chapter of my dissertation to it, and I wanted to see how her writing style translated to nonfiction. Her writing retained its beauty, and blended seamlessly with her ideas, and the academic sources that she cited. It was illuminating to learn more about the history of domestic abuse, and by placing this within her story Carmen made this so much more meaningful.One of my favourite chapters discussed the concept of queer villainy, and Carmen perfectly summed up the problem with marking all queer villains as harmful stereotypes by saying ‘when we refuse wrongdoing for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.’ Each chapter had a, for lack of a better term, mic drop moment - where I either learnt something, or another layer of the story was revealed. I loved this book, and I can honestly say that Carmen Maria Machado is one of the most talented authors that I’ve encountered.It goes without saying that this book dealt with very serious topics and was genuinely upsetting - I would advise caution if depiction of abusive relationships could trigger or upset you. However, if this is something you feel able to read, you will not regret picking it up.NOW... I would recommend this to everyone - it’s so relevant, so beautifully written, and so emotive. I definitely want to re-read Carmen’s short story collection ‘Her Body and Other Parties’, and I need to get my hands on her comic book series ‘The Low, Low Woods’.