Thomas's Reviews > In the Dream House: A Memoir

Such a powerful memoir about a horrifying abusive relationship. In spare vignettes, Carmen Maria Machado documents the beginning, middle, and end of her relationship with an ex-girlfriend who threatened, humiliated, and tried to control her. I’m a sucker for short chapters and Machado writes them well here, describing the terror and confusion she felt at the hands of her ex-girlfriend with concise and exacting detail. With courageous honesty, she shares both the desire she felt for her ex-girlfriend at the beginning of their relationship and her want to feel wanted, as well as the gaslighting she experienced and the difficulty she encountered in seeing the truth of her relationship even when her ex hurt her. As someone who grew up with an emotionally abusive mother, I related viscerally to some of the sentiments Machado shares, like when she wishes that she had a bruise or a physical indication that her ex had abused her even though she knows that wishing for that is awful in its own way.

I appreciated Machado’s commentary on the minimization of abuse in queer relationships in relation to the overall lack of representation of queer relationships, especially lesbian relationships. Though I know relationships between two women and two men are in some ways incomparable, it made me think about how we often turn away from critically examining queer relationships just because we’re often grateful for the representation at all – like Call Me By Your Name , which includes its own emotionally unsatisfying/obsessive relationship (which I recognize is different from the relationship Machado describes in this memoir), or the oftentimes toxic relationship between Brian and Justin in Queer as Folk. Machado does a great job centering women’s romantic relationships with one another in In the Dream House without glorifying or fetishizing them.

At times I felt pulled out of the narrative when Machado included some of the more experimental chapters, the ones that strayed from describing her relationship with her ex-girlfriend and her own life. At the same time I recognize that these chapters could have served to represent how the mind often deals with trauma, through taking oneself out of the event and dissociating into alternative narratives. I think a part of me wanted a little more from this memoir – such as her healing process after the relationship aside from her developing a romantic relationship with Val – though I totally respect Machado’s decision to include whatever she wanted to and did not want to in this memoir. Recommended for fans of memoir and queer books and books about relationships.